When queer was odd
and gay was happy
and no vocabulary contained the word
homosexual . . .

Before my parents read to me
of Susie’s babies
and I learned that grown up men and women
did the same repulsive things
that hamsters did . . .

In a time when every boy
married a girl,
but that felt okay because
marriage really was just living together . . .

and I was too young to know
that my fascination with shirtless men
and bare-chested farmers
was anything more than fascination . . .

I had already discovered
the secret of human flight
and could make myself invisible.

I disarmed the world
by invisibly transporting
Russia’s and America’s atom bombs
to my factories of destruction,
because Mennonite—pacifist—boys
must do that first.

Only then did I secretly save
high-school basketball players
(in those revealing uniforms)
and the handsome neighbor
(who mowed the grass t-shirt off)
from evil captors.
And they were not the only ones.

You would be surprised how many villains
conspired to lock away hard-muscled men
in secret basement dungeons
under the buildings of Goessel, Kansas
—a town of just three hundred or so people.

After I rescued them—,
naked, cold, and lonely
—and nursed the wounds on their strong chests,
and on the exquisite skin of their arms and legs
and fine-looking faces,
they would come to live with me
in my not-so-Mennonite mansion
with many bedrooms
just outside of town.

There we lived together
in chaste contentment
in a time before I knew that
something more super was possible.