When you call me faggot, you expect my shrinking, the breath catch startle and flinch, my eyes, the white widening, dagger, razor-sharp, thrown with surgical precision, you imagine, watching me flail, wounded animal, bleeding deer, stumbling around, futile, forested floor, o, the brutality of man.
But no, the moment you say it, faggot, our pupils dilate, mine, yours, I see you, and, worse, you see me see you, stammering your hate, shouting to keep your smallness at bay, and, despite our knowing your misfire was a shot to kill, pity blooms in my chest at the fearful beast, cornered dog, watching me see you.
You, who will never know the lightness of loving, the dancefloor-belted chorus, grotesque the heart that finds rage in rainbows, what terrible company you must be to yourself, lazy daggers and hand-me-down hatred, you, fearful, small, lazy, and smug, lonely are your limits, and desperate, your daggers.
June is an old neighbor, ambling yet again through our home-storied streets, verdant brush, sun-soaked shoulders against the hedges, I extend behind me an open palm at some sidewalk’s narrow, so you take it, sunshower lover, we are drunk on the amber rays, on a rinse of beer, I hand you a watermelon candy, bright idea, so we kiss, breaking apart to grin at the cinema of it, the flavor of a day with no agenda, neon pink, without apology.
Shakespeare breaks out in the bar, so we all shout huzzah, we marvel at the magic, midsummer nights in iambic pentameter, I whisper the secret in your ear: You can only understand when you let yourself feel it without asking questions, and we laugh, fall to ribbons, as you confess you still don’t get it.
Wander we through the slopes of Forest Park, no sweat, I have wanted for days like this, and our feet know these pathways, so we are free to improvise our soliloquies, each of us a Mercutio who refused to go to his grave making light of his wounds for the sake of others, lover, we are far too romantic for such romance, sturdy is the build of our devoted palms, pentameter be damned, watermelon bright, June just one among the company we keep.
What’s left of the wine pools, cranberry halo, incriminating, and it echoes, Lisa’s laughter, because we’ve been here before, we shout ‘every true friend is a deja vu we’ve chosen,’ and I clear the calendar to find you in every far-flung town, bask in the balm of our time travel revelry, ’til today’s aches hush and listen to the war stories we already won.
West Virginia, take me under the sobbing of your skies, I want to shout-sing the chorus with my friends, hug and grin and laugh, invent beach ball games and lose them anyway, want to catch the mischief in memories, we sigh and wish we could’ve known, all those young years ago, we’d be here and doing just damn fine, after all, every last mile.
Truth is that Ross never learned how to leave the party, great wild believer in this life and its rich, vivid edges, so we belt all God’s best melodies in the car, just to stave off the creep of melancholy violets and grays, Nicole Kidman in porcelain profile, we should be lovers, let the laundry sit tonight, begs the ritual, let tomorrow steal not a single second from today, miracle transient, magic harnessed and held.
No, I don’t like going to Boston these days cause it just makes me homesick for Chris, wandering new avenues as old friends, sneaking glimpses of the world through pilsner sun streaks, this old town just a time I can’t recreate, these days, and Muncie aches with echoes of forever-long summers, counting keys and dodging geese, we were there and then time packed our bags and we made home and made home and –
In a Pittsburgh alleyway, I find a bird, still and staring at the back stairs of a strange house, stop in wonder then feel the sinking of that age-old knowing: it is gone, the world and its winds in its wings and then a whispered death, so final, so strange, and my eyes well up, I hope it didn’t feel alone.
When the earliest people carved out lives, did the first deaths startle them? Or was there always this knowing, grief as instinct? We are miraculous, we, mundane and then stacks of stories we hope will somehow carry us forward.
I’m old enough to know what people say on the riptide days, and grief is a teacher shrugging at the way people offer as wisdom the ideas they use to comfort their own trembling breath, we might admit that, somehow, we’ve never made sense of time and finalities, just birds in some springtime, warbling into the wind.
Mother’s Day, and I squint at my schoolwork, cranberry scone in crumbs everywhere, everywhere, between keystrokes, blanketing the tabletop, and Mom calls, is it a good time?
So we talk and I amble, past the pizza spot, by the bleak shine of a dumpster in rust, I laugh at her story and debate with a driver, no you go, no you go, and my mom, she is driving, close to home, freshly gone to see her mother, love as instinct, saltwater and mended bone, like me, she loves a long drive with company and hates the long drive alone, so we talk, she drives, I amble.
She confesses my grandma placed a ring of green diamonds in her palm, and we remark at time, old age, scams and the very human want for company, even now, my mom tells me she’s working on sitting with people in their sadness, even now, and she tells me this is one of my gifts, green diamonds, surprise, in my palm.
Past the cemetery, behind the hospital, waving sheepishly to people on porches, I wander and talk to my mom, dissolving geographies, love as a reminder, a constant, a twig, underfoot, bearing a leaf still in its greening.
Springtime again. For the first time, I find myself wondering whether April passed by just a bit too fleetly. Two weeks ago, walking back to my apartment from morning coffee with my roommate, I was abruptly struck by a wave of green. Lush trees, gleaming grass. The world was suddenly a movie set, wont to change seasons through the invisible hands of some hardworking crew.
Last week, I drove home and felt the passage of time in a hundred small ways: my family golden retriever gone from the house and its rituals, my sister unboxing her life in a new apartment, my father’s family gathering to hold one another and say goodbye to my aunt, his sister. Everything changes color, though rarely all at once. One by one, elements of our world move beyond the frame.
After work, I run three miles around Pittsburgh. For the most part, I’ve finally mapped a few routes evading steep hills and crumbling sidewalks. A song plays, and my memories arrange themselves into a music video. I hate that someone made me feel the lyrics to this, I think to myself. Then, smiling inexplicably, I think again: No, you don’t.
I chat with a drag queen who’s considering leaving New York. She asks about Pittsburgh, and I tell her it’s been a lovely exhale. She tells me the city has lost none of its shine but all of its luster. I wonder, for a moment, about place. Are our homes really evolving so constantly, or do they hold a kind of mirror to our shifting, nebulous want?
She says, like a shrug, I’ll probably stay.
Where else would a couple of beautiful men stumble into the bar and put on an interpretive dance to Enya? On a Sunday?
–
I want, more than anything, to be a reliable narrator. In these stories I lug around, encumbered and resolved, I yearn to capture something true. I’m as prone to embellishment as the next poet, though, harboring the requisite delusion to imagine I am the first man to know these feelings up close.
In this way, I am the incurable hoarder. I revisit the library, feeling these pages’ rushes and pains in full color, every time my mind wanders off. My lover tells me I have a thousand-yard stare, and I just chuckle back. The past is a rich neighborhood, humanity alongside all the benefit of retrospect; I imagine conversations of reconciliation and it’s almost as good as having them.
To snap myself out of it, I feverishly chronicle the moment at hand: the rusting tambourine at the back of the shower, my roommate making sauce and balls in a sun dress and stilettos, dates on the laptop watching forgotten gems from my family VHS collection. Pittsburgh is sunshine, golden ale, sports regalia, and hilly walks. One day, you will be nostalgic for exactly this.
Life does indulge in its cinemas, though. On the afternoon we buried my cousin, a train rattled by, hushing us all into a watchful quiet. On the night one of my lovers pulled his hands away, watching me fall away flailing, we were drunk at a quaint dinner in Tarrytown. Everyone’s meal ended abruptly – I only just remembered – when a skunk wandered through.
Sometimes I glance in the mirror and wonder if my handsomest days are behind me. Did I fathom, then, just how beautiful? These days, my hair has grown long and unruly, and I recall what it was to nurture a mane through a pandemic. I’d pronounced 2020 my ‘lion year,’ a declaration blanketed quickly in rusted, dark comedy. I sheared it, on a whim, months into 2021. O, the desperate euphoria of turning a tiresome page.
I comb my fingers through it on a sunny drive, feel it brush my neck and grin. Perhaps these will be the lion days wrenched from my palms in those younger, wide-eyed days. My lover takes me picture in a grassy park, and I know already I will marvel, someday, at what a wondrous thing I was.
All my best friends are cowboys, wander beneath the sun-torn skies, we bandage breaking aches by moonlight, we bellow our songs, uproarious, fire-lit, together pretending we never heard the catch in our throats, jagged the memories that readied our bodies for adventure and its myriad fine-print lonelinesses, infinite, the night that soaks us in royal blue and one another’s company, and longer the stretch of days that part us.
I ask how you’re moving along, your eyes glimmer their knowing, I want the story you won’t write in the letters home, scars in the open air, the cowboy code: I’ll be still in your voice’s shaking, and I’ll bare my bruises at the campfire, too, and you won’t hear your story whispered on the wind, cowboy, ours the sacred exhale.
O, rugged travelers, we, the anchors of families, in shootouts and standstill, circle up and kick back, shed the itch of wondering whether the trail was worthwhile, why we’re so practiced in our own damn bandaging, by the sunrise, we whistle, silhouette lit across the soft-spoken legends, guns asleep in our holsters as we borrow the stars.
How does one celebrate the birthday of a cat, do I hold him close, fill his ear with whispers of the unlikely magic? Once I dreamt of a cat stretching itself along the windowsill, watching the world, populating my mornings, bearing witness to my being, even on evenings where my skin broke, chest shaking in the way grief holds, curl and sleep at my feet through emails answered, so rare, the company who asks for so little, how to honor such a gift?
When a dog dies, I discover back home, no gravestone waits, yet the house echoes with the loss of a hundred rhythms, the grass in the yard aching for those familiar pads, the floor so bare, the neighboring kids tilt their heads, a miracle here then vanished, somehow looming larger now, old friend, we adored you, loved you more than we can bear.
Wherever I wander, so my cat unfurls, posts vigil outside the bathroom door, my lover kisses his crown in the moving truck, I go looking for him from hotel beds, forgetting he is miles from reach, laugh in memory of the Halloween he shattered a plate and watched me sweep shards, amused then running, o, orange companion, I treasure the absurd life you’ve carved out alongside mine.
Back home, the megachurch offers promises of heaven, heavy is a weary world, just sing your joy and hate the immigrant, satellites rise, like a rash, risen, bathtub redemptions before steakhouse prayers, all those girls, making up stories, Jesus wept, for God so loved America first, wept the megachurch home.
I wish I’d become an astronomer, could crane your neck toward the indigo infinity, see? it’s a woman pouring water, but I canceled that path ninety-four bridges ago, studied constellations of poems in lieu of the heavens, such is the weight of choosing, tightening the lens, eliminating potential, this is my path, hold the rope and wander in deeper, this.
Reluctant the spring, it squanders its weeks each time, vacillating, sunburst melody and the silver recoil, I cradle my cat, eyes watering at the epiphany he has been sick with no way to tell me, grief and hope in a braid, hold the rope tight, promising something better ahead, look, tilt your gaze toward a poem blooming, faintly, in the sky, can you see it?, and you squint, then smile, oh!, for me, perhaps, for us.
March is just another ache – to be thought of, held in beauty longer than my beauty holds, I wonder, do you still remember the way my smile found you in those hallways we stumbled into, haphazard becoming, so very simple to find a poem among the blossoms of our aching hope, white-knuckle stubborn, the stains beauty pressed into the wallpaper.
Sun splashes the sidewalk and the optimists dress for the beach, yet by evening the cynics will cackle, snowflakes bundled like an onslaught of tiny parachuters, we scramble beneath awnings and watch, pant, through the eyes we had as children, counting down, three, to the sprint, two, the burning of, one, breath, go.
In black, in white, my grandmother loses herself in her Westerns, I watch her watching, wonder how she houses her hope, her grief, her infinite stories, I remember her prayers all those bedtimes, bits of Crayola in a cookie tin, I want her to know I still hold her, young, awake, wanting for more light in the day, wonder if her eyes looked like this as a girl, watching Westerns.
Remember how, by evening, the grass swelled turquoise? Jeans stained green at the kneecaps, tuckered out, the sliding door and we were home? Remember everyone you loved just within reach? The light, incandescent, spilling out into the world?
michael king 