Our white blinds
are always in some position
are always shut or almost shut
are always open
in some position
Our blinds are always opening
and shutting in position
in white
in closing
in positioning the light
above the bed
Two a.m.
He has a swallowtail butterfly in his mouth
He knows I’m here, he talks,
undressing
Truth, somewhere between the cloaca
and the cochlea
My head dampens pillows
I don’t want to kill him,
and yet he lives
Soberly I drove us home
from the wedding party
where you had luck with the bartender
and I stood next to the fire escape ladder
watching dancers dance
dancerly
in circular ceremony,
gathering the distances
with expert limbs
They served
a cocoa cake,
wet raspberry sponge liqueur
Eleanor thought it was gross
At three a.m.
you have a red-black butterfly on your tongue,
sleep infecting what remains
of sense
and I had the car keys
and your tongue and my ear
in our bedroom
talking after a wedding party
Reading Nella Larsen
I saw you in the restaurant, in the library, in the medic’s tent, sitting back with your pen, knowing all the bullshit that people serve, and writing down your infamy—a burden worth walking away from when it stopped being fun—when the flirtation with notoriety drew more than narcissi on a summer dress in Chicago—when people had forgotten how to read and everything just fell—literally.
All the serious problems I have summed up in one poem
I had decided to stay out of the latest Facebook debate, but in the end I couldn’t help myself. It seemed urgent and I was drinking cold coffee and ordering Seamless. I put a lot of energy into that post just to make sure that I’d done the work and to minimize the chance of being misread or attacked or called out for being racist or misogynistic or neoliberal or heteronormative or homonormative. I typed it on the screen and deleted it and retyped it and reworded it and deleted specific words and put them back and deleted them again. I thought about the world. I thought about other people. I thought about other points of view in relation to my own point of view and I typed it into the screen and made some final changes and reread it many times and it looked good to me and so I posted it. The buzzer rang and my delivery came. Not having to exchange money directly with the delivery person makes it feel like they’ve showed up with free food, and so I feel momentarily guilty about not giving her a cash tip even though I know I’ve already given her fifteen per cent through the app. She handed me the heavy feathery bag and we both smiled and bowed and nodded and she went on her way and I locked the door behind her. I sat down on the sofa and pulled out my food, setting the plastic and paper containers onto the glass surface of the coffee table. I turned on the television and started an episode of Buffy and paused it, because before I’d eaten a single piece of pad see ew, I checked my phone to see if there had been any response to my post. My stomach sank when I saw the little red seven. Losing my appetite for feedback, I closed the screen and aimed the remote control at the television even though I didn’t need to, even though I could have just blindly hit “OK” from the crevice between the sofa cushions where the blue tooth remote control had fallen when I sat down to eat.
Q and P
are,
it turns
out,
the
initials
of a pedophile
serial
killer
in a Joyce
Carol
Oates
novel
As far as
pet names
go
we
picked
a winner
Signing
our-
selves
after
the un-
canny
eponym,
a doll
with wide
open arms,
dilated
eyes,
a kind of deranged
hospitality
marked
with a
question
mark
swirl
at the pinnacle
of the fore-
head
Mass
produced
plastic
affect-
ion
Pet
names
are
always shared
be-
tween
lovers,
automatic reflex,
whether
you’re there
or not
P
is for
psycho-
sis,
love
sui-
cide
pact,
life
part-
ner,
pees
in
a
pod,
phallic
imp-
ropriety,
pleasure
domes
and
pleas-
ure
quart-
ers,
and
pill-
ows,
and
prep-
arations for
end
of life
care
Q
is for
occasio-
nal
dis-
content
for quilts,
pin-
cushion
kiss-
es,
quest
for
fire
crotch,
the beau-
tiful
quim,
membr-
anous
mem-
ory
of
an
or-
if-
ice,
cold
plast-
ic
ex-
plosives,
com-
fort-
able
queens,
fear-
less,
ever-
y
night,
to
cuddle
up
with
a
sex-
ual
pre-
da-
tor
for
eve-
r
FROM RYAN: Tender Bottoms explores observations and anxieties about contemporary gay domesticity—the vicissitudes of romantic attachment, aging, fucking, social accountability, politics, and the reliance on life-sustaining pharmaceuticals—refracted in an homage to Gertrude Stein. The poems variously hew to and depart from Stein’s compositional program, finding something new to value in her poetic innovations while also asking for something more, not just from Stein, but from the present moment. A wry map of pleasure and presentiment emerges between the repetition of nightly television watching and the daily ingestion of anti-retroviral pills; between the incessant loading and unloading of a dishwasher and the dreams of love and professional success that such an appliance is implicitly asked to support; a queer portrait, perhaps, of what Stein called “the bottom nature” of American life.
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