Aidan Forster

On the eighth day, coquelicot,
wearing my Armageddon earring,


my faggotry jumped to its death
from the foam spire of its death.


& on the ninth: in paradise, titmice
scrubbed its pearls with aftermath flax.

 
From its suicide note: So men might
once again flip you buffalo nickels.


The being inside my having been so
delicately razed itself into wondrous pink.


Meaning my faggotry carried all of astrology
& I wanted only the varmint baubles,


little sex cowlick with which I coaxed
maw into morrow, morrow into morning.


How many times could I wake like that:
gowns & waxwings, the paler gust before


the gust that everyone remembers with a notch
in the wall when a prodigal boy molts past his pastness?


How many times could I join the hundred
apocryphal boys nursing their empire stitch?


Their faggotries, too, nixed themselves
with lovability’s long & bedazzled shears:


drowned in a tub filled with pink milk,
Alice’d by an extra-large bottle of Rush.


To build trust, we plunged the javelin of fey
suspicion, deep & darkling, inch by inch,


deeper into each other. I think we sought
a new unto, as in the boys we barely let


ourselves struggle to be, as in two yuan
pieces, silver & tinkling, nearly crushing
each other into the bottom of a celadon
demitasse given as a gift by a lover who,


nightly, conspired to push our faggotry
from the glottal stopgap of the word


he never said but always meant: not fickle, no,
not fanged—but blood, yes, & its heavy shimmer.

Fall 2021

Poetry

Poem in Which My Faggotry Fakes its Own Death

We began each meeting with a hyacinth, to deny the Hole its hold on our lives. Our trusted servant, Father Brown, distributed flowers and heirloom glasses of cool water. We dipped our hyacinths, blush-quick and simple, and removed them, even simpler. Another dip, and another, and the dormant lacquer of a different, frightening flower cast itself over the stem we thought we knew. The third dip was the worst, no matter how many sessions we’d attended. Billy the Medicare salesman always shook so hard small droplets of water skirted from his wrist. But Father Brown’s voice reassured us that the hyacinth we held and the hyacinth in the water were one and the same, and he removed his flower and flourished its formal singularity, and we all relaxed. The water, although not the Hole exactly, could mimic the Hole’s obliterative properties. In the Hole, the flower became other-flower, its petals the very petals of its prior aspect’s doom.

Every Wednesday night, we pour gallon-jugs of Dasani into somebody’s aunt’s filigreed pitcher and make the Hole. Here, we make and unmake the Hole, Father Brown tells us, quoting from Azazel Anonymous’ 

. When Father Brown asks us why, we recite the answer in unison: to remind ourselves of our relationship to ourselves.

I knew things had gone too far when I walked into Henry’s Blue Ribbon Barbeque to interview for the studly sign-twirler position and realized I’d fucked the other candidates. If my porcine caricature of an interviewer, in what I imagined to be a rare moment of Polo-clad whimsy, asked me to describe the exact dimensions of each of their cocks—whose balls swayed like candied pinecones when we kissed, which mushroom heads were safe to eat and which would send you to the Minute Clinic, who licked the gossamer-pale webbing of skin between my index and middle toes until I came on his 2018 Clemson Sugar Bowl blanket—I could. Idling in the blue-tiled lobby, we eyed each other the way packs of large cats eye dummies stuffed with cameras on cutting-edge National Geographic documentaries. The smell of slow-roasted pulled pork thickened in the air, juiced and herbed and dripping. It frightened me, this proximity to the things I had once envied so much as to occupy, however briefly or illicitly, in posh condominium living rooms and used bookstore bathrooms and the big sexy room of an empty soybean field in the middle of night.

But what frightened me more was the idea that I’d fucked everything that looked like me. Or that I’d fucked everything that imagined itself as similar enough to my idea of myself that it might waltz into Henry’s on a Sunday afternoon and compete for the privilege to wear the little strap-on hooves and furred loincloth and stuffed russet sash of the Henry’s mascot costume. Somewhere deep down, we all considered ourselves a dead ringer for Satan’s go-go faggot, so terribly spurned as to slink the long way from hell to this sad corner of South Carolina to sell prime cuts of beef brisket to women in camisoles.

The interviewer called someone back, a blonde with an incredible desire to be physically crushed during sex, and I knew I needed to get out of there. I needed to reassure myself that I hadn’t fucked myself out of myself, that there was enough of me in the world to still call to whatever about me I might find pleasurable and debonair and charming. I needed it, clearly, differently, in some other and unexpected way. I left Henry’s before the first interview finished, pork scent cloying in my hair, Grindr opened before I’d even reached the driver’s seat of my sad blue Hyundai.

If our meetings took place in a novel about the redemptive qualities of incredibly ordinary men, we might call ourselves a ragtag bunch, and smile while doing it. Father Brown and Billy; a furtive band of married heterosexuals whose “names”—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Jim—had clearly been selected for the express purpose of concealing their lives from our circle, however much we might try to help them; Lawrence, who worked as a perpetual substitute teacher; Helmut, an aging leather daddy from Chesnee; an ever-shifting collection of heteroflexible line cooks from the wild game steakhouse half a mile from the mall; Blake and Jacob, boyfriends and high school seniors; and a cast of occasional newcomers. We always spotted the newbies before the meeting began. Timid and rattled by their time in the Hole, they wouldn’t speak until spoken to, and they wouldn’t stop once they started. They trawled our most terrible memories of our times in the Hole: Azazel twisting our bodies into things other than themselves, different, yes, but still so far from the most beautiful things in the world. We looked back on our old bodies from our new ones, and the distance crushed us. We could change so much and still never be enough. 

 The newbie might ask, and we’d suck our teeth and nod and maybe pat his short-sleeved arm. Everyone saw something different, we knew, and became something else. Words couldn’t quite explain it, couldn’t quite tear down the miasmic wall between yourself and yourself, the wall that was the Hole.

I showed up to the gloryhole fifteen minutes early. I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of these things, but I wanted to impress the protean but shadowy idea I held of AzzAzzel, the gloryhole’s meister. So far, I pictured him as a plush pair of floating 

 lips, poised atop a placid void like twin strawberry slugs. On Grindr, I couldn’t discern what exactly AzzAzzel used for his profile picture. I’d maximized my iPhone’s brightness, wondering whether he sported Grindr’s automated black square or if his image’s darkness held something more, some slight twist of skin or tooth or hair to picture as he sucked my cock, but I’d found nothing.

As I walked to the specified warehouse—an anterior wing in the ungentrified half of the old textile mill complex, no small-batch kudzu kombucha cat cafes to charm or deter me—I reveled in the sheer faggotry of my decision to visit a gloryhole. I kept thinking, I can’t believe I’m doing this, as if I really could believe it but almost couldn’t. I imagined a gaggle of big-breasted car saleswomen and Little Miss Greenville Counties and Vanna White’s ogling my advance, saying, We can’t believe you’re doing this either, babe, as if they really couldn’t believe it but almost could.

I nearly tittered, pushing open the rusted double doors to the warehouse, as if I’d never done something lewd before, something sexually indiscreet and technically illegal. I was visiting the gloryhole the way rich white women visited wellness retreats in adult-sized treehouse communities on Hilton Head Island. I was taking time and space for myself, I thought, stepping over a haphazard array of metal beams and picking my way toward the back wall. I could see the hole, a darker darkness in the dark room, a perfect circle cut out of an entirely smooth and sable portion of the wall. I was transforming, I thought, into a sexier, cooler, better version of myself, one I’d most definitely want to fuck if I could. I pushed my jean button out of its loop and fiddled with my cock, already half-hard, and sauntered up to the hole, ready for anything.

After collecting the hyacinths, Father Brown led us in our twelve steps. We loved this part the most because we could trust in its sameness. The steps never changed, and therein lay their promise, the radiant and gilded rungs of a ladder out of the hole of the Hole’s memory. We’d stand and intone: 

We admitted we were powerless over the Hole—that our minds had become unmanageable. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves had rendered us unbeautiful. We chose to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood him to command the One who had hurt us. We made a searching and fearless formal inventory of ourselves. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our time in the Hole. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of desire. We humbly asked Him to remove our fear of dissolution. We made a list of all the fantasies we had harbored and became willing to make peace with abandoning them all. We made direct sacrifices of such fantasies whenever possible, except when to do so would injure ourselves or others. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were lustful properly admitted it. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for deliverance from the Hole and the power to carry that out. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to warn others about the Hole, and to deny the Hole in all our affairs.

I pulled out my cock and waited for the magic to happen. Or, more specifically, I rocked back and forth on the balls of my feet and waited for the lusty little bellboy of perverse sexual encounters to beckon or nod or knock on the gloryhole’s frame and somehow indicate when and how quickly I should sink myself into its dark interior. I didn’t want to catch AzzAzzel unawares; I didn’t want to be rude. I imagined he must have a cocksucking ritual. A special White Barn candle, maybe sage and green tea, that he lit in the mysterious hovel of the other side of the warehouse wall, or a Spotify playlist whose rhythms he massaged into his patrons’ members with his tongue. I looked into the hole, hoping I might catch just a morsel of form with which to tantalize myself. At first, my gaze skittered over the black-on-black uncertainty of the hole, its outline barely distinguishable from the wall. After a full cock-handed minute, tacky globes of precum trickling over my knuckles, I almost gave up—not just on my peeping search-and-rescue mission, but on the entire notion of successfully visiting a gloryhole. Could I really reconnect with my desire to be desired, my desire to desire in others what they desired in me, in the splintery circumference of a hand-hewn hole in what would likely become a vegan astrology small press? My cock wilted from the existential pressure, but as I looked away from the hole, I saw something: a twist of topaz light, small as the sheep a fairy might count as it fell asleep.

I furrowed my brow and studied the hole, suddenly privy to the extreme intricacy of its hue. What I’d previously perceived as a scrim of unchanging darkness I now recognized as a spectrum of kaleidoscopic forms: weird sisterhoods of violet pentagons linked at their fifth points, algal blooms that would vanish in pure sunlight, the papery blush of a thousand trees shedding wirrah after wirrah of thin black bark under a heavy new moon. My ears filled with the low sibilant thrum of fool’s gold on deer antlers, as if a circle of ancestral hunters timed their glint-heavy strikes to the pattern of my breathing, trying to light the most terrible fire in the world. The wind—tumbling and traipsing through the gaps of the warehouse walls—sidled up to my forearms and shins, lapping against my small waves of black body hair.

I felt myself on the precipice of the most incredible feeling available to faggot-kind, the pearl at the heart of a world not designed for my love. I stepped toward the hole as if meeting my partner at a debutante ball for future sodomites. I wanted to be inside the hole so badly, so completely. My entire self wanted to be pulled through my cock’s angry cyclopean eye and into a world beyond imagining. I wanted to give myself fully to the thrall of the hole with no thought of what was already becoming my other life, the lattes and loan debt and lawnmowers of my days before. As I watched myself disappear into its maw, I closed my eyes and saw a white hand, its index finger hooked as if propping up a delicate chin.

After our first few sessions, we all agreed that the winds in that place—the winds in the Hole—were the worst part of the entire experience. Although everyone endured something different, we all felt the winds. Not the timelessness, so much as its chafing on the skin, or what could be called skin. Not the darkness, so much as its tongue, lapping the most secret parts of our bodies. Not Azazel, but his gaze, a zephyr applied with a fright pipette, right between the eyes.

I couldn’t explain the how of what happened, but I could explain the what. When AzzAzzel wrapped his lips around my cock, a splendiferous wash of liquid velvet, I nearly sagged against the wall, overcome with a pleasure I never knew my body could produce. It was as if AzzAzzel unspooled the chromosomal thread of desire itself from somewhere deep inside my body, a place both of me and apart from me, and wound it over my skin. I tried to track the rhythms of his movement, but I couldn’t follow for more than a few seconds. I wanted to lose myself in the version of myself to which he delivered me, one capable of otherworldly ecstasy.

I pushed myself even deeper into the hole, and when I opened my eyes, I found myself somewhere else, tethered to what I understood as my body by the slick metronome of AzzAzzel’s mouth, but otherwise floating, loose, un-constituted. I tried to blink but realized I couldn’t. I tried to lick my lips but felt the impulse stutter on its way to the idea of having lips and a tongue. I didn’t have eyes anymore but existed, rather, as a partial distillation of my own ability to see, and I supposed the same went for the rest of my senses. I tried to slap my arms or legs or stomach, to draw the bilious ghost I feared I’d become back into my reliable if occasionally unsatisfactory body, and found that I couldn’t, that I didn’t have a stomach or a hand with which to slap it. Panic mounted inside me—or I mounted inside panic—a foam of pure feeling sluiced over the series of surfaces I considered myself. One little pink fractal caught sounds, the same blood-bound thrum from before, and a chartreuse bowl seemed to collect sensation and ferry it to other glassy constellations through small white tubes. A circle of wand-like protrusions snagged little raptures of visual data, impressions of color and form and shape, then garbled them into a dark attar that dripped continually onto a long, low, corrugated plate, never filling or draining. What I would have called the feeling of AzzAzzel’s mouth on what I would have called my cock persisted, as if cradling these strange menageries of being. I latched onto it, a cerulean cloud billowing and contracting with the rhythm of his mouth, as the only thing with which to recognize myself. I didn’t know what to do about what I’d become, and I didn’t know what it meant to not know something or to be able to do something even if I did know it. I tried to generate the sensation of squeezing my eyes shut, and I focused my energy on AzzAzzel’s tongue, and when I “opened” my “eyes,” I was standing in a garden and staring at an incredibly old but beautiful man.

Father Brown described Azazel opaquely, as if doling out liturgical porridge at a group home for the sexually otherworldly. Azazel, he would say, is the cause of human sin. Azazel, he would assert, is the jeweler of human demise, handing out baubles to anyone with a penny and a wish.

Something was wrong about his face, and something was right about my body. I let these facts bloom and twine into each other until I felt newly stabilized in what seemed to be my original body. I wiggled my fingers and toes, I blinked three times in a row, and I twitched my cock. I found everything in working order, and I didn’t want to question my miraculous presence in myself as myself lest I unfurl into a collection of cosmic pinwheels.

I studied the old man’s face. Something about its arrangement was fucked up in an incredibly precise way, as if God had selected the most beautiful features from a hundred faces and lovingly, carefully, slowly blended them into a single face, at once radiant with the minty verve of youth and lined with the grace of an aging queen who started moisturizing at sixteen and never stopped. His eyes were entirely black, and I quickly looked away, loathe to traipse through his gallery of non-Euclidean torment again. Waves of creamy fabric tumbled over his body, obscuring and suggesting in turn, and I struggled to pinpoint anything definite about what he might look like. Was that mass at the robe’s lower center an enormous bulge? Before I could even pucker my lips into the precursor of the “w” in “where the fuck am I?”, the old man spoke.

“Where do you think you are, boy?” His eyes, previously trained on some point beyond me, swiveled to my face, and I winced and glanced away. He raised his hand, peppered with a clutch of blue veins, and gestured to his left. I turned and surveyed his little stretch of beyond.

We stood in a small clearing coated in a luscious and grassy pelt—like the pinky nail of God, I thought, pristinely manicured by solar winds. A tiny golden cap sat on the tip of each blade of grass, fashioned by small and industrious golden beetles in the hour between waking and sleeping in the human world. The human world? I thought, alarmed by the casual scrim between myself and what I imagined to be my home. But before I could pursue the feeling, I felt the boorish string of human attention pulled taut from my toes to my scalp, and I raised my head to look into the distance.

Concentric rings of flowers swirled as far as I could see: forsythia and jessamine and marigolds, sunflowers and wisteria and daylilies, gloxinia and pennywort and saxifrage, arranged in clades of lush hues, the rings counting the years since the birth of beauty itself as a concept and a thing to be seen, touched, loved. The blossoms stirred ever so slightly in a breeze that seemed to issue from the old man himself, as if his every shift of weight elicited an equal and opposite tremble from the pollen-clad hearts of every flower in existence.

I tried to imagine a world beyond this one but couldn’t. Or, rather, I felt that I could, but I didn’t want to.

The old man flicked his ring finger and my head swung toward him. Suddenly, I wanted to become the lustful apogee of calamitous beauty, a paragon of grace so imperious as to topple even the suggestion of another world’s mountain. I wanted the old and beautiful man to fuck me into myself, deeper and deeper, until I molted from my sad, blemished, erratically hairy skin and cracked into the juicy cortex of devotion itself.

The old man nodded, granting me permission to speak.

“Heaven?” I asked. “Is this heaven?”

The old man guffawed—I couldn’t describe it any other way. His jaw opened as if forcibly unclenched by an efficient gargoyle, and a series of short and blocky slabs of sound rang through the air, like congealed moonlight slapping the meat pocket on a lunch tray.

“Not quite, boy,” he said, studying the cool daggers of his nails. “No, this isn’t heaven. But it is paradise.” He paused, expecting a question, and then continued. “In my garden, you can have anything you want, be anything you want.”

“How did I get here?” Spurts of sugary dust rose from the crooning faces of this realm’s flowers. In their queer orbits I saw the decadent fractals of past and future empires: skyscrapers in ruins, the ocean truly dark and Merlot-sour, whores of Babylon seated in high-tech pink plush gaming chairs, crushing teenagers at MMORPGs.

“You came through the hole,” he said. “Or, you came, but you didn’t cum—we haven’t gotten that far.” The salt-slick pulse of his tongue on my cock, I realized, had diminished, now the heartbeat of a small mammal on another plane, trickling through a hole in the portico of space and time.

I nodded, unable to speak. I felt privy to the turning of something enormous, a zone inside of my idea of space itself swiveling on a hinge I’d never noticed before but couldn’t possibly ignore now.

“All you have to do is say my name. I believe you already know it.”

I imagined he expected befuddlement, a disco-dark otter slowly and unsurely fondling the cosmic heft of being and having anything. But I’d already reached a critical conclusion: this was exactly what I wanted.

“I’ll stay, Azazel,” I said. “When can we start?”

Of course, we all did our own research about Azazel after Father Brown gave us the name of the thing that had become so central to our understanding of our place in the world, or beyond it. We learned that Father Brown had not deluded us. Although man had selected himself for sin in the garden, Azazel gave him the trinkets with which to consummate it: warfare, eyeshadow, witchcraft. Outside of our AA warehouse, we approached the world with fear. If Azazel was truly the progenitor of sinful artifacts, might any small and errant thing—a Nyx Cosmetics jumbo white eyeliner pencil, a Wendy’s double-Baconator, an heirloom butterfly knife—not be detritus from the Hole, a way for Azazel to exert his hold on us? When we presented Father Brown with these concerns, he calmed us, promising that Azazel, due to certain limitations of quantum barriers and metaphysical knobs, bits, pieces, and bolts, couldn’t actually leave the Hole. His world and our world remained fundamentally separate, connected only at the Hole’s single point. This, he reminded us, was why we needed AA. We needed to train ourselves not to remember objects as they were before, but to create new futures for objects as we might know them, fresh and dewy and promising.

I never would have guessed how simple it would be to become the hunkmaiden of sheer and incredible beauty. But nothing, it turned out, could have been simpler, in this world or the old one.

After I said Azazel’s name, the exquisite grasses of his paradise cleft twisted and rose into a king-sized bed, complete with a woven comforter and throw pillow set. Azazel tossed aside his robe and revealed that he did, in fact, have an enormous cock, one of the largest I’d ever seen. It already leaked precum which, when struck by this zone’s eerie light, reflected the essence of my own name, a navy aura overlaid with a coral sheen. Azazel patted a grassy towel placed in the center of the bed. Obedient to the narrative thrust of this fantasy, I mounted the bed and assumed the position: face down, ass up, apparently the same in every astral plane. I hadn’t considered myself a powerbottom in the old world, so I tensed in anticipation of being entered, and tensed more when I realized I was tensing. Azazel placed his hands on my hips and a pulse of calm tingled through my entire body, as if a beautiful woman poured water from an ancient silver demitasse into and over every naked inch of my skin. I could feel my hole relaxing, expanding without loosening, as if I’d been blessed with incredibly flexible yet resilient anal musculature. When Azazel entered me, it felt easy as anything, easy as corn silk fluttering in a summer breeze or the surface of the earth moving three-and-a-half centimeters to the left every year, so dependable and measurable as to merit its own science.

Nothing had ever felt better than Azazel inside my newly refurbished pussy. I’d won every trivia night in every gay bar across America at the same time, and my student debt had vanished, and I’d never ignored emails from my grandmother with links to TEDx talks about the power of the evangelical handshake—or, that’s what it felt like, everything righting itself, everything always already having been right and thus not in need of any righting to be perfect. I arrived perfectly at the perfect center of every perfect thing and became it. I’m blossoming, I thought, the chthonic rhythm of Azazel’s thrusts timed to the very pulse of energy and matter through and around the earth, into a beautiful young center of the universe.

Aidan Forster

Aidan Forster

Poetry

Fall 2021

Poem in Which My Faggotry Fakes its Own Death

Fiction

Fall 2021

Azazel Anonymous