Elegy for The Hulk
Nicasio Reed
I cried once in a therapy session.
We were talking about money and it just
came on.
Two tears, gunfire-fast.
And at the heat of them on me I was filled with a great, sapping rage
at the sight of this weeping, pitiful creature.
This small person with her needs and her desires.
I set my jaw and drove my fingertips into my knees. I became
animal-mute. Desolate. A blunt power in my teeth.
The shrink said, “I can see you’re angry.
Why are you angry?” She offered me a handkerchief.
I could have torn her bones from her body in that moment.
I could have rent the flesh from her and painted
my skin in her blood I could have taken her eyes that had seen
me and burst them in my fists like ripe tomatoes taken her
plump tongue in my jaws and shredded it to chuck.
When I see you: bestial and stripped,
a graceless, bovine savage. When you assail
the bone-weak cities and the flesh-soft armies
with your fists aching to bleed. When your knuckles
fail to abrade though you yearn and you yearn.
I am there, on the low brown couch with tears
on my face and a handkerchief extended towards me.
Nicasio Andrés Reed is a Filipino-American writer and poet whose work has appeared in Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, Liminality,