Zach Linge

Masculinized

From a deep blue bath bomb
with a golden star that smiled
glitter. Tonight marks the first
day of equinox in glitter. We
smoke lazy-cherried American
Spirits, arms clacked in glitter.
I finger the thick hair on my
upper lip, rubbing it in clumps
with glitter. The full round turn
of my fingertip exhales in the
starlit breeze of glitter. The knee-
cap, the flat thigh roped in thin
shorts, the leg inside, glitter. I
check each of my testicles and
they are glitter. The man’s nails
in the bare black bedroom coated
in paint that glows in the dark,
coated now in glitter. Under
the blank roof in his cinderblock
palace, two a.m. glitter. Fuck-me,
fuck-you, we take turns, glitter.

Zach Linge is the current Assistant Editor and former Online Editor for The Southeast Review. His critical essays are forthcoming or published in African American Review and [Inter]sections Journal, and his poems are published in Sonora Review, Nimrod International Journal, and Permafrost Magazine, among other journals. Linge lives and teaches in Tallahassee.