CharlieBondhus's How the Boy Might See It

ABOUT Charlie Bondhus:

Charlie Bondhus has published poetry and fiction in numerous periodicals, including Ganymede, The Starry Night Review, Swell, and The Harrow. His debut chapbook, What We Have Learned to Love, was the winner of Brickhouse Books’s 2008-2009 Stonewall Competition, and How the Boy Might See It was a finalist for Blue Light Press’s First Book Award in 2007. He also has a novella, Monsters and Victims, forthcoming from Gothic Press in 2010.

How the Boy Might See It
by Charlie Bondhus

ISBN: 978-1-931247-72-6 $15

“Finding one’s identity is just the beginning of the struggle in Bondhus’s raw, tender poems of gay male love, lust, and the blurry line between them. With lyricism and an empathetic imagination, Bondhus claims a place for himself within multiple traditions, daring to juxtapose a comic tryst with a resurrected Walt Whitman, a disciple’s erotic memories of Jesus, and the lament of a post-Edenic Adam who longs for a half-forgotten realm of clarity and intense sensations—which perhaps it is the poet’s task to restore, though never completely— “The boy” of the title fumbles toward manhood, always hoping for the sublime, but meanwhile speaking frankly about the sordid and silly episodes that are also part of this journey.”
—Jendi Reiter, award-winning author of Swallow and A Talent for Sadness and editor of WinningWriters.com

View from Staten Island Ferry

...and the Staten Island Ferry also wailed.
—Allen Ginsberg

Off of starboard
Manhattan high rises
drag rightward
encumbered as Israelite slaves
ghosts of bricks inscribed,
hieroglyphs of handshakes, skin-brushed-against-skin,
forgeries and friendships, sex-been-had,
prayers said, children raised,
lunches and dinners-been-consumed, voices-been-elevated
or silenced–

as the letters
of the Torah
tramping across the vision
of a preadolescent boy:
the mind scrutinizing each figure in its turn

right

to

left.

And I come to the city
from the water
like Joshua to Jericho
Jonah to Nineveh
Sheba to Solomon.

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1997-2003
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November 11, 2003