When I Tell You a Story about Gay Cowboys | Amy Wang

you should know that it is an autobiography. The slow spill of romance. My slow spill of romance. The way heart took flight from neck to spine over gapped hands and widowed peaks. Cowpoke, and barbed wire, the ghost of a frontier not yet established. Harmonica, and the overflow of breath into breathing.

I begin in Oregon, where mist ate midday and turned it into twilight. After comes Nevada, where every other hour was missing. Painted faces and planets spinning in neon. In winter, early frost came and took three fingers; one from my left hand and two from your right. From that point onwards, geography was landmine: maps take a man and cut him open. Like split fish. Like split lips. Like canoeing on riverbed and how doing so meant skin cradling open wound. A controlled burn, harnessed grief, yew trees, and branches bent till breaking. August, and loss spilled from my hands like lighter fluid. September, and we were chestnuts, brown under the sun. There, the sky cleaved the sea. Even the horizon was wild; it rose up, up, up to meet the clouds until Earth threshed into thawing peaks and clouds leashed in summer. 

Limelight, and campfire, spilling from circled wagons like dysentery. Like breath. Like a sigh against skin. The prairie was endless, where we were. So vast you could wedge it between bed frame and backboard and still have it slide snug into throat. The blooming of bodies was holy there. Is holy now. America likes its history spine-straight. Unbent, unbending. Undoing, undone. But between us there was only wildfire, and the taste of smoke like sunlight.

Amy Wang is a writer from California. Her work is published or forthcoming in Myrina Journal, Ogma, and Superfroot and has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. In her free time, you can find her reading fanfiction. You can find her on Twitter at @amyj_wang.