I saw you that summer, in the club by the plastics plant under I-87, where the dance floor throbbed below the throttle of cars on the road to New York City, the bass from the DJ booth thumping the room, filled with sweat and glistening chests like a common heart, behind the blackened windows, past …
for Bette Midler On a good night, Barry would sit behind the piano’s black barge wearing nothing but a towel, tucked and knotted on the side into a white blossom, the hedge of his brown hair blunted into a soft shag. You’d pace in front of the drum kit acting bawdy, brave, at home on …
for Armistead Maupin I’d like to die if heaven is San Francisco, if it’s 1976, Halloween. I’d sit under the whitewashed stairs sharing a hash brownie with Mrs. Madrigal in her jade and crimson kimono and watch the queens roll by dressed as nuns, the bay light sculpting their bodies’ shadows on a row of …
There was always one girl who got too drunk in Lisa’s backyard that summer, face down on the cement lawn that circled the pool like the gravelly mineral clasp around a bead of turquoise on a necklace, mumbling a whiskeyed rasp to “Brown Sugar” shaking the speakers’ black cabinets. It was usually Dorothy, the plain, …
My skin was pulled taut to cover, and my feet were staked to the ground, and once they were gone, they still came back to me for shelter, until they were grown, close to full-size, and then I folded up those sections, flaps that were my skin, pulled up stakes, and they became feet again.
If the table’s edge were not there, she would have caught herself with her hands, and I could have picked her up and kissed her sore palms. If her foot hadn’t twisted and turned her body as she looked the other way, she would have walked over to her brother and joined him playing. If …
They keep working, folding into palm, reaching out, free for moments at a time; while you cannot speak with your mouth, they grasp the hand that is offered; they remember how to move to a song you’ve forgotten, how to touch and hold and let go. They are your last extension, the furthest reach you …
runs from the middle of my head, splits into different paths on my forehead where so much of the work of piecing together occurred. I was a grown woman with both my parents around me as if I was a child again as the doctor worked post-car crash sewing and knotting and picking out turf …