When I think of love, I think of girl groups from the sixties, the jangle and rasp of the bruise put to lyric, the boyfriend who will never come back, the three-part harmony that returns him to the world. When I left, the earth migrated. I could not touch ground, not from ecstasy or the …
I put it in the boat, which swayed through the yard’s green sea. Oars clipped roses, gone blue now under the starred light. I was afraid of what I’d left behind, what might follow. I was left with nothing: swallow of water in the bough, the neighbor’s dog rolling in the moon’s creamed bowl. There …
He leans into the ruined doorframe of The Edge on 18th Street, where the disco ball still turns dreamily over the worn parquet floors, casting its glass snow on walls postered with 70s porn. Drenched in drugstore cologne under the gauze of sulphur and smoke, he blazes in the early morning like a wig on …
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, …