ballad of tribades / song of sodomites
by Hazelle Lerum
October 2020
for Evelyn
you’re my son tonight—
i’ve freshly shorn your hair.
the buzzer plods over your skull
like a tractor baling wet straw
now we’re disco-dancing, we’re androgynes;
sex and drugs, 2/3rds the holy trinity
handsome cherubs garbed in punch-sweet sweat.
music crawls beneath the floorboards
it punches up through the seams
like mad seeds, germinating,
the sepals opening to drip sap
like the honey you taste after waking up safe
in a bed still wet
with strange dreams.
Hazelle Lerum is a Portland-born writer and graduate from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her work has been published in ANGLES and The Mochila Review, and is forthcoming in plain china and REALITY BEACH. She is the two-time winner of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s McKinney Writing Contest in Poetry, and her poems have been featured on the Mochila Chat podcast.