From Rattle (Winter 2009, #32). Visit Rattle for an audio version of the poem:

We were sixth-graders at middle school camp,
conscripts in an old regime of the masculine,

privates third-class,
dreading the common shower,

the inevitable comparisons—
my own genital region like an unplanted field

far from a forest.
We didn’t much care for our unit,

especially the bigger boys, lords of the rise
they got out of you,

bullies snapping their … Read More