By J Brooke
My boyfriend used to complain I shed
all over his sweaters. Miles of my hair
brown strands slough without consent
adhering to him, and clinging fast as I
could not. The sinews of my love held
tight not to him and not to his beloved
two-ply Brooks Brothers’ crew necks I
would steal and sleep within (lying not
entirely when claiming the softness so
elicited dreams I could not resist), only
omitting what became of my boyfriend
in my dreams. Not absent but present,
embodied by me, his nighttime avatar
floating through the world as I wished
to— hands casual in khaki pockets my
cologne, loafers, walk, talk, watch, just
the way I was born to embody, me just
the way I was born… like my boyfriend
only better. He would wrap scotch tape
around his hand, a tight concentric coil
of stickiness he engaged methodically
from left to right, patting himself top to
bottom, pressing homemade lint brush
to perform this preposterous display—
self-flagellation— a desperate pledge
of allegiance unable to locate the heart.
I told my boyfriend I loved him only when
he told me first. I did love witnessing him
treat my loosened locks like alien detritus,
like evidence, as if he were in on the secret.
We love how these two images wend us through the poem: the soughed hair clinging to a boyfriend’s sweater, and the avatar offered by the sweater itself. Brooke moves us across this landscape of remnant presences, fluent dreaming, and secrets the self builds a world for: what is cast off, and what is taken on; what has always been true, what needed to be dreamed into existence.
We love the way the speaker crafts the physical reality “just / the way I was born to embody, me just / the way I was born… like my boyfriend /only better.” Notice the play between the enjambed and resolved lines. How the lines dance between four and five stresses, and make use of the tight, consistent column of couplets to balance tension and patience on the page.
And we love this ending so: “I did love witnessing him / treat my loosened locks like alien detritus, / like evidence, as if he were in on the secret.” And then there is the tightness of the line, the wry hilarity that is this poem’s tonal undercarriage, and that distant affection paid to the subject of the boyfriend.
Claiming the sweater, and thereby wearing the hide of this boyfriend so as to “perpetuate” the “heteronormative” partnership, the speaker observes the relationship in retrospect as one might animals in a simulated habitat. Brooke lavishes exquisite attention on the mundane, on the oddly intimate act of the boyfriend wrapping his hand with scotch tape, a sort of hand-crafted lint roller, to lift the speaker’s hair strands off of his body.