Free Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood Page B

locked his lips grimly on a breast that night
    and drank milk until he died, the other took an entire
    bottle of Doctor Samson’s Soothing Syrup for Crybaby
    Boys, two-hundred-proof I read somewhere, and his throat went
    whoosh
and he died too. Who was the final McCoy
    or Hatfield? He says point a gun at me, then maybe
    I’ll know where I am. What else, I will learn
    what year it was, and lift my head from reading
    a full year later, finished with Hatfields and McCoys,
    my sight on fire will have gutted their houses, the line
    of old whiskey will have ended here now.

The Arch
    Of all living monuments has the fewest
    facts attached to it, they slide right off
    its surface, no Lincoln lap for them to sit
    on and no horse to be astride. Here is what
    I know for sure:
    Was a gift from one city to another. A city
    cannot travel to another city, a city cannot visit
    any city but itself, and in its sadness it gives
    away a great door in the air. Well
    a city cannot
except for Paris
, who puts
    on a hat styled with pigeon wings and walks
    through the streets of another city and will not
    even see the sights, too full she is of the sights
    already. And within her walk her women,
    and the women of Paris looking like
    they just walked through an Arch . . .
    Or am I mixing it up I think I am
    with another famous female statue? Born
    in its shadow and shook-foil hot the facts
    slid off me also. I and the Arch we burned
    to the touch. “Don’t touch that Arch a boy
    we know got third-degree burns from touch-
    ing that Arch,” says my mother sitting
    for her statue. She is metal on a hilltop and
    so sad she’s not a Cross. She was long ago
    given to us by Ireland. What an underhand
    gift for an elsewhere to give, a door
    that reminds you you can leave it. She raises
    her arm to brush my hair. Oh no female
    armpit lovelier than the armpit of the Arch.

When the World Was Ten Years Old He Fell Deep in Love with Egypt
    Just as he fell in love with the dinosaurs,
    just as he would fall in love with the moon—
    no women in the world yet, he was only ten
    years old. A ten-year-old is made of time,
    the world had forever to learn about Egypt.
    He entered encyclopedias and looted every
    fact of them and when he had finished looting
    there he broke into the Bible. He snuck
    into his mother’s room and drew thick lines
    around his eyes and those were the borders
    of Egypt. He carefully wrote in stiff small
    birds, he carefully wrote in coiled snakes,
    he carefully wrote in flatfooted humans.
    The ten-year-old world needed so much
    privacy, he learned to draw the door-bolt
    glyph and learned to make the sound
    it made. I am an old white British man,
    decided the ten-year-old world, I wear a round
    lens on my right eye, the Day, and see only a blur
    with my left eye, the Night. When the sun shone
    on him it shone on Egypt, all the dark for a while
    was the dark in the Pyramids, the left lung
    of his body was the shape of Africa
    and one single square breath in it Egypt.
    They never found all the tombs, he
knew
. Anyone
    might be buried in Egypt, thought the ten-year-old
    world in love with it, I will send my wind down
    into my valley, and my wind will uncover the doors
    to the tombs, and I will go down myself inside them,
    and shine light on all the faces, and light on the rooms
    full of gold, and light on even the littlest pets, on the mice
    and the beetles of the ten-year-old kings, and shine light
    on even their littlest names.

List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers
    First there was Helen of Sparta, who did it only
    with oil, no one knows how; then there was
    Maggie of England, who even on the battlefield
    put men back together; and then there was Rose
    of the deepest South, who stood up in her father’s
    clothes and walked out of the house and herself.
    Disguised women were always among them.
    They badly wanted to wear blue, they badly
    wanted to wear red, they wanted to blend
    with the woods or ground.