Michael Bondhus

European sex clubs have the best STDs in the world

 

It didn’t burn                                   after Bucharest                only slight

 

twitches my urethra as if inside an eel with an erection

“lasting over 4 hours”

 

but safe                              rubbery

no blood pee

two weeks sprouted

              

               two odd symmetrical growths                    near the base    

 

which should alarm but felt less like

“an abnormal alien mass” than

unexpected evolution    

 

so I watched

 

day by day                        

 

curious                                    whether “Cerberus Dick”                         or something else

 

I wasn’t expecting

wings

 

but that’s what I got wings! feathery ones like it’d died

gone to heaven                 hot commodity          fetish sites

 

they called me “The Angel of Dick” uninventive

but boy did I earn it         appendages        beating                could pump

                                                                                                         fast

                                                                                                         fast

fast til

  smoke the virus didn’t transmit

 

    disappointed boys I liked          being so special    till one day

 

                                                                                          it detached

and flew away.

 

Michael McKeown Bondhus (formerly Charlie) is a bigender (male/neutrois) Irish-American writer. He's the author of Divining Bones (Sundress, 2018) and All the Heat We Could Carry (Main Street Rag, 2013), winner of the Thom Gunn Award. His work’s appeared in Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The Missouri Review, Columbia Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Bellevue Literary Review. He’s received fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Tyrone Guthrie Center (Ireland), and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers (UK). He lives in Jersey City, NJ (unceded Lenape land) and teaches at Raritan Valley Community College. More at: http://michaelbondhus.com.