Butt Stuff Flower Bush

In the university gardens
full of “native and nonnative” 
trees I come across a leafless bush
with twigs surrounding its branchy 
base, and there, the plaque painted 
over, in pencil but somehow 
formal, its new given name,
“Butt Stuff Flower Bush,”
and I think of the long history
of butt stuff and bushes, of husbands 
and sons who experience salacious 
snippets of freedom in the arms
and bushes of other men,
in butterfly gardens, in botanical 
forests, by rivers and on mountains, 
in camping tents. Fingers and tongues 
and dicks touching butts, most 
glorious gateway to a man’s heart.
Was ass-to-ass invented in my parents’ 
time? In my grandparents’ time?
The insatiable sight of two bouncy 
bubbles, jiggling, touching, more 
beautiful, always, together? I want 
to have more sex outside. I want 
to hear birds and cicadas and
owls hoot while a man with a thick 
mustache spreads both cheeks 
with hairy knuckles, goes in to find 
his dinner. But we don’t live
in a very liberated society like that.
You have to find yourself somewhere 
quite isolated, or somewhere openly 
gay, populated, which right now
I have neither of. All I have is 
Butt Stuff Flower Bush, my first 
invitation of late, saying Come 
here, little bottom, come arch 
under my sprouted arms, come 
sniff my berried ends, remember 
I’m still blooming

Read more from Issue 20.1.