Tight blue jeans
rushed down
to your thighs,
thong strap
tugged aside,
you’re riding
him cowboy
by tracks
in a downpour.
I—I’m about to,
he stutters
and shutters
his eyes.
In the glare
of a nearing train,
he appears
*
​
to be crying;
it’s just rain.
His cadence
synchs
with the train’s
while a wheel
flings
from a rail
into your neck
the lid
of a sardine tin
and the locomotive
blows its whistle,
your trick
his cargo,
you yours.
*
A thistle’s
in wind,
your head
lists
toward his
as he lifts his
to lip you
while stripping
his eyes;
within seconds,
they seem
to be weeping
red wine,
merlot
or maybe
inferno.
What Other Choice by Jeremy Halinen (he/she/they/it) won the 2010 Exquisite Disarray First Book Poetry Contest, judged by Kathleen Flenniken. Their poems have appeared or will in journals including Cimarron Review, Greensboro Review, the Los Angeles Review, Meridian, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, and Sentence and in anthologies including Best Gay Poetry 2008 (A Midsummer Night’s Press/Lethe Press, 2008); Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011); A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (University of Akron Press, 2012); Pale Fire: New Writing on the Moon (Frogmore Press, 2019); and volume 3 of Aurora - The Allegory Ridge Poetry Anthology (Allegory Ridge, 2022).