Dennison Ty Schultz

 Dennison Ty Schultz

I’m Sitting in the Eagle in Portland

With a line after Billy-Ray Belcourt

& it hits me that I haven’t been touched—.Months—: a telescope bumbling its eye into the dim, the bright rope of its looking.

Looped & yearning for a calf or a leather post, meeting instead, space.

I’m alone at the Eagle & earlier sam sax read a poem about a belt around his neck.

Now on the television harnessed men hold one squirming man still enough.

To be meticulously whipped but not still enough to deny the body’s velvet to deny

desire’s muscle-clatter.

Megaphoning every touch in the dark, the man’s back a pit sword

weathered to the quick & accurate in its logging.

I’m dead-reckoning myself in the Eagle.

A shaking compass engulfed by the magnet-echo of sting. Where every chokehold is

transformative.

Where I am safest in the grip of leather in the grip of the right man who safes me.

I am at the Eagle. I could grip into their breath. Who could leather lan-

guage out of me.

Collimate me to their horizon. Where they would tie me to wait. Where I

silk.

Dennison Ty Schultz

115

Where I flare, desperate-strung. I imagine myself.

Tuned to their answer:—how a sextant holds two beings in its sights & marks inti-

mately their distance——I padlock.

To anything mapped by lube to anything metal & pinching to anything.

Brutal & trusted. I could disappear into pleasure.

Everything is so distinct outside of language.

The body says exactly what it says.