South​ ​Carolina​ ​is​ ​/​ ​shaped like a heart: / like a fist by Justin Phillip Reed


              —Michelle Detorie

the way a fist
that wishes it were a heart
wants to be the only tattoo
on my left chest:

the arrogant welt,
on skin as a nipple
nodding through a shirt.

in dreams my fist is just
a wrist, stiffless
as the naked neck
of a dead hen. i hit

nose and jaw and hurt
mostly myself. i’m not
what has long passed
for a Carolina man.

my heart is hard-
pressed to be a fist.
in my black bed
i rotate east

and South Carolina
is the only one
who waits,
sunk to the trenches

of my body’s bluest
blues and sending up
an eon of steam
that wishes it were mist.

when South Carolina sleeps
next to me, sewer roaches
rain from the ceiling
of a tunnel still lunging

out of the sweetest
boy i once was and
ending in the rusted city
men like South Carolina

have since made me.
i accumulate disgust
i cannot claim but
that roots my tongue

like Christ nonetheless,
my grimy floors percussed
that same sick mouth-
roof slap and dig amid

maggot and rigor when
men walk my gutters.
i wake and bully
my body head-first

against their rhythm, shook
like that man who loves,
yes, but hates to hear
himself saying it back.

Justin Phillip Reed is a South Carolina native and the author of the forthcoming chapbook, A History of Flamboyance (YesYes Books, 2016). His poems appear / are forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Obsidian, Phantom, RHINO, Union Station, and Vinyl Poetry. He is a Junior Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis.