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THE BELLWETHER REVIEW
Literary and Arts Journal
Kids
Shane Allison
In my dream we are two best friends
lying on our bellies reading comic books
strewn across your bedroom floor.
The sugar rush from the wad of Big League gum
we’re chewing is assurance that we’ll be up all night reading
The Fantastic Four, Captain America, and Superman
back when they were seventy-five cents.
We hang loose at your parent’s house
because my mother is afraid we’ll break something,
that we’ll track in dirt from playing outside.
She offers us Cheetos and Capri Suns to stay away.
Our friendship is impenetrable like a GI Joe tank.
Nothing can break us after the pinky swears
and blood oaths we take using the pocket knife
stolen from my dad’s glove box.
We go around collecting worms in jelly jars,
burning ants under a magnifying glass.
When the black neighborhood kids ask,
Why are you always hanging out with that white boy?
I tell them to shut up and hold them in headlocks
until they say sorry.
I am the biggest kid in school
like The Thing from The Fantastic Four.
Mother would never let him in the house.
I had this dream where we were kids with superpowers,
who could fly over buildings,
shoot red beams out of our eyes
and bend crowbars like licorice ropes.
I wish I had grown up with you
in Tallahassee or Kettering, Ohio.
I could have used a friend like you.
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Author Bio
Shane Allison was bit by the writing bug at the age of fourteen. He spent a majority of his high school life shying away in the library behind desk cubicles writing bad love poems about boys he had crushes on. He has since gone on to publish many chapbooks of poetry—Black Fag, Ceiling of Mirrors, Cock and Balls, I Want to Fuck a Redneck, Remembered Men and Live Nude Guys—as well as four full-length poetry collections: I Remember (Future Tense Books), Slut Machine (Rebel Satori Press), Sweet Sweat (Hysterical Books), and, most recently, I Want to Eat Chinese Food Off Your Ass (Dumpster Fire Press). He has edited twenty-five anthologies of gay erotica and has written two novels, You’re the One I Want and Harm Done (Simon and Schuster Publishing). Allison’s collage work has graced the pages of Shampoo, Unlikely Stories, Pnpplzine.com, Palavar Arts Magazine, The Southeast Review, South Broadway Review, Postscript Magazine, and a plethora of others. Allison is at work on a new novel and is always at work making a collage here and there.