Just One Thing with Max Pasakorn

Max Pasakorn’s poem “Ghazal for My Gay Ass” bursts forth with playfulness, longing, and hope to be and to have a certain sort of boy. Here they share just one thing about the piece:

“I love poetic forms, particularly ones with refrains or repetitions because they signal a kind of internal obsession with certain themes or tropes. When initially drafting "Ghazal for My Gay Ass", I knew one of my obsessions was with boys. So I tried including many variations of the word "boy" in the poem, not really intending for the poem to veer too far from the rules of the traditional ghazal. Later, I found out in a writing workshop pronounced "buoy" as "boo-ey", which made it a surprising half-rhyme to them instead of the "boy" sound I'd initially intended. (In Singapore, there is a brand of soap called Lifebuoy that we pronounce as "life-boy", so I assumed "buoy" was always pronounced "boy".) With that realization, the poem invited variations of "boy", like "himbo", a word I've always associated both positively (omg hot) and negatively (omg only hot?). The result, I think, is a poem that's even queerer than it was initially intended to be.”