“Worth what?”

“Getting pissed over, dude. Ah—score!” He took out a mini Snickers from his coat pocket. “Must’ve been here since last Halloween.”

“Who said I was?”

“He just got his things, you know?” He pointed the Snickers to his head. “The drink gets to him.”

“Yeah. I guess.” The tree frogs seemed further away, smaller.

Some kind of quiet sharpened between us.

“Hey, don’t do the fuckin’ silent thing, man. It’s a fag move. I mean—” A frustrated sigh escaped him. He bit into the Snickers. “Want half?”

By way of reply I opened my mouth. He placed the thumb-sized morsel on my tongue, wiped his lips with his wrist, and looked away.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, chewing.

He was about to say something else, his teeth grey pills in the moonlight, then got up and stumbled toward his bike. I picked up my own, the steel already wet with dew, and that’s when I saw it. Actually, Trevor saw it first, letting out an almost imperceptible gasp. I turned around and we both just stood there leaning against our bikes.

It was Hartford. It was a cluster of light that pulsed with a force I never realized it possessed. Maybe it was because his breaths were so clear to me then, how I imagined the oxygen in his throat, his lungs, the bronchi and blood vessels expanding, how it moved through all the places I’ll never see, that I keep returning to this most basic measurement of life, even long after he’s gone.

But for now, the city brims before us with a strange, rare brilliance—as if it was not a city at all, but the sparks made by some god sharpening his weapons above us.

“Fuck,” Trevor whispered. He put his hands in his pockets and spat on the ground.

“Fuck.”

The city throbbed, shimmered. Then, trying to snap himself out of it, he said, “Fuck Coca-Cola.”

“Yeah, Sprite for life, fuckers,” I added, not knowing then what I know now: that Coca-Cola and Sprite were made by the same damn company. That no matter who you are or what you love or where you stand, it was always Coca-Cola in the end.

Trevor rusted pickup and no license.

* * *

Trevor sixteen; blue jeans streaked with deer blood.

* * *

Trevor too fast and not enough.

* * *

Trevor waving his John Deere cap from the driveway as you ride by on your squeaky Schwinn.

* * *

Trevor who fingered a freshman girl then tossed her underwear in the lake for fun.

* * *

For summer. For your hands

* * *

were wet and Trevor’s a name like an engine starting up in the night. Who snuck out to meet a boy like you. Yellow and barely there. Trevor going fifty through his daddy’s wheat field. Who jams all his fries into a Whopper and chews with both feet on the gas. Your eyes closed, riding shotgun, the wheat a yellow confetti.

* * *

Three freckles on his nose.

* * *

Three periods to a boy-sentence.

* * *

Trevor Burger King over McDonald’s ’cause the smell of smoke on the beef makes it real.

* * *

Trevor bucktooth clicking on his inhaler as he sucked, eyes shut.

* * *

Trevor I like sunflowers best. They go so high.

* * *

Trevor with the scar like a comma on his neck, syntax of what next what next what next.

* * *

Imagine going so high and still opening that big.

* * *

Trevor loading the shotgun two red shells at a time.

* * *

It’s kind of like being brave, I think. Like you got this big ole head full of seeds and no arms to defend yourself.

* * *

His hard lean arms aimed in the rain.

* * *

He touches the trigger’s black tongue and you swear you taste his finger in your mouth

* * *

as it pulls. Trevor pointing at the one-winged sparrow thrashing in black dirt and takes it

* * *

for something new. Something smoldering like a word. Like a Trevor

* * *

who knocked on your window at three in the morning, who you thought was smiling until you saw the blade held over his mouth. I made this, I made this for you, he said, the knife suddenly in your hand. Trevor later

* * *

on your steps in the grey dawn. His face in his arms. I don’t wanna, he said. His panting. His shaking hair. The blur of it. Please tell me I am not, he said through the sound of his knuckles as he popped them like the word But But But. And you take a step back. Please tell me I am not, he said, I am not

* * *

a faggot. Am I? Am I? Are you?

* * *

Trevor the hunter. Trevor the carnivore, the redneck, not

* * *

a pansy, shotgunner, sharpshooter, not fruit or fairy. Trevor meateater but not

* * *

veal. Never veal. Fuck that, never again after his daddy told him the story when he was seven, at the table, veal roasted with rosemary. How they were made. How the difference between veal and beef is the children. The veal are the children

* * *

of cows, are calves. They are locked in boxes the size of themselves. A body-box, like a coffin, but alive, like a home. The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.

* * *

We love eatin’ what’s soft, his father said, looking dead

* * *

into Trevor’s eyes. Trevor who would never eat a child. Trevor the child with the scar on his neck like a comma. A comma you now

* * *

put your mouth to. That violet hook holding two complete thoughts, two complete bodies without subjects. Only verbs. When you say Trevor you mean the action, the pine-stuck thumb on the Bic lighter, the sound of his boots

* * *

on the Chevy’s sun-bleached hood. The wet live thing dragged into the truck bed behind him.

* * *

Your Trevor, your brunette but blond-dusted-arms man pulling you into the truck. When you say Trevor you mean you are the hunted, a hurt he can’t refuse because that’s something, baby. That’s real.

* * *

And you wanted to be real, to be swallowed by what drowns you only to surface, brimming at the mouth. Which is kissing.

* * *

Which is nothing

* * *

if you forget.

* * *

His tongue in your throat, Trevor speaks for you. He speaks and you darken, a flashlight going out in his hands so he knocks you in the head to keep the bright on. He turns you this way and that to find his path through the dark woods.

* * *

The dark words—

* * *

which have limits, like bodies. Like the calf

* * *

waiting in its coffin-house. No window—but a slot for oxygen. Pink nose pressed to the autumn night, inhaling. The bleached stench of cut grass, the tar and gravel road, coarse sweetness of leaves in a bonfire, the minutes, the distance, the earthly manure of his mother a field away.

* * *

Clover. Sassafras. Douglas fir. Scottish myrtle.

* * *

The boy. The motor oil. The body, it fills up. And your thirst overflows what holds it. And your ruin, you thought it would nourish him. That he would feast on it and grow into a beast you could hide in.

* * *

But every box will be opened in time, in language. The line broken,

* * *

like Trevor, who stared too long into your face, saying, Where am I? Where am I?

* * *

Because by then there was blood in your mouth.

* * *

By then the truck was totaled into a dusked oak, smoke from the hood. Trevor, vodka-breathed and skull-thin, said, It feels good. Said, Don’t go nowhere

* * *

as the sun slid into the trees. Don’t this feel good? as the windows reddened like someone seeing through shut eyes.

* * *

Trevor who texted you after two months of silence—

* * *

writing please instead of plz.

* * *

Trevor who was running from home, his crazy old man. Who was getting the fuck out. Soaked Levi’s. Who ran away to the park because where else when you’re sixteen.

* * *

Who you found in the rain, under the metal slide shaped like a hippopotamus. Whose icy boots you took off and covered, one by one, each dirt-cold toe, with your mouth. The way your mother used to do when you were small and shivering.

* * *

Because he was shivering. Your Trevor. Your all-American beef but no veal. Your John Deere. Jade vein in his jaw: stilled lightning you trace with your teeth.

* * *

Because he tasted like the river and maybe you were one wing away from sinking.

* * *

Because the calf waits in its cage so calmly

* * *

to be veal.

* * *

Because you remembered

* * *

and memory is a second chance.

* * *

Both of you lying beneath the slide: two commas with no words, at last, to keep you apart.

* * *

You who crawled from the wreck of summer like sons leaving their mothers’ bodies.

* * *