Sucking the Cock of Michelangelo’s David (1501-1504)

This past March, you could find the David in
Florence, the Galleria dell’Accademia of course,
but now he’s in my mouth. And I don’t mean
metaphorically. I mean that I am literally sucking
the cock of Michelangelo’s David and madonna,

he sighs, I’m so fucking good at it, which makes it
hard to write. And perhaps it’s my own distraction—
Who would have thought that marble came? (So much
for blood from stones.)—but it feels important
to note how much bigger he is in person. No, really,

the pictures do him no justice. But I like older men
and I’m sucking his cock so maybe I’m likely to say
that all the same. And it’s true, I am biased. I’m biased
to love a man who made another man fall hard, and who
did it to me again while I scrolled on my phone outside

of Respectable Street, my back to a mural and then to
his front. When is a statue born a statue? When does it
become? When I see him in the marble? When he’s moved
past a thick velvet rope and he’s thrown sixteen feet
in the air? When he throws off his jacket and unbuttons

his jeans and you see that, thank God, there’s a vein
that runs down his shaft when engorged? When you save
a name to the number he typed in your phone, or when you
delete the mountain emoji that all of your hookups get
the first time they’re saved? When he dribbles a chalk

that your tongue presses down or when he whispers
with his fingers now locked in your own as he fucks you
on a couch that he bought at the Goodwill off 95 and
Broward? Or when two parents decide that he shouldn’t
be one anymore?

Zachary Scalzo (he/they) is a queer writer, translator, and theatremaker. They are currently Artist in Residence in the English Department at the University of Central Oklahoma, and can be found at azachofalltrades.com or on Instagram at @zjscalzo. His poetry can be found in TRANSverse and Dear Poetry Journal.