"Elegant Perversion" by Richie Hofmann

Elegant Perversion

It was freezing in the unheated churches.

My hair was uncombed,

My eyes couldn’t close.

Eyes of the ruling class dead

Stared down.

Underneath an expensive coat,

I had hairy legs and a classical phallus.

I wanted to be blindfolded.

The hallways of a villa

Filled with ghosts of illegitimate children—

Those were the voices

I heard in your apartment,

Scratching the headboard.

Rain in the ashtray, rain in the broken chair.

In the books stacked around us,

People bled over lust

For women. In public toilets,

Piss tethered strangers

To the wall, their hair flattened

By rain. When it rained,

The squares flooded like the urinals.

You like it here, or you don’t.

It’s climate change and unbridled tourism.

Also the punishment
	
Of the grim gods of water.

Their faces line the facades, each one

With a different feeling:

I am hungry, I am powerful,

I am lustful, I am defeated.

I lay awake feigning sleep, everything bronze.

The water opaque like coffee

Swallows the buildings,

I play dead in your arms.




Appears in The Bronze Arms (Penguin, 2026)

Richie Hofmann is the author of three books of poems—The Bronze Arms, A Hundred Lovers, and Second Empire—and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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