Material History of the Closet [Soft Serve Ice Cream]

A photo: me, a high school freshman, blue with joy for making the team, standing flagstill in a parking lot, crumpled eating a soft serve ice cream cone out of a baseball mitt. My mom behind the camera with her hair blown over her face like grass stains. Me in the photo drinking boy as it melts down the cone pools in the mitt, tongue carving the leather for boy vanilla, boy sweet on the teeth like air. Me in the photo folded small by the sunset, me a shadow with short sleeves. The cone dropping onto the asphalt, its noiseless shatter, the white boxed lines of the lot like a coloring book. And my mother gently asked for a replacement which, yes, twist flavor this time, fresh and spiraled, a tongue searching for a word that means My body was made home for everyone other than me. A word more like an emptying, a window left open overnight. Morning breathing the curtains into letters. The cool weight of the light with the dust in the shape of the air.

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Tyler Raso (they/them) is a poet, essayist, and multimedia artist with work in DIAGRAM, Black Warrior Review, Salt Hill Journal, The Journal, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere. They currently write, study, and teach in Bloomington, IN, tweeting at @spaghettiutopia.