Danny Bultitude
as a child, I was known for eating the wax along with the cheese
‘cos it came in waterfalls of sweet kaddish wine
irradiated radiating on the ruby jellied tongues
sincerely asking how it felt to know that they fucked
more people than me despite being younger
could it be the headlocks and aggressive team games
he said he’d learnt in the IDF grinning, bulging
through his singlet with the subtlety of a saw blade
launched through any Palestinian schoolyard
perhaps the ancient, scholarly women avalanched
by bagel crumbs and talent only celebrated within
the slimmest columns of the monthly newsletter
that throb alive like veins visible through a pink blouse
or the Rabbi who sung and held my waist and
explained to me what furry fetishism was right before
my Bar Mitzvah because, by God she knew how
to ease an anxious teenager’s nerves better than weed
maybe the one-eyed man who taught me to barbecue
the non-binary person in homemade skirt and bangles
every pink-hatted poet and dark-shirted attorney
the countless converted in a converted townhouse
and they all sit in the sandpit of my upbringing
where I spent decades feeling that honeyed cut
forced into mind whenever rinsing a wine glass
with tap water, peeling wax away from the cheese
they watch intently in dresses and suits and starlight
holding memories for me good, bad, queer, callous
with hands that have lived long and made decisions
and smiling teeth I’ve come to recognise from afar.
irradiated radiating on the ruby jellied tongues
sincerely asking how it felt to know that they fucked
more people than me despite being younger
could it be the headlocks and aggressive team games
he said he’d learnt in the IDF grinning, bulging
through his singlet with the subtlety of a saw blade
launched through any Palestinian schoolyard
perhaps the ancient, scholarly women avalanched
by bagel crumbs and talent only celebrated within
the slimmest columns of the monthly newsletter
that throb alive like veins visible through a pink blouse
or the Rabbi who sung and held my waist and
explained to me what furry fetishism was right before
my Bar Mitzvah because, by God she knew how
to ease an anxious teenager’s nerves better than weed
maybe the one-eyed man who taught me to barbecue
the non-binary person in homemade skirt and bangles
every pink-hatted poet and dark-shirted attorney
the countless converted in a converted townhouse
and they all sit in the sandpit of my upbringing
where I spent decades feeling that honeyed cut
forced into mind whenever rinsing a wine glass
with tap water, peeling wax away from the cheese
they watch intently in dresses and suits and starlight
holding memories for me good, bad, queer, callous
with hands that have lived long and made decisions
and smiling teeth I’ve come to recognise from afar.
Biography
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Danny Bultitude (he/him) is a Jewish Pākehā working at Ngā Taonga: Sound & Vision, New Zealand's Film Archive. He has had fiction, poetry, and essays published in several literary journals, but this is his first publication beyond the shores of Aotearoa. Despite popular opinion, he still prefers sweet kaddish wine to all other varieties. If you disagree, feel free to debate him on his Twitter: @dannybultitude
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