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Choose Your Own Adventure: Pools

by Oliver Sedano Jones | From Issue 29 (Summer 2025)

After Hala Alyan
a boy at the swimming pool has asked if you’re ______. do you:

  • Conceal

    bluff. glasseyed, flip
    the Q on its back –

    bumlord unto him
    who bumlord thinks.

    play-jab the mid-
    shoulder, somewhat

    harder than you
    feel. feeling is

    anathema, with viol
    -ets. Smirk, either

    they’re gay or
    AMOG’d by one—

    think fast, batty
    boy. chameleo

    -sexual switch, code
    green & the moment

    passes, the droplets
    evanesce. No, that’s

    too frilly. They dry,
    bitch, dry and

  • Reveal

    smirk, raise the louche
    tweezed brow; wouldn’t

    you like to know, darling?
    then brace for blowing

    tongues. remember nick:
    flippant, a man’s fingers

    on his throat, a top-deck
    choking-off. “not in

    public darling,” he said.
    and later: “I get beat

    up a lot.” a vinyl couch,
    where he tugged my

    vest, deep

    AMs & frosted chic,
    stroking the goosed

    & pebbled skin. droplets
    fragment the narrow

    chests. risk it now
    or you never will

  • Re-veil

    neuter the tongue,
    numb it to love,

    tennis-love, cipher
    of vague normie

    sports chat & apple
    syrup. ask not for

    serenades. misdirect,
    emit flares.

    reader, this happened:
    my feet on the pebble

    finish, knurled, made
    eye contact reader

    i told you: yes
    & whips of laughter

    like bells, like
    strange ropes, I

unfold at the pale seam. where water leans on air.

Oliver Sedano Jones (he/him)

Oliver Sedano Jones’ work has appeared in Poetry Wales, The Oxford Review of Books, bath magg and elsewhere, with shortlistings for the Yeats Prize, the Wales Poetry Award, and the Plaza Prose Poetry Prize.

Poet’s Note

This poem is a kind of triptych that compiles three instances of liminal queerness – three Schrödinger’s closets if you will. Each is a sort of coming-of-age reckoning with how the ways I’ve allowed my queerness to present and not-present – all tied together by this controlling image of air-water blurriness – water that is naturally curvaceous but so easily bounded by a straight edge…or something. The real story is: I read a fabulous Hala Alyan poem and wrote this one right after without thinking very much, then continued to not-think for as long as possible until this moment…

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