[POETRY]

[10/15/25]

Cigarette Ends Behind the Sofa

Two Poems by Vic Brooks

What are your pronouns?

A chest. A flip phone I turn flat a ratta-tat and down below a Frankenstein’s aperture a chauvinistic streak of fools blood pooling into true seamen floating without thinking becoming toxic easily without a needle she is a needle instead be a change a cut across the chest 10K it’ll be raised through chance and goodwill if I were a pretty boy and dance without clothes and a sense of urgency that if I don’t I will become a wooden pew. God bless this chest. Sex feels wrong I’m not the one assigned I think the binding is too tight I can’t breathe I don’t want joy I want to be who I am I want to know if they offer a hip-flesh-slice and spice for my life afterwards where I am who I am and will boys still fancy me and what about the girls. Will I smell different a barbeque of meat cooked and succulent and no longer floral but dusty like a jacket made of hide I’m stitched together feather light now my kids hit me with mum like a balloon and I don’t mind. This question means nothing means everything and sometimes I just want to lift my chin in that masculine way with earrings and a skin fade and that be the answer everyone needs and my gender cuts apart in the shadow of the absence of she/her/they/them/he/him. You get me?

My gender is cowboy

When I was 18 I used to mince
through the trailer park
in hotpants and cowboy boots.
I had a hat too with a tooth pendant around
the crown which I would cut

in the summer reading Nabokov
while reclining on the steps.
Sticky boredom like molasses
between my toes and teeth—
look past the nymphet and see a poor boy

wearing cheap lace underwear.
Under it a spectre of binding to come
like cigarette ends behind the sofa.
Checked shirt not tied at the hip
while I waited for a hatch line

across the cheap eggs filling sandwiches
eaten while looking into the eyes of carpet mushrooms
and breathing in a thousand shifting
spore-genders smelling like mildewed clothes.

breathe out.

Maybe my mince was my swagger?

Vic is a duplicitous queer gender-shifter poet and novelist living in London, and parent to an octopod (2-year-old identical twins). Their first novel, Silicone God, was published by MOIST Books (UK) and House of Vlad (US). Their essays, short fiction, and poetry have been published in Archer, t’ART, W0rms, SAND, Discount Guillotine, Tears in the Fence, and elsewhere.