One of My Thin Friends and Other Poems

Lucas Crawford is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick. Lucas is the author of Sideshow Concessions (poetry, Invisible Press 2015) and Transgender Architectonics (monograph, Routledge 2016). Lucas is from rural Nova Scotia.

One of My Thin Friends
You don’t know embarrassment until somebody has tried to fuck you in one of your fat folds, and of course I mean embarrassment for the other party and not myself. I felt bad for that person, but only because we were on camera. Can you imagine being documented for life as someone who couldn’t find the cunt of a morbid o-beast? Wouldn’t you just DIE? Wouldn’t you just curl up under a fat comforter with a fat teddy bear and watch some fat porn in order to study up and to shame-masturbate while you cry over your thin-minded folly? As for the person who truly did lose their dignity thus, I believe the half-rotten zucchinis helped their case somewhat. Yes, they could blame it on the produce: hey, YOU try getting it in the right place when the fucking implement you are using in that particular moment is neither sentient nor firm! Indeed, I think much of the debacle can be blamed on agriculture, like many bad fucks or even medium-quality fucks. The frat boys don’t call it getting corn-holed for nothing. It’s because corn is a fucking disgusting food. Oh, my professor friend teaches some dumb article about frat boys—how they tell jokes about how to find fat women’s vaginas. The joke has something to do with coating them in flour, or breading them—something that reminded me of fried chicken, anyhow. All I took from it is that guys secretly love fucking fat people, but only in secret. Like, I had a skinny roommate who said his favourite dinner was a tie between coquilles St. Jacques and a deconstructed Steak Oscar with rapeseed-oil aioli even though I once walked in on him at night because I thought he was having a nightmare but he was just tummy-down on his bed gnashing his face into a bag of Cheetos and grunting. Now, that metaphor doesn’t quite work, so don’t quote me, because it implies that fat people are of lower nutritional value or whatever the sex equivalent of that would be. That is untrue. Some of us are so highly nutritious that we fuck and eat zucchinis, you know. Or was it a cucumber? What I wouldn’t do for some tzatziki

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and grilled meats right now. There was no meat at the party where the fold-fucking faux pas occurred, only very small oranges and a bottle of maple syrup that was eventually poured atop someone from England, as per her request. Nobody asked if she was a crepe or a crumpet. But as for my thin friend, my fat-fucking strumpet, well, I loved that person so. We remain the best of buddies. But I’ll never ask that friend over for crudités. That would just be cruel.

Take my off-beat heart to the clock shop; Throw ‘em all off for years. Tenderize my loins; shellac my chops; Donate my funhouse mirrors to my queers.
Feed my yeast to brew your beers (At least something is still alive). Rub my grease on a few good steers; Remember rosemary, thyme, and chive.

Please Don’t Bury Me Down in that Cold Cold Ground
No, I'd rather have ‘em cut me up and pass me all around -John Prine
Use my tripe for dental floss; Transgender women can have my tits. Braise my ribs in honey-garlic sauce; Burn my slick pits, zits, and clit.
Use my temper to dispense with folks Who’ve always got stuck in your craw. Daddy-dutch, don’t you ditch my yolks – The finest hollandaise you ever saw
Duck duck goose, get my liver to Quebec; Chefs, it’s almost foie gras. Tartar my tongue; make a broth with my neck; Then, baby, choke me down raw.

Grind my milk-bones for Titus Andronicus pie. Serve with crumpets and a spot of pee. Tan and treat my thick-skin hide; Quill my blood to write your new treaty.
Play your soundtrack on my vertebrate xylophone (To hell with cell-phone style). Ignite my gas before a zealot’s home; Extinguish it with my pool of black bile.
My feet were made for more than walking; Don’t waste the years I spent on that gut. Repurpose my chins as makeshift caulking To seal this casket shut.
But, please don’t bury me Down in that cold cold ground. I’d rather have ‘em cut me up And pass me all around.
Airplane Lavatory Algebra

Use my calluses to sand down your edges; Use my butt to make some soap. If you’re hungry for change, then dredge, Batter, fry, and eat my cunt for hope.
Puree my asshole into wieners; You know people love that shit. When the bread’s broken, be catholic keeners And consecrate a whole vat of my spit.
Salvage my piercings and store in a Ziploc bag; Give them away to someone unsuspecting for free. Wring out my favourite shorts for my guerrilla rag And institute a bloody archive of mouldy me.

If X = My Ass and My Ass is 100 feet behind First Class, then let Y be the compression required to have X in the airplane lavatory – I am the reluctant engineer of the Mile Wide club.
If V = the volume of the airplane lavatory and C = the circumference of my thighs, then let B be the rotational axis around which I must pivot to P(ee). Like Superman, this booth transforms me – into the lead contortionist of the Cirque de So-Gay.
If my buzzcut seatmate’s hair = A2

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it remains unfair, this space between our chairs, where the armrest is owned by the acute-angled elbow he digs into me while my flabby forearm hovers (rather nonaerodynamically). My god, dude, would touching elbows be like buttfucking me? (Am I the first-ever fat flight attendant of Flight AC 693?)
If H = the height of the lady attendant’s bangs
then P = her hunger pangs this year.
If my queer chest, uni-boobed, may be called Q3 then my bad mood will be visited upon all the rubes who own the airplane seatbelt-making factory. They need to think bigger. Because, at this height, I can’t summon Houdini’s powers to extend the length of this bruising constraint.
Inner monologue: don’t worry, you’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, you’ll be fine— The PA: return to your seats, as the captain has switched on the Fasten Seatbelt sign. Inner monologue: you’re still fine, you’re still fine— Seatmate: the armrest is mine, it’s mine, it’s mine… It’s mine!
F = my fear that in the unlikely event of an emergency landing over water the others will grab me to float. I’ll kick them off with aqua-fit quads; let the rich drown with their lead-rod lean bods. Unlike the airlines, my policy is no-fuss: Noah saved pairs and I’ll save 2XLs and plus.
I’m flying to a city where Fat ≥ just one. It has a street of strip clubs flanked by Addition Elles, where XXX meets XXXL.
Hell, I’m a regular Fat Elvis entering my Graceland bananas in pockets peanut butter in hand.

Urologist
Your head is an old Body Shop My body is an old head shop
Your Satsuma sneeze makes me gag each time. I’m weed-weak in the kneeling pulse of my fag-niche prime
The plywood of your skull leaks Oceania oil, but you never moved with a current
We were: ripened patchouli sweaters sopping up spilt swill – white musk
you straightened out like corn you mistook me for your husk
but I’m in cyan silk and will not attend your crop.
Your head is a boarded-up Body Shop My body is not quite an old head shop
Just one year had me cabbing to the clinic at West 4th and Burrard
trying to roll one up with an onion-leaf page torn from my unabridged works of the Bard
But there were other dank years of stolen phones and unlucky coins That I wouldn’t scrub with strawberry soap for new bones or new joints.
Did you ever have a bilingual gay lap dance to a Cranberries ballad? Break your finger at a party
in a condemned house filled with Clementines? Do you know how to vanish? Why Montreal is a verb?
Are you still perturbed if a friend comes up queer?
Oh, MD. You never could see me.
In your sterile soap dystopia of white things

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I’d slow-gait evaporate – smoke rings, fat sweat
Soon I may get un-scandalous surgery, then take a long rest. I’ll host no more neighbours for the organs you play best.
On your bony back I heard a primate hiss behind your unhung earlobe:
You shall not be moved; tea tree oil sacrament You shall not be moved; body butter for all selfflagellants
My nostrils remember your priss-stink bliss. But “my” body, this body, now takes and
gives and takes the piss out of you and your rat-run Body Shop mind.
Don’t look for my chopped body. There’d be “nothing to be gained.”
You stay up late, king. Me, I’ll be in Maine.
“One of My Thin Friends,” “Please Don’t Bury Me,” and “Airplane Lavatory Algebra” are from Sideshow Concessions by Lucas Crawford, published by Invisible Publishing (2015). Republished by permission of Invisible Publishing and the author.

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