I wish for sex out / in the open, to have / some strange body / glide over mine, to collide / as if to butterfly / underwater required not one / but two sets of salty / chests & jutting / calves
of its own future folded inward, enclosed within its seed & its surroundings my nascent homosexuality is that I love every body even
as if it were my own which is to say I love every body as if I were myself tasked with becoming both object & the offer of adoration begged
by it Is it wrong to think If I weren’t sitting on a bench overlooking the Vieux Port not considering each vessel approaching the Canebiére but
recently this would read otherwise or not at all which is to say I am indebted to so many forms & what can only be gifted by our swift encounters I bow before velocity & haphazard excess, the latent succulence
contained or carried by words, a generous invitation to plunge or plummet or to be the hole itself out of which something always something blossoms (count the number of times naugahyde appears in the text)
(count the number of times hypnotic & ass mingle in my mind) Reading Puig from memory I can place myself back at the beach & every time or so it seems I wish for sex out
in the open, to have some strange body glide over mine, to collide as if to butterfly underwater required not one but two sets of salty chests & jutting
calves (last night’s intermittent dream where my penis appears in public, veering in & out of jean shorts almost violently) & Puig’s wish (how could I forget this?) to grow up & not
to become movie star but movie, which means assemblage, network, motoric scrapbook, the discontinuity of the act of filming—set pieces rushing across the set & the set itself but also the future
of the subjects within the frame— not just the act of filming but its unknowable points of view, simultaneous & multiple months or only moments later & always to return & to beg reception draped in dark or the privacy of some well-lit home, alone
or in the company of people one has only ever seen in passing reimagined through this allowance for difference, which is my own inability to say where Puig’s wish comes from (other than Puig himself, speaking
as if he were still a child, unless Puig, at 43 or 44 or more, awaited a life of substitution & self-adaptation unless Puig, ever exuberant is still awaiting to be, the way in place of source or reference I find only my own origin: my meticulous way of copying out
everything that comes even everything that evades me)—is it me is it Puig is there any difference? The opposite of authorship is feverish attribution, my tendency to assume all thoughts I have belong to everyone
& doesn’t a changeover imply the endeavor to move by rapidly opening & shutting one’s eyes? The real catches only if I deny myself
Chris Campanioni is the author of six books, including A and B and Also Nothing(Otis Books | Seismicity Editions, 2020), a re-writing of Henry James’s The American and Gertrude Stein’s "Americans" which merges theory, fiction, and autobiography. Recent work appears in Ambit, Nat. Brut, American Poetry Review, RHINO Poetry, and Life Writing, and has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. He lives in Brooklyn, where he edits PANK.
I wish for sex out / in the open, to have / some strange body / glide over mine, to collide / as if to butterfly / underwater required not one / but two sets of salty / chests & jutting / calves
I wish for sex out / in the open, to have / some strange body / glide over mine, to collide / as if to butterfly / underwater required not one / but two sets of salty / chests & jutting / calves
I wish for sex out / in the open, to have / some strange body / glide over mine, to collide / as if to butterfly / underwater required not one / but two sets of salty / chests & jutting / calves