Sex, Kink, and the Erotic: Three Poems by Brian Leung

Limited Engagement, 1997

Six Lines Without Intercourse 

Fall—five o’clock shadow blues smoky
            breath and stubbled fields 

            Hawks watch beside denim ponds where butterflies outnumber leaves 

You hum James Baldwin and I wish a 
                               caress from his songs

The Sausage Links and Chicken Hung  

after Matthew Dickman  

[.] You made the rules— 

Each time I utter “fuck” you think of the most disgusting acts, this disgusting gay life since I was  18 in a theater program when I fucked Jax during my run as Edmund Pevensie in the musical  version of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, since the days when I had no-other-option  fucks in the back seat of my first car, fucks in the front seat too, fucks on the slick hood of that  very accommodating canary yellow 1978 Toyota Corolla, mmm, A Chinese-American fucker  fucking in the closed-on-Sundays subway station beneath the Twin Towers a decade before they  fell [so now I suppose you’ll blame me for that], fucking against a fogged pillar under the  Transamerica pyramid in San Francisco, fucking in the waxy red hallway of a Manhattan club in  the Meatpacking district before it gentrified—Fuck the High Line—Fucking in a treehouse  nineteen years after I built it in elementary school with my neighbor, Susan, whom I never  fucked. Minor porn stars, fucking boyfriends, fucking in twos and threes and too dark to count.  Fucking in a wheelbarrow, and let me tell you it’s true that except for the white chickens— so much depends  

upon  

a red wheel  

barrow  

glazed with— 

Fucking on the granite patio where my naked thigh smashed a lover’s eyeglasses, fucking despite  AIDS,  

One fuck  

Two fuck  

Red fuck  

Blue fuck  

Fucking until I got a little bit older and things died down, fucks dwindling, fucks sighing, fucks  wheezing, fuck, fuck, fuck— 

And then invention, and then the internet, and then fuck ramping, and then fuck typing, and then  fucks everywhere, and then second life, and then all aboard— 

But now a party— And so I meet him, and now I love him, and so I ask him, and now it’s yes,  and so we marry, and so you win. You win. I am converted. But no. But no. It’s all disgusting.  We’re disgusting. I say you won. You won. What more do you want you want? I’ll be  disgusting with the same man for the rest of my life— 

An incantation. Repeat after me— 

            Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Like cluck, cluck, cluck.  

Now we’ve fucked—No harm came to you—I know you’re curious how one fucks in a  wheelbarrow—Call me for advice, but don’t ask about adding the white chickens—That’s  disgusting [.] 

About Brian Leung

Brian Leung, author of Ivy vs. Dogg: With a Cast of Thousands, Lost Men, and Take Me Home. Among other honors, he is a past recipient of the Lambda Literary Outstanding Mid-Career Prize. Brian’s fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry  appear in numerous magazines and journals.  He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Purdue University. His forthcoming novel, What a Mother Won’t Do (C&R Press) will be released in fall 2021.