The last night we spoke, you said we could make this work.

I sold the bed we used to sleep on, to forget, hoping it would work.

I left the pink book you gave me on my desk, your letters

in my drawer, the ones where you said love is work.

I left the memory of us sleeping on a cliffside in my head

but deleted the picture we took, dead-eyed from waking up to work

at 5 AM on another coast, the night sea barely visible beyond your head

laid against my thigh, sprawled black hair, it was easy work

to be in love with you, but it was impossible to love you

in a way you felt. We were two felled trees attached by thin string, trying to work

gravity against itself. In a Key Largo parking lot, years ago, before we ever fell

through each other, your hand brushed against mine. We worked

so hard to be that simple again. B, forgive me. I would have

given myself away (I did) just to make it work.

————————————–

Jarrett Moseley called us from Charlotte, NC.

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We promise to protect each other

After Willie Perdomo

which means we pinky swear it

which means we draw

our pinkies

like switchblades

from brassy knuckles

which means

i hold your hands

between the pocket space where we keep

the taser between the thumb & index the hammer between the index & middle

the cross between the middle & ring & the middle is my weapon of choice

which means

i talk a lot

but my face says

i can’t

fight

your face says we should run which means

i face you standing still pressing my switchblade into yours wishing the switchblades were switchblades

& not pinky promises we draw from brassy knuckles

want brass knuckles but don’t want proximity

want a gun but don't want that smoke

want incense but only handmade

want these hands

to be protection

enough

that’s what space in poems are for: to store arsenals

in this ars poetica keys between my fingers never felt comfortable like i would get sliced too

if it came down to it

i am walking across a blacktop

i could tar myself into

the sun is saying

i should get home

but home is on my hip

i am aware of you

& all the things that follow to follow & nothing more

which means

we promise to protect each other

we pinky swear it

————————————–

Lauren Dotson called us from Chicago, IL.

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Get in vans with strangers: a Palo-Santo heavy Chevy G20

with a sonnet-spilling prophet; a red 70’s Volkswagen

shaggin' wagon with three long-haired surfers headed South;

a fuzzy pink and purple pimped out festival-goer’s fantasy

stocked with the best candy—one taste and I make-out

with God. Talk myself out of a felony on one side of the

border, have my first lucid dream on the other. Skinny dip

a bioluminescent shoreline with a nowhere-bound time

-traveller, his touch the lightning that strikes me sober,

makes me want to remember. Take LSD blessed by

a Mayan shaman on a Panamanian beach. Find out

the only love I’ve ever known isn’t free—my softened

gaze on strangers spinning around me, I love them not

because they’re mine but because they never will be.

Get all my shit stolen and backpack for three months

without a backpack. Dance callouses onto the bottoms

of my feet. When strangers barge into the van, I learn

that boundaries don’t need to be barbed wire fences,

a purple velvet rope is all you need. The prophet

heads North and Tara asks Are you sure he’s not the one

who stole all your shit? Nope. Hand what’s left of me

to a golden-haired dreamer who hymns any instrument

he holds. Change my mind about building a home in the

gap between his front teeth. Leave him carving our initials

in the rearview like the one before him left me. Fall in love

during a solar eclipse. Let a wizard undress my notions

of pleasure in the stolen darkness at mid-day, melt into

the world of tantra without knowing what it means. Yes,

a nameless rose does smell as sweet. I’d forego the forever

my college sweetheart promised when he said he’d ask

my dad, like I was an 18th century commodity. I’d handpick

the same bouquet of brief eternities, still slam on the gas

pedal—my rose-coloured windshield shattered to pieces

when I travel to the final frontier to find the lights

in his Northern eyes out of order those nights. Kintsugi:

the Japanese art of repairing broken items with gold lacquer;

freesias swooning over the fallen vase—her slow dance of

shimmering scars. Given the chance, I’d still fling myself

off the shelf, bless the falls that broke me golden.

————————————–

Dré Pontbriand called us from Antigua & Barbuda.

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"these days, everybody wants to hear the prophecies of yore at a mcdonald’s drive through, and i just don’t think that that’s what i’m after"

& when my friend pulls up & the speaker starts crackling with some eldritch horror, & it asks,

do you want to die with that?

& my friend looks over at me & asks, well, do you?

& i say i’m good with just the pepsi, thanks

& the eldritch horror, profound & decrepit, wails like a thousand suns being born or the edge of a paper slicing through skin or your dad shutting the door on your family the morning that he dies

& my friend says, oh, i think they only have coke products here,

& i say, hm, then i guess a cherry coke

& my friend says, okay, a mcchicken, a cherry coke, plus can i get an answer the question unspoken in my heart?

because my friend is always saying shit like that,

especially in the mcdonald’s drive through

& this time the voice from the speaker is sweet dulcet caramel dripping off a spoon, a siren song in symphony,

& my friend says, damn, i think i’m a dollar short,

but it’s okay because i have two dollars in my pocket, & anyway, the prophecies are free here, free like the way any of us are, free as a man with an albatross around his neck, free as an albatross around a man’s neck, since the albatross is dead, and isn’t death a kind of freedom?, free like a limited time only BOGO sale at the Gap, free like you’ll still have to give up your firstborn son, but whatever, who’s having babies in this economy, anyway, not to mention your firstborn won’t be a sun, if anything they’ll be the MOON,

& we drive to the window

& my friend’s camry sounds like it might fall apart right there

& so might i, if i’m being honest

& i look into the black hole at the first window

or rather, it looks into me,

i blink first

& it becomes a murder of crows, silent, except to say

second window only tonight,

& then i say it, just for good measure,

second window only tonight,

& we’re at the second window,

which is a little grimy,

with a freckled bespectacled teen behind it,

& she looks like me, a study in personal time travel,

but when i ask my friend he says,

hey, doesn’t that guy look like me?

so it could be the whole world, or nothing at all

(like most things)

& i’m handed the cherry coke without much fanfare

& the teen leans out the window to whisper in my friend’s ear

& i strain to listen

but all i hear is the rustling of the first breeze that ever swept this earth,

& when my friend turns to me,

he says, the prophecy machine is down tonight. can i get a sip of your cherry coke?

& we drive away, dial-shifting through static,

as the world dissolves into whipping wind, fresh fizz,

& our laughter, spilling into empty eternity

————————————–

Aparna Paul called us from Cambridge, MA.

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I dreamed of a canoe, and of the two of us: I was new on the lake. Streaming through the murk, the cellar scent of blue and brown water, and you, my new love, saying nothing, only rowing us backwards deftly. At the lake’s deepest point: a miniature goose—a full grown adult, though not five inches high, resting on an island of ice, mid-June. Tenderly I scooped it. Its feet were frozen in a lump of ice, but it stood on my palm as quiet and unmoving as you, who waited with paused oars, seeming not to care much about the goose, but caring about my care. I rubbed my fingers over the ruly bird’s webs to warm them, and the ice melted all shiny and dewy as the goose stared into the distance, patiently or bluely, I could not tell. The goose free, we moved on.

//

Tuesday night I felt a stabbing at the bottom of my foot; ignoring it I woke in the morning to the same pain and could not run. You sat with me in the dining room and took my foot in your palm and tried to maneuver the splinter out, spaded with your tweezers the dip in the soft spot of the sole, right beneath the ball, asking, “Does this hurt?” I wanted to answer, “Yes, and I love you,” but I could not tell you I loved you while you held in your hands something so rude as my dirty and wounded foot. You could not remove the splinter, but with time it came loose on its own, or else the soft cheek of my sole grew hard enough to enclose the shard.

————————————–

Devan Murphy called us from Pittsburgh, PA.

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Chocolate Polynesian brown was beckoned

to the land of the long white cloud

to work in factories, freezing works, docks,

was beckoned to work hard,

send money back to islands of hibiscus and frangipani

But chocolate Polynesian brown got swallowed,

digested in a stomach churning with acid-filled hate

The outcome? That other shade of brown

//

But dawn,

because you covered your eyes with the dark hands of night

batons bashed on doors,

scaring pregnant women, given barely enough time

to dress while dogs spat their barks through bared teeth

But dawn,

Because you hid behind the horizon

torches blazed, blinding,

breaking sleep and families

as parents were taken from screaming kids

to be jailed then charged then sent back to the islands

Dawn,

because you were silent,

because all murmurings were silenced.

————————————–

Cindy Kurukaanga called us from Aotearoa, New Zealand.

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I studied Italian painters, Giorgione, Titian.

At one job, I’m a glorified secretary.

I answer the phone in my professional voice

and sell gaudy urns to luxe addresses.

My neighbor listens patiently, amused by my young life.

We’re the only Black gay men in our building,

so he has me over for Sunday tea. I fill our cups.

For the heart, he says, adding whiskey to his.

In the 80s, on a fellowship in Spain,

he practiced arias and translated Romani ballads.

After a concert, he presented Leontyne Price

with flowers wrapped in sheer blue paper.

Today, I argue Another Country is Baldwin’s best novel.

My neighbor shares a recipe for chicken paprikash.

Gone like that, he says, flipping through an album of friends

in their youth with fades and thick mustaches.

They could quote Mahogany. They cut up

in the house-inflected dark of a dancefloor,

worldly and glamorous as a Venetian painting.

I refill our cups. A splash of whiskey in his tea.

————————————–

Derrick Austin called us from Chicago, IL.

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so you do the next best thing

and you cut your hair

you follow a youtube video

and a confident-man-hair-stylist-type

shows you how using a mannequin head and swift movements

on your turn you take two ponytails

and the shittiest pair of scissors money can buy

and you snip away at your kinda-long hair

until it becomes less long and hopefully more shape

arms overhead

you’re diving

into what no one can say

today was the first day of April

you got rejected from a job opportunity

you remembered it’s your abuser’s birthday

you sit on one friend’s porch and don’t talk about it

you sit on another’s futon and you do

the night wears on

the day folds in on itself and you catch

a glimpse of your body in the toothpasted mirror

arms overhead

you’re picking fruit

we’ve seen this before

in fact we saw you in this exact position three months ago

in a stranger’s bathroom using arts n craft scissors

you saved the hair before immediately losing it

one day sooner or later you might find a bundle of your locks

wrapped up in a sheet of printer paper with November 24th 2024

scrawled on it in green crayon

there is so much you cannot control but you can choose

the crayon

the scissors

the bathroom where you’ll cut our hair the next time you have to do something

and you can choose what you do when that is no longer enough.

————————————–

Sarena Brown called us from Philadelphia, PA.

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People fell in love during the fall of the Roman Empire

and people were falling in love in 1930s Germany, the Nazis were coming into power and regular German citizens were going on dates and falling in love.

I have new tires on my car so I feel invincible driving to you through the snow,

I am driving to you and a song is on the radio that reminds me of you

and I’m passing all these other cars because I have new tires and it’s snowing so hard but

maybe I’m in love and I have to remind myself

that happy people can still die in a car crash.

There was happiness in 1930s Germany and at the end of Rome, too.

Falling in love doesn’t do anything for the climate crisis, falling in love won't save democracy. It’s late-stage capitalism, it’s the fading days of the Anthropocene,

new tires don’t save me from other drivers and love doesn’t save us from anything really,

but isn’t it nice, for a minute in the snow, to feel so wildly protected?

————————————–

Jill McLaughlin called us from Portland, ME.

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Dad was on the couch, mostly

starving to death in front of us

cancer, stage IV

(for this type, many don’t catch

the earlier stages, and of course

there aren't later ones)

we hung pinecone bird feeders close

to the house, bringing Nature near

when he couldn't go out

we talked about our shared

favorites: the praying mantis, female

cardinal, blue herons, black cats

we talked about Chris Christie taking a swing

at the Bully, about what the hell would make someone crazy

enough to walk into North Korea

we talked about how to take care of mom

where to find the passwords,

who to trust

we talked about the final moment

and how I might not make it

(I did, he waited)

we talked about how a summer would never

be enough time, as the days stretched out

my son, his namesake, waited in the cherry tree

————————————–

Annie Powell Stone called us from Baltimore, MD.

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