LAVENDER WEDDING
Shane Allison
​
I’m convinced that I’ll get married in the gym of my old high school.
The ceremony will take place on a beautiful spring afternoon
on Saturday ’cause Saturdays are for weddings.
My suit will be “virgin” white
with a shirt of lavender and ruffles at the collar.
The shoes will be platformed.
I’ll reek of Brut and Afro-sheen.
My husband-to-be will look stunning in his lavender Christian Dior
wedding dress
imported from Paris.
I’ll mow the hair from my legs like newly cut grass with a Lady Bic,
pluck my chest hairs like feathers from a chicken,
paint these lips with apple red lipstick.
I want all my closest friends to come ornamented in those dresses
like they wore in Footloose.
The lesbians will come as Wall Street tycoons constantly
reminding me
how expensive all this shit is and how much it’s going to
set me back
no matter how many times I tell them that money is no object.
I want my daddy to give me away if he promises to keep his hands
off Aunt Tillie.
My mama will be the bearer of rice and punch spiked with whiskey.
The priest will be a Michael Jackson impersonator.
The reception will be held at the house of Chicken and Waffles
where Debbie, employee of the month, will catch the bouquet.
Wally, the four-hundred-pound, stubble-faced cook,
who smokes stink cigars,
where the ashes occasionally fall in the blueberry pancake mix,
will have the pleasure of pulling the garter belt from my husband’s
thigh with his teeth.
There will be no limousines ’cause if a Pinto was good enough for
my sister and her husband,
Then it’s good enough for me and mine.
Shane Allison
Shane Allison was bit by the writing bug at the age of fourteen. He spent a majority of his high school life shying away in the library behind desk cubicles writing bad love poems about boys he had crushes on. He has since gone on to publish several chapbooks of poetry, Black Fag, Ceiling of Mirrors, Cock and Balls, I Want to Fuck a Redneck, Remembered Men, and Live Nude Guys, as well as four full-length poetry collections, I Remember (Future Tense), Slut Machine (Rebel Satori), Sweet Sweat (Hysterical), and I Want to Eat Chinese Food off Your Ass (Dumpster Fire). He has edited twenty-five anthologies of gay erotica and has written two novels, You’re the One I Want and Harm Done (Simon & Schuster). Allison’s collage work has graced the pages of Shampoo, Unlikely Stories, Pnpplzine.com, Palavar Arts Magazine, Southeast Review, and a plethora of others. He is at work on a new novel and is always at work making a collage here and there.