Two Poems

Miami Gay Pride

Alas for the prisoners of masculinity
who would not be caught dead holding
a man’s hand on the boardwalk between
South Pointe Drive and First Street,
where even hetero couples get swept
out to sea, crushed under condos or
washed up on the beach to be eaten
by realtors. What do you want, nothing
is perfect. (But it might be survivable.)

Lost in this city for eons, afraid of
HIV, of police, of dying and nobody
notices, of living & nobody notices,
of the people afraid of me (including
me), of men who need you to know
they like GIRLS (whatever), rescued
by a guy schlepping Domino’s for ten
years with no Wi-Fi and he still can’t
speak English. Yep. Feels like home.

My life unfolds in the dysregulated
hands of a clock TikToking off sun
showers in Adderall City, anesthetizing
stylers arriving by invitation only from
Argentina and Latvia and NewYorkCity
rolling up on Soho Beach House where
a Russian model sacrifices two french
fries and one bite of a half-pounder as
an oblation to the Versace angel.

If you fall into the apps without a life
vest, you may awake with the heir
apparent on a palmetto runway to
Millionaire Row. Cloned by a 3-D
printer in an intracoastal bird cage,
another Giza on the a$tral plain,
orbiting Planet Her on a flexible
itinerary the way a menu flies out of
some pop up: strictly “need to know.”

Smoothing the synchronous pillow
case into divipada pitham—bridge
pose—we met in a sketchy nebula.
Then he crawled his way out of me
like a poem, the umbrella a robotic
arm with webbed fingers carrying
us to Puerto Plata, bone-sweat-like
silver-tears on Bro-meliads. Rain
or shine, these sprinklers revolve.

They never quench this/thirsty/soil,
hungry tendrils caressing each tender,
shrinky bud and leaf, exfoliating piña
colada in the sauna, arroz con pollo
and fryde plantains at the mercado,
or an officer responding to another
unscheduled, eventual emergency
at the World Museum of Erotic Art.
(Humanity was going up in flames.)

Percolating through the food court
at Lummus Park, the carmelized chunks
are melting into sweetness, ripened
grains imbibing the savory juices. ¡La
Vida! In a heartbeat the world flips &
you can see from the Mariana Trench
through a glass-bottom boat an ahistoric
collapse of a pre-histeric ghetto.com.
Now Jews will be living north of Fifth!

You can be gay here during Pride,
he says, Erotes serving elotes on
blushing wings from a fully-erect
coconut grove on Ocean Drive, chin
strapped police & jock-strapped
waiters, flirting with the Michel-
angelo at Marshall’s admiring your
microfibre boxer briefs (say it 3x
fast lol) if all your sales are final.

But you can’t go out, because abuela
got catfished in a dream, lost her
iPhone, her rosary, her conscience.
And you will ride this sparkling
elevator alone through security forever.

Blind Date

Pulling up in darkness I’m “I think I’m here,”
and you saying prove it with a pic of your bldng
okie, which felt over the top but still I took
it through the cold glass the lights bouncing back
in my face from every direction & you were like
okie. Idk it’s like you couldn’t look out a window
where I parked or if you did you couldn’t believe
your own eyes.

Off to the left flies a giant American flag but I
don’t think you recognized any of that color-
blind landscape, the cars at the dealership near
the frontage road crossing an ocean you
never noticed like stepping onto another
planet through a door you may never see again.
How do you find your way back to a
strange place?

Waiting for an hour I drove off once but you
said to come back, and there was a licorice
whip of man-shaped hole in the snow the
smoke out your mouth a lit fuse burning into my
car under layers & layers of Gucci frosting which
granted it’s cold but you turned the weather into
another layer. No wonder you took so long
getting dressed!

“Are we staying close?” was you asking where I
lived like a scared vampire timing his exposure
to a world of curses to a white boy lost here in the
hackles of your suspicions like arguments you
rehearsed upstairs for the last hour about why you
shouldn’t come down and get burned so that
even a condom might be held against you at
the inquisition.

I’m going to New Orleans, you said later,
to be closer to “my people,” but it wasn’t
your family you wanted, either but the culture,
is what you said not soul food or jazz or voodoo
or not just that but lying still on warmth of black
asphalt under a hot moon and the earth stops moving,
no more questions where you are living with the
windows down in a place that you can see with
your own eyes.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.