the first straight person

he looked at the tangerines & thought, "billboard."
crouched in the grass. drew his finger across
the ground. delighted in a dream of borders. 
saw the elk sing & plucked their language 
from his heart. 
he did not believe in tying cherry stems
in your mouth. he thought, "love comes
from power earned & lost." he played with 
little plastic army men past childhood. he bought
a gun & married it in secret. saw people
as troughs. found a woman to make into
a woman. because what is a gender
without its mirror? he told her, "you have
everything you could ever want." she took
her hungers & put them in jewelry boxes. he bought
binoculars. he bought a little tape recorder.
he searched the valleys & the cities. he wanted 
to see all the ways people lived. not to catalog. 
not for a love poem but to invent new ways
to shrink them. he never just wanted 
a woman. he wanted a scheme of genders.
the small genders & the big voluminous genders.
he wanted genders to witness his gender. he wanted
a bunch of same-ish genders to tell him
his gender was big & marvelous. in the dark though
sometimes, his real hunger arrived. the licorice kind.
he would go out into the daylight. find
a tangerine. peel it with his hands. remember
what it felt like when once he met another 
boy beneath that tree. they did not kiss
or even touch but, in the velodrome of his chest
he saw their life together. felt terrified, 
not from homophobia. that wasn't invented yet.
he wasn't even sure it was romantic. a longing
to be seen. to be kept. he was jealous of the boy.
it was something in the way he ate. juice down his arms.
so, he crafted a way to control him. he became
the first straight person.