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February 14, 2019

Two Poems

by James Penha

 
Uncle Ray’s Mirror

When, every Sunday, we arrived at The House
after the 12:15 mass for dinner with my grand-
parents and my mother’s youngest sister who
lived there along with the eldest, Jo, the father’s
favorite whose glass eye trembled in lieu of the real
one blasted with a BB by her brother when they
were kids, and her kids, my cousins, her husband
Ray sat without fail in the wing chair at the foot
of the staircase reading The Sunday Mirror. Not
The News or the Journal-American sectioned
and scattered in piles throughout The House. No,
Ray looked into The Mirror like no one else. No
one else I knew read The Mirror . That was as queer
as his soft voice ever-so-slightly lilted with a sweet
Irish demeanored Mornin’ pal in The House of Italo-
American passions expressed—The RULE—
only in English. I thought Ray looked like DiMaggio,
especially his calligraphic nose, enough to abut
The Family as long as he behaved himself. But he
didn’t, disappearing for days and once for months
until again he sat in the wing chair with The Mirror.
My father, who couldn’t wait himself to get home
every Sunday, shook Ray’s hand Happy he said
to see him. But soon thereafter Ray was gone again
for good. That, much later, my mother told me Ray
drank too much and died in a fire in San Francisco
I forgot until last week when my cousin whom I called
on her seventieth birthday said she always thought
her father, like me, liked men more than Jo and had
some kind of a life beyond the wing chair, The Sunday
Mirror, The Family, and that lonely crowded House.


Yellow Books
 
“Things have always impressed me this way.”
      -Aubrey Beardsley
 
I had never seen an erection other than my own
before I snuck inside the book into which I heard
my father’s friends laughing in the library
the night before. It lay still on the coffee table
under which I stretched my legs and riffled the pages
till I found and gasped at the prodigious phallus
emanating from the beautiful Spartan herald, inky
curls dripping round his visage and round his balls
as the old magistrate whose flaccid penis invited
laughter closed enough to kiss the head of the herald’s
dick yet only tickled it with his index finger to make sure
it was real. I did the same. Lightly. Not to smudge.
I felt woozy and a dreamy mist in my underwear.
I closed the book and read its cover. Lysistrata. I knew
of the play from school. But these pictures! I flipped
the pages and saw farts and pussies and plenty of cocks
though none as handsome or huge as that herald’s. I rose
and looked for the name elsewhere on the shelves.
Beardsley. Beardsley. Beardsley. Morte d’Arthur—
a work I’d read. But not like this. A hermaphrodite?
tiny tits and dinky trapped within coils of barbed vines
daring to climb to inhale the rose’s perfume? This could
be me. And why is King Marke who hates Tristram
because they both love Iseult gazing at the knight
with such longing—Marke’s finger extending just
as the old magistrate’s—when he finds him naked
in the wood? Because he saw at last all he wanted
to be? This could
be me.
 
A native New Yorker, James Penha has lived for the past quarter-century in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his LGBTQ+ works appear in the 2017 and 2018 anthologies of both the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival and the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival while his Raymond Carver fan fiction appears at Eclectica. His essay “It’s Been a Long Time Coming” was featured in The New York Times “Modern Love” column in April 2016. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry.

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