by David Hanlon
after Lana Del Rey’s “Ocean Blvd”
Sexuality isn’t a steamroller—
not some sudden crush of steel.
It’s fuchsia petals, unfurling
like breath through trembling ribs.
That’s why straight boys tear it—swift as a flash,
lightning cleaving the sky of selfhood,
clawing out my twitching root
with basalt fists.
Uprooted and exposed, I curl inward—
a vole beneath cracked earth,
my whole body a flinch.
Darkness cinches tight at both ends.
The faint echo of my once-bloom
spirals these tunnel walls.
My eyes, now cellars hollowed by grief,
I pour it out
into the fissure of my mind.
I toil for a decade
to survive the rubble.
With blistered palms,
I hammer escape into stone—
a wide channel
to drain their viscous oil—
Then, slowly, I teach myself to drive—
on the sweet scent of petunias.
I line the walls with glass shards—
piecing memory into mosaic:
the jagged, the tender,
cutting until I shine again—
until sight regrows,
persistent as wild grass.
And when I’m ready,
I unscrew the rusted cap
of this vault narrowing around me—
let in the muted piano,
her voice—a wingbeat encompassing—
spills across the stone,
like dam water released,
remembering to flow.
In these new waters, I kneel.
I gather shoots from shadows—
and graft them
into the loam of queerness.
Its wind is cradling now—
a soft insistence pulling me toward breath.
I crawl, then rise—
emerging from the tunnel’s mouth,
each petal swirling into bloom,
returning to the garden
I once buried
just to stay alive.
David Hanlon is a poet based in Cardiff, Wales. His work appears in numerous magazines and journals, including Rust & Moth, Anthropocene, and trampset. His latest collection, Dawn’s Incision, was published by Icefloe Press.
Beautiful! Our sexuality presented as something to be created, nurtured, celebrated.