Shirtless to display sun-tawny hides,
they stalk across the July-dry hills of the Casa del Campo,
proud as any lion surveying its savannah.

Heads held high, alert to every sound
above the constant drone of the insects,
they prowl the labyrinth beneath the teleferico's shadow.

Sweating from the climb and the heat,
I freeze as a rabbit bolts across my path;
startled by the noise of my approach,
it has left my own heart pounding.

When I catch my breath, I strip off my shirt
and join the hunt.

Dry brown pellets, now hard as stone, spill across one path--
the fewmets of a deer.
But I am stalking different spoor:
the tattered brightly-colored squares of empty condom wrappers;
a wadded tissue, used to wipe-up after they'd come,
then abandoned to the elements as they hurried away from what they'd just done;
the burnt-plastic smell of a used-condom as it bakes under the summer sun.

At each branching of the trail I scan for this post-coital detritus
that marks the areas where those I'm hunting tend to cluster:
a clump of trees, well-hidden from the road;
a dip in the ground, perhaps some dry rivulet,
screened on all sides save from above;

Dry seeds cling to the hairs of my legs.
A tuft of thistledown wafts past.
A rustle in the dry grasses--
the breeze, or a fellow predator?

I stop. Strain to hear. Expectant.
Waiting for that moment when two predators,
mutually and simultaneously, become prey.

 

© 2007 Lawrence Schimel

Lawrence Schimel is a full-time author, anthologist, and translator. He has published over 80 books in a wide range of genres, including: Fairy Tales for Writers (A Midsummer Night's Press), Two Boys in Love (Seventh Window), The Future is Queer (Arsenal Pulp Press), First Person Queer (Arsenal Pulp Press), The Mammoth Book of New Gay Erotica (Carroll & Graf), and Best Gay Poetry 2008 (A Midsummer Night's Press). His poems have been published in a diverse range of periodicals, such as the Christian Science Monitor, the Saturday Evening Post, Physics Today, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and The Lyric, and have been widely anthologized in Gay Love Poetry, The Badboy Book of Homoerotic Poetry, Queer Dog: Homo/Pup/Poetry, The Sandman: Book of Dreams, Chicken Soup for the Horse-Lover's Soul 2, and The Random House Treasury of Light Verse, among others. His writings have been translated into Basque, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, and Spanish. He lives in Madrid, Spain, with his husband, Ismael Attrache.