Joshua Merchant

The First Summer

this is my brain on sunlight.
young enough to not know
what a revenge body is
and to not care. chocolate
and slim, ready to melt
in somebody’s son’s hands.
their is a daisy chain of nineteen
year olds like me and half of them
been outside since middle school.
got their heart broke in highschool.
became the element which makes
the ocean blue by the time they left
the house. I wanted to be where the
people were. wanted to see the many
ways I could make a man bejewel
himself with what my body could
leave behind without dying. us twinks
are always trying to leave behind
something in this world without dying.

every sunrise begins with an agreement.
I say I’d like to smile in your lap for
the next few hours. he says what I
imagine they all say, koo. see you soon.
when he rises through the hollow of my
lungs I wait like a child inhaling helium,
giggling for his approval. everything
is exactly how I dreamt: man becomes
steal. boy attempts to melt flesh into
mercury. the chemistry changes when
he flips me on my stomach and turns
my backside into an equator with his tongue.
I stopped feeling like the star he revolved
around when he surprised me with a drill.
I was now of earth. him, a man in search
of something he was never meant to find,
I, the plot of land becoming something
more flammable. maybe he was right
when he told me what I wanted. good
bottoms are trained. stars burn. when
a Black child is desperate for joy while
running from a pain that can leave the
mouth muted and the eyes eclipsed
the body cries instead. when he was
finished, glistening in what I left behind
I crawled back to his lap, once a ball
of fire he gassed up, now a dessert,
with the audacity of thirst.

Joshua Merchant (THEY/THEM/THEIRS) is a Black Queer native of East Oakland exploring what it means to love as an intersectional being. A lot of what they’ve been exploring as of late has been in the realm of what it means to be a “Delectable Negro” in a world with an insatiable appetite for Blackness and the many ways we show up spiritually, mentally, and physically. They address the countless exaggerations of white fantasy as a means of humanizing the Black Queer experience through a lens only someone who grew up ashy and yet a teardrop slicker than the average lesson any Corner-Store-Prophet could provide. They've had the honor to witness their work being held and understood in literary journals such as 580Split, Soup Can Magazine, Snow Flake Magazine, Corporeal, Obsidian Literature & Arts In The African Diaspora, Verum Literary Press, Ice Floe Press, Hotazel Review, MORIA and elsewhere. They have also received the 2023 San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award for poetry and was nominated for the 2023 Best of the Net Poetry Award by Spare Parts Lit. Their forthcoming book is scheduled to be released in 2025-2026 by Game Over Books.