Wyoming is Bleeding
By Joseph Lezza
In 1970, Hélène Cixous wrote Tomb(e), about the love of a man. In 2000, Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre Project wrote The Laramie Project, about the death of a man. The following piece draws from and is inspired by both.
As September dies and the world turns a burnt orange, he comes to me looking for warmth, the boy who whispers through screens, whose words light up the dark corners of my room, whose breath and body – until then – were unknowable. And I fly, innocent hellion, to a stranger’s doorstep. Lover-killer tugs me across the threshold and I follow. The familiar play begins, in which intimacy is a concept, to which there is always an audience, a watcher. HE is there, two or three steps away from us, buried waist-deep, long dead. Immemorial, therefore never dead, therefore always, actually: unavoidable.
It’s a little guy, about five-two, soakin’ wet, I betcha ninety-seven pounds tops.
A feather, a shroud; but the stairs cry out under the weight of HIM. And, I turn to chide: YOU. YOU are the first dead, the first to die
Move, move we are being expected
In the present a door appears. I open. The present opens. I rush in. I fall. There’s the present. No room for ceremony, the world flips on its side with quiet fanfare and lover-killer stands over me, still a hyphen, still the line on which my life hangs.
he starts grabbing my leg and grabbing my genitals.
…I beat him up pretty bad. Think I killed him.
But, as he unclasps, undresses, he un-hyphenates. And he is revealed. And I sink into the fabric under muscle and bone. It is this forbidden bed where we will undo each other and ourselves, which will break up the earth and mark the story. I hold him by the waist, my arm thrust round his waist throbbing too, his body the cross between the forces of life and the work of death and the body of confrontation. The transaction proves hollow time and again and I am at once full but not whole. I throw my cries into the vacuum loud as I might, but I have misunderstood volume entirely. So, I offer what’s left of my half-hearted penance between his lips. What his mouth knows my mouth knows. He put his death in my mouth. I sucked it and chewed it and swallowed it and ended it as it began.
The cold breeze stings the sweat on my arms as I slip away from his flaccid, dozing silhouette. But, as I skirt along the edge of moonlight to gather my effects, I will squat down, I will observe him, I will see his hair quiver in the wind
and that was a major key to me, noticing it was a human being – was his hair and I will taste iron, copper. Despite a lack of apparent wounds, a red sheet covered us.
The only place that he did not have any blood on him, on his face,
was what appeared to be where he had been crying down his face.
And now silence here; HIM among the silence. And, I cannot call out HIS name and I cannot stay. This is not a place where I can live, how can you live here…
Joseph Lezza (he/him) is a writer in New York, NY. Holding an MFA in creative writing from The University of Texas at El Paso, his work has been featured in The Pointed Circle, The Hopper, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Still: The Journal, Fearsome Critters, Rio Grande Review, Cleaning Up Glitter, and West Trade Review, with work forthcoming in The Canopy Review. When he’s not writing, he spends his time worrying about why he’s not writing. His website is www.josephlezza.com and you can find him on the socials @lezzdoothis.