Issue 22 - 1992

Coe Review • Issue 22
For James
Alexa Fenske
a letter from New York tells us
you are unemployed. tired of serving
bagels to suits so you up and leave
for research announce that you
want to hang out street corners and alleys
to see old men purchasing young boys
with dimes and maybe you too
can earn some keep. or when it is warmer
to live with the homeless for research, more
stories of the city of course your writing
flourishes with the poor and I wonder how to
get experience of my own. and then
remember at seventeen being handcuffed
sodomized on a sunny day before the movie
in the living room his roommate laughs another
one down while my friend gasps she was the one
who wanted to meet older men now
this. we feel we will be living here forever
even though at night our mothers call
we return home guilty and glad to still be
someone’s child.
only to find a week later he leaves
not me though for a wife named Carrie who
is older like him and probably likes it,
you know, that word that my father would
cry over if he knew someone did it to me,
baby girls are so sweet and our fathers
kiss us thinking no one would ever and then.
six months later she tells her own father
he has left with the car they just bought
closed the account took all her money
and left her alone to make payments on a house
he wanted. “he fucked me up the ass,” she
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