Parable of the Gay Son

Conan Tan

Every night, the phantom limb of a father
begging to be stoned. I excise the growth

the way I shuck an oyster’s flaming secret
from its shell. This I learned from my mother.

A boy must find the joint and press
until it pops, not like a balloon, but like

mushroom spores igniting a deep breath.
Other things she taught me: the fresh weight

of laundry, how to say my name like it has
meaning. That God, like air, is everywhere

I forget I’ve been. How he floods then recedes
from dreams my father returns to the whiskey.

The wheat inside the confessional booth I once
worshipped the gospel in a priest’s cock with

the hunger of a good son. Good boy, I remember
him pressing my tongue into prayer, the pearls

pulsing light. Good boy, I imagined him cupping
my face with the same palms that dressed me

from shower to spine. Fresh out of the rain,
my lungs mature into kidney stones I deposit

in his tissue’s shifting dusk. The dream ends
with me on four knees like a dog chasing its tail.



Conan Tan is an undergraduate at the University of Oxford. Based between the UK and Singapore, he was the winner of Singapore's 2022 National Poetry Competition and the recipient of the 2024 Martin Starkie Prize. A Best of the Net nominee, their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Passages North, Salt Hill, The Cincinnati Review, Rattle, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. He can be found at conantan.com.