In Memory of Zachary Dutro-Boggess, 2008-2012
I. Kyrie
Don’t look away. Don’t miss
What God left here for you to see. Just this:
This mess of sticks and blood and rags
That spews slurping tidal gags
When the soul has rushed out but the body lingers
In cracking lungs and curling fingers.
Here in the middle of the homeless shelter
This fragile puppet, broken toy
Was a boy.
Now empty as a beachball
With the air crushed out.
If you look away
Your eyes will be useless glass.
Your brain already dead,
Your heart
Dried and hard as brick.
And this mess of sticks and blood
Will be nothing more than a wet doll
Left on the floor of an empty house.
No, for your own sake,
Don’t look away.
II. Agnus Dei
This bloodied toy
Was a small boy
Named Zach,
Kicked by mom’s boyfriend,
Beaten by his mother
Until dead,
Because, she said,
Or rather texted,
Because he looked so queer.
“He walks like them,
He talks like them,”
She tweeted. “Ugh.”
That was a four-year-old’s
Sentence of death.
Of course she was right.
A mother knows these things.
You were a fairy-child,
Who bounced and flounced,
Twirled like a girl,
Lisped limp-wristed through the tortured days
Before your mother
Couldn’t bear the shame
And all that’s left is your name.
You died of shame spit-shined and polished, Zach.
Not your shame. None was yours.
All hers.
In shame she chose a name
That was already an attack:
Zach. ZACH. ZACH. ZACH!
Oh, Zach.
Beyond the family nest,
You were the collateral cost
In the war on queers,
Part of the time-honored
Slo-mo
Homo
Holocaust.
III. Credo
Zach, I wish I had my colleague’s power
To write you into eternal life,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
But in sooth,
Poetry is piss-poor life support.
Just check the report
That Shakespeare filed.
His beautiful friend
Still met his end
And all that lovely love and lust
Crumbled into dust
As we all must.
But words are all I have
To call you back.
Whatever magic lives in your name
Cannot relight a flame
Gone cold.
No matter how long I call for Zach,
Zach, Zach, Zach, Zach
How I long to call you back,
I lack the power.
No one can call you back.
IV. Gloria
We’ll never know what’s been lost.
A Tchaikovsky, Nijinsky or DaVinci,
Noël Coward, E.M. Forster or Cole Porter,
A wartime hero like Alan Turing,
Acclaimed by queen and nation
Then rewarded with chemical castration.
Alexander the Macedonian
Leader of armies, bedder of men,
Chief among them Hephaestion.
Hadrian and his Antinous,
Enkidu and Gilgamesh,
Achilles and Patroclus.
All loves of epic, Homeric immensity.
Ned Rorem, Walt Whitman,
Herman Melville,
Auden, Cheever, Baldwin, Bernstein,
Benjamin Britten,
Tennessee Williams,
Dag Hammarskjold,
Marlowe, Il Sodomo,
Michelangelo,
Frederico García Lorca,
At least four lionhearts of England,
Including Queen James of Bible fame.
Sondheim, Jean Genet,
Oscar Wilde,
Thornton Wilder,
Billy even Wilder
Harvey Milk and Larry Kramer.
Isherwood, Bachardy,
RuPaul, Capote and Byzantine Cavafy.
Not to mention William Shakespeare,
Who crackles electric queer in my ear.
The list of secret names is much longer –
I could have named them
If the closet had not claimed them.
Maybe you would have survived –
Thrived –
Among the schoolyard bullies and their taunts
To fly high in history
At the side of Sally Ride
To become our first sissy astronaut.
Proving one mother’s zero
Is another man’s hero.
Or would you be
Just another me?
Heart-scarred
With wounds so hard
To heal
It takes three score years and ten
To learn to love again.
In my dictionary of queer
Every word rhymed with fear.
V. Sanctus
And yet,
When it comes to love,
God has the patience of a Job,
For those not too proud to learn.
So while I indulged my self-inflicted crimes,
Afflictions and addictions,
God presented me the gift of time.
The point is this:
Our other brothers and our sisters,
In all times, all places,
Have already earned their seats,
Your seat, my seat,
At the grown-ups’ feast.
All we need do now,
The least we can to honor you
And all our martyred kindred,
Is take a seat and eat.
But what shall we do with your mother?
The love you feel for her is real,
Along with the bewilderment and fear.
Can we forgive her
For your sake?
That’s a Himalayan leap.
We can start with a smaller step
And remember she did not act alone.
VI. Dies Irae
It takes a village to kill a little boy.
A mother. A boyfriend.
Grandparents with the skill and age
To distill, instill, install the rage.
An extended family that hates itself.
Aunts and uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces
To forge their hatred into jagged shrapnel
Tooled to shred the soul.
Among them, they also kill who only look away.
Plus thousands of onward marching preachers,
Plus whole schoolyards of little kids
The front-line ranks of scornful screechers
Recruited and stationed to purify the nation
To scourge the vermin
From among the “pure”.
They also kill who only clap and cheer.
A phalanx of teachers just to nod with pride.
They also kill who only turn aside.
A campaign of shame
Requires boots on ground
Once the target’s found
To break the ribs,
Rupture the spleen
Break apart
And take apart the heart.
Italian leather is the best.
Polished by toiling male virgins
With holy-moly oils,
To a greasy shine.
Italian leather has survived the test
Of time – days, weeks, centuries, hours –
With proven magic powers:
The shit and tears and blood of children
All wash off.
No trace remains,
No tell-tale stains.
The evidence of a thousand years
Is empirical.
It’s a god damned miracle!
Who owns the greater blame?
The heart that welcomes murder in?
Or the one who preaches sin?
Do not grieve for your mother.
She is in a double prison
Stays within her cell
Imprisoned in her self
A single cell,
A double hell
To which she herself holds the key
Held tight within her heart.
She will be free
The moment she discovers it
And finds her love for you again.
Only she can turn the key
And get free.
VII. Libera Me
Meanwhile, the immortal Other always reappears,
Every when and every here.
An endless army of infant queers,
Born into every time and age,
Some like Zach born to grief
And the briefest pirouette across the stage.
We will always reappear.
We’re the miracle
Spiraling unexplained
Out of the DNA:
The red tulip in the field of white
Neither wrong nor right
But equally precious in God’s sight.
It takes a village to commemorate
Such a child,
To light the birthday candle
And recite a death-day prayer.
To not look away in horror
From the broken puppet
On the bloody floor.
It takes a village
To honor this exactly Zach
And all his broken brethren
To pray for all their mothers and their fathers.
And the teachers and the preachers
Who see evil everywhere except at home,
In every heart except their own.
If I could, I’d sing you back,
Back to a loving home,
Sweet Zach, broken Zach.
And if I cannot sing you back to love,
I can at least remember you,
And in so doing
Invite the world that declared you wrong
To join me in a thanksgiving song.
You nudged us all forward
One eighth of one quarter
Of a fraction of an inch.
Take pride, infant warrior,
Fallen hero.
That’s all any of us can do.
VIII. In Paradisum
We’re here to sing you to a better sleep
Enveloped in our arms.
Words were the first weapons honed to kill you,
Words can be used to right each wrong
Words can weave a spell
To welcome you if you come back,
And if not you, then greet
The next sweet fairy Zach.
Safe at last in the eternal family
Where it’s not too late
To forgive all hate
With our God who loves us all
Gay and straight
Lesbian, queer, transgendered
The murderers and their murdered,
Safely harbored, recalled,
Each intermingling with each
In a separate, universal peace
As vast as thought and time.
Cradled in remembrance here,
Safe forever from all harms
Cradled here and in God’s arms.
Jon Bell 