Reading Queer in the GTA (2)

Staff/ June 23, 2020/ Poem

KHASHAYAR MOHAMMADI

Pillow’s Kiss
(excerpted from Moe’s Skin)

Pillow’s kiss past midnight’s stroke and doze down the fugue
of highway tunes. Up, up and away — past mall-lit windows we
migrate between, bootleg DVDs and cider house blues where
hatred blossoms in plastic-bagged opacity, past the hooka-smoking
girls lustfully eyeing lustful men in blue.
Feel like a god, but slip on Moe’s Skin.
A new motto for massage chair afternoons:
“Don’t frown! You’ll slip.”
A single leaf behind an iPod case;
a Djinn in each passing eccentricity.
I fly where the water poured.
From up here all is bright — neon dots
splashed against god-stricken shacks,
shackled. Fluttering glitter, dashing
along the five-lane Serengeti. Highway

windows hold Mystery Men of Blue, half-
knit to cascading lace curtains, puffing away

exhausted cigarette smoke. Purring cars
bow to laundromats, an exhibition of
teenage mothers freckled with nocturnal
blues. Yanking shirts and slamming doors:
another bed left unshared.

I fly back to trace
our blasphemous steps.
My back to the blinding sun,
I smile a masculine smile
and bludgeoned by my adaptive nature
you spin.

Ticker taped by rain we stride,
counting down to the promised flood:
two boys dipped in the absurd;
two mystery men in blue.

Khashayar Mohammadi is an Iranian-born, Toronto-based writer/toque enthusiast who moonlights as a chef. His second chapbook Dear Kestrel was recently released with knife|fork|book.

Pillow’s Kiss
appears in CAROUSEL 42 buy it here

CAROUSEL 42 — cover by Nicholas Di Genova
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