The Most Beautiful Boy in the World 

After Björn Andrésen

You stand behind her, separated by a shimmering membrane and 

inches from her silhouette. She chain smokes with the shutters undone and 

you think, 

When I grow up, I’m going to save mom. 

What remains? A door,

a gaping 

hole. 

You are pinned and posed before every camera that will have you. 

You are rouged and stripped, 

you’re buttoned straight up the front and propped before a crowd, 

their outstretched hands clutching shears to steal ribbons of your famous hair.  

To snip open your green velvet and expose your dewey underbelly. Newborn colt. 

Red pill, red pill, red pill

in oily refrains of bars, now dressed and cleaned and spooned and 

passed from snapping mouth to mouth,

tender still, at half past fifteen. 

Soon, your skin buckles. Your hair groans, signs, 

and falls waist-length.

The camera follows the crushed-silk doll of you. 

You’re thirty. Your wife’s stomach expands, contracts,

bare-chested in her wedding dress, a child on each breast. 

See the world through the bottom of your bottle,

green, blue, 

rye brown, 

spilled over the taut bedsheet next to where 

your little boy lays, pale-skinned, 

motionless. 

You know now what you knew as a child: 

grief is a 

hole. 

Shall I paint you as an old man, 

standing on the edge of the white cliff, 

cradled in gravity?

Action, so 

you sail into the ground and 

the ground comes up to greet you. 

Cut, 

& you’re suspended, lowered safely, 

the ritual sacrifice saved, 

the cameras bowing, 

your body unharmed,

but I ask you:

do you wonder? Did your fingers ever reach and 

try to turn the knob?