43 Lgbtq poems

She wants a house full of cups and the ghosts of last century’s lesbians; I want a spotless apartment, a fast computer.  She wants a woodstove, three cords of ash, an axe; I want a clean gas flame.  She wants a row of jars: oats, coriander, thick green oil; I want nothing to store.  She wants pomanders, linens, baby quilts, scrapbooks.  She wants Wellesley reunions.  I want gleaming floorboards, the river’s reflection.  She wants shrimp and sweat and salt; she wants chocolate.  I want a raku bowl, steam rising from rice.  She wants goats, chickens, children.  Feeding and weeping.  I want wind from the river freshening cleared rooms. She wants birthdays, theaters, flags, peonies. I want words like lasers.  She wants a mother’s tenderness.  Touch ancient as the river. I want a woman’s wit swift as a fox. She’s in her city, meeting her deadline; I’m in my mill village out late with the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells, thinking of the twelve years of wanting, apart and together. We’ve kissed all weekend; we want to drive the hundred miles and try it again.

feygele is yiddish for the way i walk into a room. feygele, the anglicized spelling of angel fallen into the dark earthen pits of fashion. feygele from the german vögelein meaning “little bird.” little bird, where do you flame from? where do you bird from little german flame? little singlet split for entry. little finger slipped into the mouth staring hard across the bare wet bar. little bear in his arrogant leather harness, his broad american faith. carry me with you across the fleshless threshold how an old woman carries her language across an ocean so vast, so many fathoms deep one might imagine all life springing from the wet slit of its shoreline. sure i’ve memorized every word for faggot & nearly all their origins are plural & bound together with twine. little string corset wrapped around my brothers’ thighs. little horses wild at the bit to be ridden. little films where the animals are let out but only at night. sure i’ve eaten directly from the hand of a man who taught me the simplest words, gestures of thirst & begging. sure i was hatched into a world that expected me to fly straight into power- lines. but see how hideous hearse-shined my feathers, see my wings spread like a dead book of legs, see my brutal beak a seed-thief in the club light. my first name was flame & i drew moths & mouths alike. feygele as in son of the first preacher with gills. as in the flood that began & refused to quench. as in when i was a child i killed a bird, sparrow i think, with my bare hands so it wouldn’t go on suffering — it was sick. give me your hands, hold my skull between them how you’d hold a bag writhing with birds, a pillowcase thick with lights, two grown boys in gowns howling, a cold mud village consumed by flames, a cage door opening, a blade, a blade, ablaze.

Then, the police arrive — they don’t find me. I’m disguised as a boy in a champagne wig And hid inside the gold rattle of a warm Appalachia wind. Beneath the trash of willow, I am. The sorrow Of  trailer parks and carnie uncles. The poor Girl’s underworld, a weedy thing. The night, With its kingdom of  lanterns and awful blue lark. How we waited, how we hid Like wolves, in the revolving question of a field.

The link between us all is tragedy, & these so many years later, I am thinking about him, all of twenty & gay & more free than any of us might ever be, & this is one way of telling the story, another one is aphorism or threat: blood on my knife or blood on my dick, which is to say that surviving that young & beautiful and willing to walk every day as if wearing sequins meant believing that there is always something worth risking doom. There is no reason for me to think of him now, especially with the football player’s hanging body eclipsing another prison cell, except, maybe the kid whose name I can’t remember but walk I can, had mastered something the dead man’s singing legs could never, how not to abandon the body’s weight, & how to make the body expand, to balloon, to keep becoming, until even the danger could not swallow you. One day I watched him, full of fear for my own fragility & wondered how he dared own so much of himself, openly. For all I know every minute in those cells was safe for the kid whose name I cannot recall. But how can a man ever be safe like that, when you are so beautiful the straight ones believe it & want to talk to you as if they love you and want you to dare them to believe some things in this world must be far too lovely to ever be broken.

1 an urban image from the eighties when we hung out at Chez Madam Arthur and at the back of the room women wrapped their arms around nights of ink and dawn 2 calendar of murmurs vague caresses about the planet and its water we could have confused words but there were doors open confetti in the midst of darkness gentle ways to swoon in a corner with she who put her tongue in my mouth 3 focus on yes, on the woman’s eyelids caress not silence not word focus beyond. Hold me back

I loved a girl when I was a girl, before I knew desire could be used against me. I so wanted to be relevant. Simple exchange— bouquets of wheat. My dirt-stained hands, tangled hair. I never could be prim, in apple-pie order. I dropped all the eggs, licking their smear off my hands; wrinkled her ribbons into my pocket, tore pages from her books, all for the sake of the lonely hour.

Since I stopped the flow Of primordial ciswhite straight men Whom I heedlessly collect And from whom the spring feeds Without reason I have been Shopping so much more Than suits a prophet in the forest. A man said he felt like an awful cad But an admission as such Does not irrigate a dry spell Once it’s surpassed the length Of a petty offense record Because the body’s memory is not so Mutated by language And there’s very little pleasure in force When the subject is inertia. I used to leave as soon as The mysterious chemistry worked out Now I am both the one who leaves And the one who stays Eco-novelty is rare and common And each design reforms The future and the last.

Do I still long for my virginity? — Fragment 107 I never longed for my virginity. I heard it on the radio after the hurricane. There, in the aftermath, was the voice of a man — once the sweet, screwed-up boy whose hooded, jessed spirit I tried to possess with the ruthlessness I mistook for power. Here he was on NPR, so gentle, so familiar with devastation, his timbre woke the teenage falconer in me who once saw his kindness as weakness, saw a boy as an unfledged goshawk — a creature to trap and be trapped with in darkened mews. I knew the rules: neither of us could sleep until the molting bird grew ravenous enough to take the raw mouse from my hand. Breaking the falcon broke us both, left us scared and less aware of  love than fear.

There is an alley where you can go, where you can kiss someone’s mouth until you climb inside them, force your way in, push your cells into their cells and become one creature — angelic. It isn’t the way you’d dream it. There is piss, dew-damp moss crawling across the brick. Some nights it is so dark you must enter only by touch. Walk by in the light and it will seem like nothing. The scripture is written by wenches: 4eva, L+ J, I.T.A.L.Y. A heart jagged in two. But what you’ll make there it’s not love, it’s not weighed down with that, it’s feather, air, an at-once exultation of being not of this time, this alley, this shitty good for no one, shut-down town. I never went there, I promise you. I never knew such sweet violence. Though there are mornings now, miles from that place, when I wake with the thought of it: wet and bitten, half- winged.

Other-lips     whispering     between my legs. What they called black hole     not-thing is really packed full of secrets.     A rebel mouth testifying from the underside.     Careful not to let it     speak too loudly.     Only hum demure     in polite company — never laugh or spit on the sidewalk     or complain lest we both be dragged     under the wheels of one of those.     Or worse     coddled smiled at     as at a lapdog acting wolf. Or worse     called ugly     a cruel joke. Or — there are always     worse things. Too many messengers     shot.     But then who wouldn’t fear     an eyeless face whose ghost stories     always     come true?