Creatures in-between, we are half men, half boys, tossing empties onto brick stoops like the morning paper. We are the angel mutants, the streets for us seduction. We are melodramatic and we don’t care. We rock shit tattoos: Max von Sydow at the chessboard, a hovering Chevy Malibu glowing green, a she-demon with a ginger muff and red angry snatch.
Our dresses flow over matte black BMX bikes whose serial numbers were long ago stripped by flea market vendors. We pedal for speed and our dresses sully in the bike chains—quinceañera dress, flapper dress, other dress we don’t know how to call it. Macabre scars litter our legs and we don’t care.
We land in barren fields amid art deco vacants, a menagerie in chain-linked fences. We spark Marby Reds, our echoing laughter not faintly falling but swelling like applause. We stub our cigarettes on black stomper-boots. We perch on backhoes, heaps of rubble, singing Little Anthony and the Imperials: think I’m goin’ outta my head, well I think I’m goin’ outta my head, over you, day and night, night and day and night…
We’ve seen your 3-D movies. We’ve seen your summer constellations a hundred times and more. In violent abduction we blast your mindless structure. We see your Latin beauties through the chain-link: dolled up, tank tops, tits, and a whole lot of something more. They whistle and say, Hey girls! They call us their sabrosos, and we lift our dresses and give them the sun and the moon and they laugh and scream.
We apply mascara and, cocking our heads back, kill our beers. We see your backwards baseball caps. You call us faggots and we don’t care, though we say we like sabrosos better. We are three on three. Our cause unjust and ancient, we need no introduction for mass annihilation. We’ve let our blood before and we don’t care. Our hands a storm of haymakers; we draw blood, too.
Our dresses flow over matte black BMX bikes whose serial numbers were long ago stripped by flea market vendors. We pedal for speed and our dresses sully in the bike chains—quinceañera dress, flapper dress, other dress we don’t know how to call it. Macabre scars litter our legs and we don’t care.
We land in barren fields amid art deco vacants, a menagerie in chain-linked fences. We spark Marby Reds, our echoing laughter not faintly falling but swelling like applause. We stub our cigarettes on black stomper-boots. We perch on backhoes, heaps of rubble, singing Little Anthony and the Imperials: think I’m goin’ outta my head, well I think I’m goin’ outta my head, over you, day and night, night and day and night…
We’ve seen your 3-D movies. We’ve seen your summer constellations a hundred times and more. In violent abduction we blast your mindless structure. We see your Latin beauties through the chain-link: dolled up, tank tops, tits, and a whole lot of something more. They whistle and say, Hey girls! They call us their sabrosos, and we lift our dresses and give them the sun and the moon and they laugh and scream.
We apply mascara and, cocking our heads back, kill our beers. We see your backwards baseball caps. You call us faggots and we don’t care, though we say we like sabrosos better. We are three on three. Our cause unjust and ancient, we need no introduction for mass annihilation. We’ve let our blood before and we don’t care. Our hands a storm of haymakers; we draw blood, too.
We see into our futures, reapply mascara and, hiking up our dresses, pedal west, thinking of invincibility, though we don’t know how to call it.
We land in warehouse parties, the insemination of little girls in the middle of wet dreams. We need no introductions. We’re here for what we want. We want it, we need it, we’ll take it. On the eastern horizon, set against the sawtooth buildings, the sky begins to blue. We see into our futures, futures that will soon make humans of us, and we care, we care.
Ezra Carlsen’s fiction has been published in the journals Fiddleblack and REAL: Regarding Arts and Letters, and is forthcoming in The Southern Humanities Review. He’ll begin his MFA in fiction at the University of Oregon in the fall.