tuxedo fittings and gum

his brother’s wedding was supposed to be spectacular—

that is the word his mother used                             “spectacular”

so, being the best man and all

he goes to the fitting, all the tapes

and buttons and pins                          pulled

from tomatoes filled with sand

the woman measures his waist from her knees, her fingertips

slipping past his waistband, checks the tightness           she asks him

questions like “are you excited?”

“how do you know the groom”

“what do you do for work?”

she lifts her eyes to his for the answers    he quivers

at that touch, another woman, and his blood moves

his penis moves, it’s as though her skin touches his

he only feels skin, even when there are layers

and thinks about her naked

body, all those young curves and bumps, the way

she might walk differently unclothed, but who hasn’t

had that flashbulb pop and I’m sure we’ve all been

guilty of that, like shoplifting gum

from register displays

the Extra Winter Fresh he stole

so kids at school would stop calling him

“nasty breath”

then, he thought that gum was for people

with bad breath cause his father said cologne

was for people who didn’t shower, and naturally

he thought those rules applied to gum so, he slid

the package into his shorts                            that night

his mother found him chewing

with his head down, he returned the gum and apologized

and his mother paid—the cashier smirked  he, the kid,

assumed the smirk was because the cashier knew about gum’s one purpose

but the cashier found the apology endearing, or perhaps cute

the kid, defeated 

whenever he chews gum he thinks of that cashier, even now

that he knows it wasn’t about the breath

and here at the tailors, her on her knees in front of him, he can’t help

but feel the climb of lust into his skin

it tightens and pulls as though he asked it to

Joshua Young is a Graduate Student of Creative Writing at Western Washington University located in Bellingham, Washington. My first two novels (there and have you heard of wes anderson?) were published by local indie press lines and blood books. My fiction and poetry has appeared in Wheelhouse, Jeopardy, Midst Mountain's Shadow, Fragments of Youth, among others. I wrote and directed my first feature film, Afraid to Merge, this past June with my twin brother Caleb. The film will soon start the festival rounds.