Yes they chased me          Yes it was spring                 It was spring                  It was spring      It was               spring all day and nightAll the trees leaning        into light their fuzzy buds and calyxes                  The grass greener than whatever’s greenestThe daffodils yellow and yellow and yellow and creamThis telling will be different          I swear                  from when I was eighteen                  and described the perfect            springiness of the grassunder my high-tops        Fuck the lyric      mountains and the air                  I had just turned ten      We were playing capture the flagwhen the boys in my class            and their older brothers           turned In the mock Olympic Games       I’d won javelin                     shot put                  and wrestling     Came second in long jump         but thatdidn’t matter now             they chased me                  I fled past the echoing                  concrete of the pavilion            past barrel trash cans fizzing with flies     past the short field     over the edge of Ragged Mountain That’s the real name of it                I say the real names of things                  when I know them         Maybe somebody said a name thenMaybe to Ethan                  lithe as a deer   Ethan my friend who’d given me                  a folding knife for my birthday                  smiling quietlyor otherwise their blood    moved them like magnets        like swallows or certain bugs that hang together like nets     fly like they’re                  woven together     Maybe someone said dyke or goytheir names for me    A boy who had just started shaving gave a whistle                  gestured with his arm      My body pressed againstthe mountain’s steepness              They are so high above me I can see the soles of their shoes           when they lift them up to kick                  dirt and leaves in my face      zigzag            swoosh honeycombhead of a fanged roaring wildcat      They stone me               stone stone stonestonestone      When I wrote of this before        I focused on the rocks                  gave their scientific names     suggested I was becoming one Naming things feels good       cataloguing has great colonial power                  and so distracting     A way of looking awayThey threw and threw    All the roly-polys       from under the rocks                  revealed and     scurryingNo one came     No one stopped them     They stopped maybe because they got bored    At first they got farther away as they threw                  Someone      heel-dragged a line in the grass and they stoodbehind it               Humans in a field    Men in the man-made ground                  keeping at bay below the tree line’s dark            danglingedge something else         Something not made like them or unmade        abject and profane        I heard a sound from my body                  like a growl               heat poured off my head       I felt mypersonness evaporating       as the boys laughed upright                  in the mown field            I bellied up with millipedes     snailslast year’s leaves rotting and skeletal The body  lost human speech then     But somewhere  someone                  was writing      I know that now          at a desk in a cool roomshining haired      You can’t see them now     you in the bloody torn                  jeans      covered with mountain-stuff but you will       They areexplaining it        That these boys             Ethan    Noah     Shawn big blonde Jeff who once                             picked you up and                  stuffed your whole body in a trash barrelin a week’s worth of discarded lunches                   maggots                   broken                  glass   and who claimed           to have seen a moviecalled Carnal Knowledge               but wouldn’t describe it They are explaining it all            in a book                  They are saying                  you are a person                          who came firstnot a copy           They are saying           these boys          are fictions                  stoning other fictions        These are the punishmentsthat attend           These are ghosts throwing at nothing