All the Byronic Boys I’ve Loved Before

By Jackie Rosas

Atticus Finch with just a little 
pinch of a one-eyed shot from 
tortoiseshell frames popped 
my literary cherry. But he was 
a nice guy. Not a brooding guy, 

not an ironic, 
deliciously sardonic 
guy. He wasn’t a 
Byronic guy, not like: 

Sand shoes, sonic screwdriver 
beating sky blue, and pinstripe suit.
Run with me, alien boy. Knock 
like a thief through time’s spiraled night.
Rage, rage, for the oncoming storm 

of the emotionally catatonic, 
moronically hypnotic man who 
sips from the chaotic draught 

and does some wand-waving 
over lilies and runes, scribbles 
and masks. He slithers in fumes 
and barks at little boys with scars. He is
obsidian lashed from a dark lord’s green. 

Tectonic plates breaking, comets racing,
tracing a world not made for 
something so scathed in earth, so toxic
but scattered in a haunting cosmic. 

Like a boy who wields 
cracked red light in a crossguard, 
who burns a single hole 
in his father— 
a boy masked in metal, a creature 
shaded in another man’s light. 

Neurotically erotic 
words spat and lulled, melodic. 
A thinker’s tonic. 

Bleed inward, thrash thorns 
along the fields, the moors of 
your ribs for me, the wicked man with
black eyes. The man with a wife
pleading for a wife. 

So, furrow those brows! 
Ready the steads, from horse to 
blue box! Dive into a painted seascape!
Ruffle your dark hair! Brood and 
flutter those black capes! My bad boys, 

my beloved beasts, my deranged 
dears. My Byronic Boys. How could I
love without you?

---

Jackie Rosas

1/15/22

Jaclyn Rosas recently graduated from the University of San Francisco with a major in English and minor in history. Currently, she resides in Sonoma County where she enjoys watching way too many Jimmy Stewart films, reading biographies on the Kennedys, and staring into space thinking about her next writing idea. At least, that’s what she’d tell you she was thinking about . . .