Editor’s note: The Second Annual Poetry Luchador Battle of ALL of the Sexes on Valentines Day was a multi-generational, multi-lingual, multicultural ash-up of art, gender, poetry, wrestling, language, and theatre brought to you by the favorite revolutionary poets, media-makers, poverty scholars and cultural workers at POOR Magazine. As cosponsors of the event, we’re proud to run the winning poem. We published the first-place winner in the paper this week — here are the second- and third-place winners of the contest.
———-
Second place: “Queer Boi and his HIStory with Biological Males”
By Queer Boi aka William Romero
The first one
Bought me Suszy Q’s, cherry cokes, and let me pick the Fantasy Five on Fridays.
He would wake up at 4 a.m. five days a week to go shine-up new cars so I wouldn’t have to
He carried me asleep in his arms, up the stairs to our two-bedroom apartment
His actions spoke his affection
Especially on nights when he would blast Vicente Fernandez while
drinking his Budweiser
Doors slamming, vases flying, his screaming, my mother’s crying
I’m not enough, was the feeling my seven-year-old lips sobbed onto my pillow
The second one
Made me lunches and fruit punch Kool-Aid during our summers at home alone
Beat the S-H-I-T out of any boys who made fun of me
And let me be Laserbeak to his Soundwave on our Cybertron
Unlike the one before him, whom we both called father, he let his
words speak to his affections
I would rather you be a criminal than turn out to be gay
I’m not enough was the thought that crept into my head as I fled home