Bryan R. Monte – AQ44 Autumn 2025 Book Reviews

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Bryan R. Monte
AQ44 Autumn 2025 Book Reviews

Jennifer Clark. Intercede: Saints for Concerning Occasions. Unsolicited Press, 2025, ISBN 978-1963115390, 170 pages.
Amlanjyoti Goswami. A Different Story. Poetrywalla, 2025, ISBN 978-81-984437-9-3, 241 pages.

I received five requests for book reviews over the summer. Not all of these titles caught my interest, but two really stood out because they were especially well-written, and coincidentally, both encyclopaedic in scope. Both are by past contributors to Amsterdam Quarterly. The first book is Jennifer Clark’s (AQ14, AQ17, AQ20, and AQ23) Intercede: Saints for Concerning Occasions about various Christian saints, from the first through the 20th centuries. The second is Amlanjyoti Goswami’s (AQ28, AQ29, AQ33, and AQ40), A Different Story, which offers various takes on a myriad of subjects such Indian customs, religion, letters, history, music, and travel, along with the poet’s love for his hometown, family, film, and particularly poetry.
      Intercede: Saints for Concerning Occasions confirms that Clark is not only a poet, but also a scholar. It follows in the footsteps of her previous and similarly well-written and historically researched poetry book, Johnny Appleseed: The Slice and Times of John Chapman. In Intercede, Clark covers a panoply of saints from the first century to the 20th. She investigates their spiritual qualities and their method of selection (originally vox populi before papal canonization was formalized in the 12th century). Intercede’s poems describe the well-known, such as Sts. Ambrose, Andrew, Catherine, Denis, Jerome, Joseph, Lawrence, Martin de Porres, Monica, and Nicholas, and the more obscure such as Sts. Apollonia, Drogo, Jeanne de la Noue, Juthwara of Cornwall, Thecla, Vitus, and Wilgefortis. Clark’s catalogue even includes a Job Posting for Sainthood with the required skills and experience perhaps for application. It is Clark’s thesis, borrowed from St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, that it is not the miraculous that makes saints extraordinary, but rather their ordinary lives which they lived extraordinarily.
      However, Intercede isn’t a dry, ecclesiastical tome. Clark’s erudite but accessible poetry and humour brings these saints, even the mythological ones such as St. Ursula, or the creatures they fought such as St. Columba’s battle with Nessie, that never lived, back to life.
      Another reader-friendly feature of Clark’s saintly collection is that 60% is traditionally versed, while the other 40% are prose poems. I imagine this is for those Catholic school students who were scarred not only psychologically but also physically by ruler-wielding, knuckle-whacking nuns, who not only enforced the punitive memorization of poetic lines, but also their scansion.
      Clark’s connection with Amsterdam Quarterly also goes way back. Long before she completed Intercede, Clark sent AQ her poem, ‘Saint of the Broom, help us learn your sweeping ways’ for consideration for publication in AQ20 in July 2018. This poem describes St. Martin de Porres: a poor, illegitimate, mixed-race, young man, who overcame prejudice through the simple act of sweeping. ‘(F)or eight long years, you swept your way through the friary’… ‘and made a clearing in the heart of the Dominicans’. Martin continued on his upward path, next as a brother…(who) ‘tended the garden, planted orchards of olives and oranges, lemons and figs.’ However, when asked by his fellow friars to poison mice, who were ‘chewing the altar linens’, Martin instead ‘whispered in the(ir) ears’ (leading them)…to ‘a safe path to the garden.’ Clark writes it wasn’t his ‘abilities to levitate, bi-locate, and heal,’ that made him stand out, but rather his ‘leaning in corners, unobtrusive, humble as a broom.’
      Clark’s uncommon and/or humorous approach to saintly lives is most apparent in her poem about St. Lawrence, ‘Patron Saint of Cooks and Comedians’, which begins in the form of a traditional bar joke and also gives a bit of early Christian history including the martyrdom of St. Sixtus II.

            A saint walks into a bar packing a punchline
            It’s 258 A.D. and Saint Lawrence’s friends’ heads
            are rolling in the aisles—including Pope St. Sixtus II.

Clark conveys this persecution through more comedy metaphors: ‘Rome, the opener, is just warming up.’ It demands Lawrence ‘hand over the riches’ (to the church) / or else he’ll suffer a similar fate.’ The poem further describes ‘the poor/ as his main audience’ to whom he gives the churches riches instead of the state. It concludes with:

            Rome roasts him on a gridiron. Rome thought it killed
            but it is really Lawrence, on fire with Christ, who kills
            that night. His closing line is perfect. “This side’s done,”
            he quips. “Turn me over and take a bite.”

In 2011, I visited the Church of St. Lawrence in Perugia with students from a memoir writers’ workshop in Assisi, led by Philip Lopate. These students might not have known much about Christian martyrs, but they could all recount the ‘turn me over’ quip about Lawrence as well as ‘The first step was the hardest’ remark about St. Denis, who walked six miles into Paris after being beheaded.
      However, Clark does not present being a saint as all fun and games. St. Columba admonished the Loch Ness monster to ‘go back with all speed’ and ‘She fleed…and never killed again.’ Other saints such as Sts. Gemma Galgani and Hedwig practised self-mortification by wearing hairshirts, chains, and flesh-piercing spikes. The former, in an act of extreme penance, threw herself into a well. (It’s said that an invisible hand pulled her out. She died of tuberculosis.) St. Simeon found monastery life too luxurious, so he lived, preached, and shat atop a plinth in the open for 36 years.
      Clark’s list of Christian saints also includes some DEI picks: a forgotten early female evangelist, who preached, baptised, and conducted services in the first century, a possible intersex saint to whom women prayed to be freed from their husbands, and three Black popes who later became saints. The female evangelist was Saint Thecla, a contemporary of the Apostle Paul. In the second century, her sayings were collected in the Acts of Paul and Thecla. However, over the centuries she and her message were forgotten due to later institutional misogyny. Clark’s St. Thecla says:

            …I fade away in a cave near the Aegean Sea where someone in the
            sixth century painted me standing next to—and equal to—Paul, though
            someone has come along and blinded my eyes and scratched the raised
            fingers of my right hand. As if that could take away a woman’s power.

Clark also mentions St. Wilgefortis, also known as Saint Uncumber, to whom women prayed to be freed of their husbands. She was a Christian woman who ‘begged God / to make her ugly, the only / way she could think to sheer / the suitor from her side.’ Although she was able to grow a beard because of her prayers, nonetheless, ‘her pagan, Portuguese King / of a father would crucify her.’ Clark’s poem, ‘Three Black Popes’, tells the story of three men of colour who led the church during its first six centuries, who were later canonized. The first was Victor in the 189, the second Miltiades in 311, and the third, Gelasius in 492. (Unfortunately, Pope Gelasius ‘condemned the Acts of Paul and Thecla as apocryphal.’)
      Clark’s saints also include those closer to home: her family and some of their friends, who were wise and kind. She even includes one concrete poem in the shape of half a ship’s hull, ‘Underwater Jesus’ in memory of Gerald Schipinski and sailors killed in boats on the Great Lakes. According to Clark’s notes, Shipinski lived Bad Axe, Michigan and was accidentally killed in 1956 by a shotgun he’d just received as a fifteenth-birthday present, while driving a tractor. His parents purchased an 11-foot crucifix to memorialize him, but it arrived broken. This cross was purchased by the ‘Wyandotte Superior Diving Club’ and later ‘repaired and maintained by another Michigan diving club’ … ‘Today it serves as a memorial for divers who lost their lives in the Great Lakes.’
      However, what I found as the most outstanding saintly characteristic in Clark’s roll call of saints, was their ability to forgive grievous harm done to them by another or to sacrifice their lives for another. Two saints that fit this bill are Sts. Maria Goretti and Maximillian Kolbe. St. Maria Goretti was twelve when she was murdered by a 20-year-old man, who stabbed her with an awl 11 times in the chest and three times in the back. As she lay dying, she forgave him. She later appeared to her brothers in dreams advising one to go to America to seek his fortune, and he did. St. Maximillian Kolbe was a priest, who gave up his life in a Nazi concentration camp for another, who was selected for execution.
      Clark’s poems and notes are reinforced by frescos, block prints, illustrations, engravings, etchings, icons, paintings, and photos ranging from the medieval to the twenty-first centuries. All help illuminate the persons in Clark’s pious catalogue: Intercede: Saints for Concerning Occasions.
      Art also plays a role in Amlanjyoti Goswami’s new poetry book, A Different Story. Its front and back covers feature a five-story building with two windows per floor. In some of these windows are silhouettes of children, large plants, a woman watering a plant, a violinist, and a bald man sitting on a window ledge on the front cover and painting a wall on the back, (perhaps the poet himself), along with monkeys climbing up electrical or communications wires. This cover provides a visual context and an additional meaning for the book’s title. It is a very large collection of 235 poems divided into nine sections: Wonder, Sorrow, Courage, Laughter, Anger, Fear, Compassion, Love, and Peace. This is the poet’s tribute to the nine rasas of Indian aesthetics, which serve as emotional foundations of being. The book is dedicated to ‘all the lonely people who long for a different story.’ The poets’ subjects include art, books, music, history, both personal and general, death, Indian geography, weather, culture, religions, and rituals, as well as references to ancient and modern writers and artists such as Horace and Fellini.
      Section I: Wonder, with the epigraph, ‘Sometimes the sky sees me’, starts this book off with a bang with a poem, ‘Turning Points’, about the events that are traditionally considered historic such as battles, thrones, and rulers. Instead of these standards, the speaker mentions three aspects of what he considers history: ‘…if the way you came back is different from the way you left.’ / …if no one remembers you anymore, even those you once knew.’ / …(if) during oral renderings of life stories…/ you moved someone from stone.’ So, right at the beginning of his book, the poet has set himself a tall order.
      Section II: Sorrow contains many of the book’s elegies: to the poet’s mother, the Indian jurist Fali Nariman, Indian classical musician Ustad Rashid Khan, and US poet and 2012 National Book Award winner, David Ferry, among others. In fact, this section begins and ends with poems about Goswami’s mother, a central figure and recurring figure in A Different Story. In ‘It’s only 4 a.m.’, the poet is present as his mother passes:

            Ma left in my arms,
            quietly without attention.
            The machine beeped a little
            And then she was gone

The poem includes memories of what his mother liked: ‘sea breezes, folk songs / Passages from the Gita / And lines from classic poems.’ Towards the poem’s end, Goswami sums up:

            In life, she was life.
            In death, she is an absence.

Goswami memorializes these people’s so simply and clearly that I felt in some way that I had known them too. In addition, these poems, especially the one above, could also be used as models for elegies in creative writing classes. The poem that bookends this section is entitled: ‘Ma did not see Bombay’ Its lines include:

            Ma is gone from this world
            And I don’t want to call her back
            Now that she is wind, and sometimes rain

      Section III: Courage begins with ‘Graduation Ceremony’, a poem which compares how ‘Grandmom continues to find meaning in small nuggets.’ while ‘her granddaughter wants to change the world.’ In ‘Baroda Pharmacy’, a child comes in with ‘a gash on the right arm, blood oozing’ instead of going to ‘the hospital next door.’ Nonetheless, the pharmacist cleans and dresses the wound. Section IV: Laughter captures the more sophisticated world of a slightly older narrator. It has many poems about inspiration, including the value of coffee ‘A good filter coffee is hard to find’, going to a traditional healer in the market for a dislocated limb, ‘Bonesetter’, film and the imagination, ‘Fellini asked me for a smoke’, procrastination, ‘Reasons for Delay’ , and the hope for success as a writer in ‘Success’.
      In the first poem of Section IV, ‘From a small town which loves sleeping’, the poet tries to define

            The urge to write
            What this means to me.

            Light streaks an open door
            Ideas and mosquitos come in.

Later in the poem, the speaker mentions the strange feeling of (self)-exploration poetry gives and the paradoxes it can create:

            Time standing empty
            When I step into my own shadow

            To greet the stranger
            I’ve never met before.

In ‘The Perfect Line’, Goswami writes about his difficult and sometimes interrupted pursuit of inspiration that ‘came to me while sleeping’ or ‘was hiding somewhere.’ or ‘Never arrived’.
      However, Goswami’s poems aren’t only about the personal and the artistic. ‘Final Settlement’ is a political poem and a detailed, categorical summary of the Union Carbide tragedy that killed and injured thousands in Bhopal, India in December 1984. In another poem, ‘War Clouds’, the descriptions could be applied to armed conflicts and political oppression in many places around the world: ‘Those who come in armour / Knock at a midnight door / Raining bombs on those with no umbrellas / Who think it is mere spectacle’
      Yet, Goswami does return to his family and his mother over and over again. In ‘My Mother wonders about Poetry’:

            My mother asks where these lines lead her
            She asks: why poetry?

A few verses later,

            She wonders if words have taken over my life
            Just like some people are possessed.

            By a will to live
            Other by a wish to die.

Likewise in the poem ‘Light & Shadow / What the Greeks knew’ the poet emphasises the contrast between the temporality of the human body versus the mind’s awareness of the cosmos’s eternity.
      Goswami also has several typographic experiments in this book. His lines in the second half of the later verses of ‘When my mother ran down the Street’ veer progressively farther away from the left-hand margin replicating the earth’s movement in a 6.5 earthquake, as told by a young man. Another poem, ‘Man in the Crowd’, the lines are right adjusted as in Urdu or Persian writing. It describes an older, legendary poet, Ghalib, who queues with the other people on the street waiting for food to be distributed. Once he has eaten, he smiles and ‘become(s) the Ghalib of old / and shares some secrets only he knows / Where poetry lives these days and what she likes & why / She doesn’t enter our hearts as often.’ Another centred poem is ‘What the poet Needs’, whose first verse is immediately engaging: A poet doesn’t need much. / Just the universe / And its broken shadow. A third poem with scatter shot, short lines, some with only one or two words, similar to William Carlos Williams’ variable foot is ‘The day she forgave her father’s killer’. Sometimes the two speakers’ lines are on opposite sides of the page, but sometimes when they try to reach some closure and/or a middle-ground, they are in the middle of the page.
       Section VII: Compassion has many poems about readings, wisdom, poetry and poets themselves, and also about translation. This section begins with ‘A Gathering’ where ‘Old colleagues gather in the common room / To read out poetry to each other.’ // A guitar strums in the background. / Today is not for theory.’ / but for music arriving slowly.’ Towards the end of the poem, the speaker relates: ‘When the room is filled with light / Verse enchants listeners with second sight. There are also more than a few unconventionally spaced or aligned poems in this section also. These include ‘A Visitor’, all of whose lines are in centred mode, about an old, very well-dressed man, who comes to sit on the veranda and watch younger people play in the sunset. The speaker admits ‘We didn’t know what moved him. / But we were gracious and let him be.’
      It’s a bit of journey, but finally in Section VIII of IX, on page 206, is the book’s title poem, ‘A Different Story’, about the different kinds of stories, how they unfold and how they exist without a reason:

            Some stories exist because they do.
            The best have no morals.

            They quietly fold into a bed sheet
            & step out before morning.

            Others stare long nights, howling with pain.
            Some enjoy a good night’s sleep.

However, The speaker also includes love poems on his list, which he says:

            They believe in themselves, breakfasts & long evenings
            These too exist without a reason.

The last section, IX: Peace, is composed largely of meditative and a few ekphrastic-like poems, which are dedicated to centring perception and the heart. It begins with the observant poet ‘sitting on a monastery bench watching leaves fall’ in which he sees ‘on my left, gray clouds advance stealthy as a platoon…on my right, closed doors of perception / remain locked for today.’ Two poems later, ‘The Heart of Silence’ appears to be in the form of a person sitting in meditation, centred in the middle of the page, trying to achieve its title’s state. ‘I am describing the heart of silence / The way I have been taught / Which is to say, with the least words possible’. In this section, the speaker tries to describe his illumination, sometimes with the help of art such as that by Pissarro and Hopper. For this reviewer, it has been a long journey, but well worth it. It has changed both the narrator and the reader.    AQ

Bryan R. Monte – Ground Zero/Islands in the Sunset

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Ground Zero/Islands in the Sunset
© 2025 by Bryan R. Monte. All rights reserved.

The desire to be of service to the LGBTQ+ community and to return to the place where I founded my literary magazine, No Apologies: a magazine of gay writing, was the reason I drove from the East to the West Coast the summer of 1987. I wanted to recover the momentum I’d lost while at graduate school and the year thereafter that I taught high school. I thought I knew what I was doing. However, I would soon realize I had underestimated the physical, psychological, and economic toll of driving into ground zero of the US AIDS pandemic.
       I was certainly aware of the pandemic. I’d kept up with the news and knew about HIV’s rapid spread among gays in San Francisco, New York City, and even where I lived in exurban New England. I had mentioned to friends it might be safer for me to stay there. They strongly disagreed. They felt that the rates of infection in outlying regions would soon catch up with those in New York and San Francisco, and the best places to be would be where the first new drugs and treatments would appear.
       I returned because I thought I could do my part and help inform people about AIDS prevention and care through writing and editing newsletters and pamphlets such as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence had done with their safe-sex pamphlet, Play Fair!. I had distributed it along the June 1982 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day parade route, and it just might have saved my life.
       However, even though I was informed about the pandemic and wanted to help fight it, I was still regularly shocked by its scale and how much it had changed LGBTQ+ culture. The two, weekly, gay newspapers, the Bay Area Reporter and the San Francisco Sentinel, instead of featuring adverts primarily for gyms, masseurs, barefoot gay cruises, and dance parties, now had double pages of AIDS obituaries along with adverts for estate planning, wills, burials, cremations, and legal and bereavement services. When I mentioned this to someone, they said: ‘Oh, you’ve been away for a while.’
       Former flatmates, partners, and friends also confirmed this radical change during my first weeks back. San Francisco City and County Supervisor Harry Britt, my former flatmate and domestic partner, told me that Bill Kraus, his campaign manager, had been diagnosed with HIV in late 1984 and had died after going to France for treatment in 1986. Britt also advised me ‘to assume that everyone was anti-body positive until you know otherwise,’ because statistically the infection rate in the city was then one out of every two gay men. ‘So, if it’s not you, it’s the person you’re with.’
       A few days later I went running in Golden Gate Park. I thought I saw Mike Belt, the designer of No Apologies’ cover, run by. I ran after this man, calling Mike’s name, but he didn’t stop. I eventually lost sight of him. Later that day, I called my friend, Roberto Bedoya, to tell him I’d seen Belt in the park. Bedoya told me I hadn’t because Belt had died while I was gone. It was then that I began my list of those I knew who had passed away from AIDS. It would eventually reach 33.
       My first visit to the Castro was also shocking. At Café Flore at 16th and Market, a hub for gay writers, I was surprised by how thin and aged some men looked in just three years. I tried to speak to one, a former boyfriend whose hair had gone grey. However, he couldn’t seem to remember me and he spoke with a tremor. Someone at the café told me: ‘Oh, yeah. The virus must have crossed his blood/brain barrier.’ While at Flore, I also overheard one man ask another where a third man was. The second man quietly answered: ‘He’s gone.’ Then I walked from Flore to Castro and Market and passed the Names Project at 2362 Market where inside men and women sat behind sewing machines making quilts for their AIDS dead. Thousands of these quilts would be displayed on the DC Mall near the Washington Monument just a few months later in October.
       Walking down Castro Street, among the usual gym-fit men, I also noticed an occasional man with a cane or a walker. At Star Pharmacy at 18th and Castro, I saw a triple row of white prescription bags sitting in the Will Call window, waiting to be collected. At the 33 MUNI bus stop outside of Hibernia Bank, I noticed more thin men waiting for the bus, which ran from Pacific Heights through the Haight and the Castro and terminated in Potrero Hill. This bus connected UCSF and San Francisco General Hospitals, the main AIDS research and the in- and out-patient treatment hospitals. Walking back to the Castro from the Mission on 17th and Prosper Streets, I’d sometimes see men sitting in cars, outside the Castro-Mission Health Center, gripping the steering wheels and staring ahead, either afraid to go in and get their AIDS test results or trying to pull themselves together after they had.
       In addition, there were people I had rarely seen in the Castro before: parents. As their children’s illnesses progressed, a few arrived to assist them with their treatments and hospitalizations. Two parents were most memorable. The first was a mother and her adult son walking across the street together at the intersection of Castro and Market. They wore matching sun bonnets with broad brims and holes for ventilation. As I looked closer at the son, I noticed the brim and the holes helped to partially mask a face freckled by Kaposi sarcoma. A second was a father wearing a green, John Deere cap above a sunburnt neck and his pre-teenage son sitting in a restaurant. As the son enjoyed a slice of chocolate cake and a glass of milk, his father rubbed his tired eyes and creased brow and silently drank his cola. I imagined the boy’s mother was with an older sibling either back in hospital or at his/her/their flat.
       As I said previously, I was prepared for the severity of the AIDS health emergency. I had kept up with it in the news. However, I was unprepared for rents that had doubled in the last three years. From 1982 to 1984, I had rented a two-bedroom flat in the Mission for $450 a month. Now they were $900 a month. So, the salary increase I had anticipated obtaining with a Master’s degree would be wiped out.
       In addition, San Francisco was experiencing massive corporate restructurings such as Joan Didion wrote about in Where I Was From. Companies were downsizing and reorganizing, shedding jobs and employees and/or moving to ‘lower wage regions’ in the American South and Midwest. I discovered the previous promises of employment, through my university alumni networks the winter before, were no longer valid.
       Fortunately, I still had health insurance through my former employer’s COBRA plan for 18 months and a place to stay for a month with Dennis Green, a friend from my UC Berkeley days, so I had the time and space, physically and psychologically, to get my bearings. I also had contacts in employment agencies where I had worked previously.
       In the meantime, I checked in with other friends from my first stay in the Bay Area from 1980 to 1984. I drove up to the Berkeley Rose Gardens with Greg Murphy, where he took some photos. I also cycled with Bedoya from the Panhandle to the beach and back and we had a BBQ at his house. From Bedoya’s I called Tobey Kaplan, who I had published in No Apologies, (and many years later in Amsterdam Quarterly). Kaplan invited me to come teach a poetry class with her at an East Bay high school. The class went well and she asked if I’d like to teach part-time in the prisons, a job which offered health and dental benefits.
       Then, I found a two-month stay in Pacific Heights with a Brown alumnus. He offered me a room in exchange for housesitting while he went on holiday. It was good that I did because one afternoon I came home from work early and saw two men in the back garden trying to break in. When they saw me, they hopped over the back fence. I called the police and two policewomen came right over, chased the would-be burglars, and then took my report.
       Finally, a break came in October at a San Francisco insurance company, where I’d been sent by an agency. On my first day, I heard one of the underwriters sighing as she pressed keys trying to get one of the office’s only two PCs to work. I went over and asked her if she needed some help. She said she wanted to work on a policy rating, but couldn’t get the computer to start properly. On the screen was the message, ‘Insert a system disk and press any key’. I looked in the diskette caddy next to the computer for a DOS disk. I inserted it and pressed a key to get a prompt. Then I asked her what type of program she was trying to use.
       ‘Was it for word processing or a spreadsheet?’
       ‘What?’ she asked.
       ‘Was it to type words or numbers?’ I added.
       ‘Numbers’, she said.
       I took the operating disk out of the drive and looked in the caddy again. I saw various program names with which I was unfamiliar. However, one was called Lotus 1-2-3, so I thought that would probably be for spreadsheets instead of the ones with ‘Write’ or ‘Word’ in their titles. I looked in the disk’s file directory for the .exe files. There were two: one was Lotus and the other was 1-2-3. I tried one of them and brought up the program. Then I asked her to put her data disk back in the drive, I did a directory search, and loaded her most recent file. She beamed at me happily as if I was an Egyptian priest privy to the secrets of the afterlife.
       ‘Would you like a job here?’ she asked.
       Next, I had to find a permanent place to live. Through newspaper adverts, I looked at places in Silicon Valley, whose rapidly expanding tech companies I’d heard so much about in the media. I placed an advert in one of the gay newspapers. After looking at about a half dozen places, I chose a flatshare in Mountain View for six months. After that, I shared a house in Cupertino for two years. During this time, I commuted up to San Francisco on Caltrain to work in San Francisco or later, drove or took the bus to the company’s San Jose office. After work, I’d run on a local high school’s dirt track or along a trail in Palo Alto.
       I also attended the weekly, Stanford Gay and Lesbian Alliance meetings, at the Firehouse, near campus. Here I met men and women from the surrounding suburbs, who I sometimes also saw at weekend house parties. Many of them were electrical or mechanical engineers, computer programmers, architects, and copywriters, who had studied at Berkeley, Caltech, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. They worked in Silicon Valley’s large aerospace, computer, defence, and intelligence industries or at their own small start-ups. Many belonged to High Tech Gays, an IT professional group that met monthly.
       Some of them had already tested positive for HIV due to the big, mid-80s, AIDS prevention campaign to get tested. Unfortunately, many who discovered they had seroconverted also realized statistically they had a life expectancy of one to three years due to articles in the press and what had happened to their friends with HIV. One man, an Ivy-League educated architect, told me he felt like he’d been given a death sentence because there were no drugs in the pipeline to slow down let alone stop the progression of HIV. In addition, in 1988, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) still insisted on strictly run, double-blind, drug test trials and forbade experimentation with more than one untested drug on patients, even for people, many of whom had few years to live, who were willing to volunteer to take the risk of testing multiple drugs simultaneously.
       During this first, full year on the West Coast, I did have time to visit and get to know another gay company employee, Ken Blaylock, in San Francisco, who was antibody positive. He mooed to break the tension when he returned from receiving his experimental cowpox shots. We occasionally went out to dinner, and/or to a film at the weekends, drove up to the redwoods or out to the beach, sent each other holiday postcards, and spent one New Year’s Eve together.
       I also visited gay poet and Manroot Press publisher Paul Mariah in Agua Caliente in Sonoma County. He was grieving the loss of his partner, who had passed the previous March. Mariah had cared intensively for his partner during his last months, even setting an alarm every four hours, so he could get up and move him to prevent bed sores. When his partner died, Mariah was angry that the county newspaper wouldn’t identify him as the surviving partner in his partner’s obituary.
       However, even though I had returned to the Bay Area and found a job, I still had little time to help the gay community and to write. Once I started working full-time for the insurance company, I was required to attend weekly night school courses to learn insurance concepts and formulas and apply them to case studies. I was also required to pass three general insurance exams within two years. (That gave me only one chance to retake one of the three, semester-long courses’ three-hour exams.) Otherwise, I was told I would be required to repay the company $2,000 for the classes and I would be fired. (At that time, I also had $7,000 in student and car debt).
       During the next year and a half, I passed my insurance exams. I transferred up to the corporate headquarters in San Francisco. I found a flatshare through Paul Roth, a pianist at a Nob Hill hotel, who told me about a friend who was looking for a flatmate. This flat was coincidentally in the same block in the Mission where I had lived before I had left for Brown.
       After working in three offices, I finally felt I was coming into my own at the company. I was in charge of the installation, maintenance, networking, and backup of 32 PCs and their data. Through my work I was exposed to the latest operating systems and software even though I sometimes had to buy them myself before the company adopted them. For example, I bought and installed Windows 3.1 on my computer. My boss noticed its iconic, flying-windows screen saver and remarked, ‘It’s just a fad.’ Six months later I had installed Windows on every PC. Nonetheless, I was happy to be working and living in San Francisco again. From my desk many floors up, I could sometimes hear the clang of the California Street cable cars’ bells.
       I also finally had the time to start my first writers’ group. Through adverts in Poetry Flash, I soon had a group of five or six writers who met weekly in my living room, though they didn’t always attend the same weeks. The core of this group were three writers: Ronald Linder, Donna Kreisel Louden, and Andrea Rubin. We discussed and critiqued poetry, fiction, and other prose. Other writers came and went, but these three stayed in contact with me and shared their work for at least a decade. For example, I assisted Linder with editing and typesetting two poetry books: his Animals on the Roof in 1991 and Dancer Stay Out in 1993. Poet Ed Mycue also occasionally stopped by. He’d entertain my students with saucy tales about my ‘former life’ as I referred to it, when I first lived in San Francisco, before my graduate scholarship to Brown. Some students would attend the workshop just in the hope of catching Mycue again.
       Around that time, I met writer Marc Dulman at the Walt Whitman Bookshop in the Castro. Through him I came in contact with a gay radio group at KPFA-FM in Berkeley. Their news reporter had taken a leave of absence to care for his partner, who had AIDS, so I offered to do the weekly news and bi-monthly interviews. I covered mostly LGBT legislation, new AIDS treatments, AIDs protests, and cultural events. My interviewees included John S. James, editor of the AIDS Treatment Newsletter, about new AIDS drugs and treatments, Eric Rofes, director of Shanti Project, about housing assistance, Stan Leventhal, publisher/editor of Heat Publications, about gay books, and Heiner Carow and Dirk Kummer, the director and the star of the ground breaking East German film, Coming Out, among others. I also covered the Left Write! Writers’ Conference where I spoke with Allen Ginsburg and James Broughton.
       One of the last and biggest stories I covered was the Sixth International AIDS conference in San Francisco, which also coincided with Lesbian and Gay Pride Week in June 1990. There I witnessed its thunderous conclusion. LGBTQ+ and AIDS activists flooded the conference hall to protest President G. W. Bush’s administration’s slow response to the pandemic. US health secretary, Louis Sullivan’s short, concluding speech was interrupted and sometimes drowned out by protestors with air horns, a hand-cranked police siren, and chants of ‘Shame, shame, shame’ and ‘Turn your back’. Some also threw pennies and paper airplanes at the podium. It was the most important story I ever covered.
       It had been almost a three-year wait to get back to what I wanted to do since my return to the City, but now I was back in my element. As I wrote in my previous memoir, ‘Write/Right to Speak’, I had hoped that one day I would report on a cure or at least a successful treatment for AIDS, but that wouldn’t happen for another five years. By then, many of my friends and acquaintances, such as Blaylock, Leventhal, and my childhood friend and artist, Jerome Caja, would be too weak for the new drugs to save them.
       Running a writers’ workshop and gathering the news and interviewees for my portion of a weekly broadcast also placed significant demands on my time: about an hour for each minute of airtime and about 30 minutes outside of workshop for each student’s submission. Unfortunately, this left very little time for my own creative writing, which was largely confined to journaling.
       Unexpectedly, in the summer of 1990, there was a very disturbing change in my Mission neighbourhood: four homicides in four months within four blocks of my flat. My funky, artistic, multi-cultural neighbourhood had not improved as residents had hoped. Instead, it had become dangerous, so I had to move for my own safety and that of my students’.
       Fortunately, I heard about a flat share out by the beach, just down the street from Golden Gate Park. Months before this, I’d dreamed of an ocean-view flat. So, after a brief interview with my prospective flatmate, I moved from the sunny, warm Mission to the cooler, foggy, wind-torn, seemingly abandoned Avenues in the Outer Sunset. Here, blown sand that accumulated in the gutters was periodically scooped up by the City and returned to the dunes. From my third-floor living room window I watched the dune grass wave in the wind and saw and heard the ocean’s breakers. My students also liked the new location. It was much easier to find parking under those windows and they no longer requested an escort to their cars or to the bus stop, both of which I could see from my windows. Some nights I would even make it home from work in time to watch the sun set behind the Farallon Islands, 40 kilometres from shore.
       Then in February 1992, the pandemic literally struck home. Eight months previously I had met and fallen in love with a man. Within a few months, I moved him into my flat (my original flatmate had moved out months earlier). This man seemed strong and healthy when we met. He could pop doors off their hinges and move furniture without straining. He told me he practised safe sex and that his last HIV test was negative. However, around Christmas he developed a persistent cough.
       Two months later, I came home from work to find a note from one of my partner’s friends saying he been taken by ambulance to hospital with pneumonia. A few days later his official diagnosis was Pneumocystis carinii (now referred to as Pneumocystis jirovecii), indicative of HIV. I was shocked. However, while my partner was in hospital, I paid the bills and held down the fort. When he was discharged from hospital, my partner’s parents and siblings snubbed me, perhaps blaming me for his illness, and his friends moved him out one Friday while I was at work. They left so much rubbish it took all weekend and three, large bin bags to clean it up.
       Then, my downstairs neighbour died and his partner lost his mind. He built troughs of water in his living room, which he tried to part as Moses did with the Red Sea. This water leaked into the garage below, causing the ceiling to turn green from the mould. He’d also sometimes switch off the building’s electricity at the mains. Next, the guy down the hall with HIV went home for Christmas and never came back. ‘Another abandoned apartment’ my landlord remarked, and I wondered how many there had been in my building.
       I couldn’t mention any of this with my department colleagues, all of whom were straight. Once my boss had asked me if I was ‘One of those people’, after a gay friend, an employee in another department, dropped off some documents at my desk and shared some news of his recent weekend. To my credit I replied, ‘You mean one of those people protected by a city and county anti-discrimination ordinance?’ and we left it at that. I also called my mother to see if I could come home on unpaid leave for a couple weeks to recover from all that I’d been through recently. She said, ‘Don’t’—and I didn’t for the next 12 years. A few weeks later, driving home on the coastal motorway from Silicon Valley, my car was suddenly enveloped in fog and I couldn’t see more than a car-length ahead. Frustrated at not being able to really navigate, I suddenly thought: ‘What does it matter if I drive off the road and/or crash?’
       Thankfully, as it became increasingly likely I was going to lose my day job before I found a new one, it was my writer friends who kept me from ‘checking out’. To keep myself busy, I joined the Gay Macintosh Users Group (GMUG) with Linder. Through this group I was aware of the newest Mac advances and even those still in the pipeline. In addition, through Rubin I got a tip on free-lance jobs evenings tutoring Russian emigres in English. Lastly, I taught a once-a-week, technical writing course every other semester at the UC Berkeley Extension.
       Unfortunately, in April 1993 I was made redundant by my company. With only a $640 unemployment cheque and an additional $400 at most from three, part-time free-lance jobs, I soon realized I’d quickly burn through my savings to pay my $1,400 a month bills. It was then I knew my future lay elsewhere. Here I could no longer help others. let alone keep my own head above water. Finally, I stopped struggling to stay where I was. I conceded I’d soon be moving far away from ground zero and my view of those islands in the sunset.    AQ

Jane Blanchard – Penelope

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Jane Blanchard
Penelope

A man like mine could not stay home,
Not for a wife, nor for a son,
With all the rousing world to roam,
Sights to be seen, wars to be won.

Though he set sail so long ago,
There is a lot I still recall,
And life without him seems too slow.
Each day I work; each night I stall.

At times this house gets full and loud
As lesser men compete for me.
I never do enjoy that crowd,
Yet offer hospitality.

Most waking hours I weave and wait.
My husband may return too late.

Jennifer L. Freed – 2 a.m. Letting You Go

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Jennifer L. Freed
2 a.m. Letting You Go

Your footsteps in the hall,
down the stairs. Gentle creak
and click of the front door opening, closing
you off into the dark.

I know you’ve been jolted awake
again.

Or have not slept.

In the morning you’ll refuse to speak
of this–how you walk
your dread away. You will ask me
to pick you up from school. You will act
happy.

I am learning
that I can
not save you.

I am learning
I can only let you
go.

I lie awake,
give thanks for gentle streets, our quiet
town. For the dog
who trots beside you.

I am learning how to wait
till you come home.

Dick Westheimer – The Dark Places Are

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Dick Westheimer
The Dark Places Are

…deep in a bottle of ink before
the cap is loosed, before the pen
is dipped and the letters unfurled
on the quiet white of the page;

…between the covers of a book tucked
on a shelf—until a child comes by,
takes it down, opens it
and lets the words spill out;

…under the blankets of the winter-
made bed where my love and I
crawl in and illuminate the space
between the sheets;

…inside the husk of the walnut shell
beneath a fall of leaves,
a germ, an idea, a reaching
dream of a tree;

…where the roots of the tree
reach, where a layer of rock
stirs. Another resists. Thus
the birth of one more abyss;

…under the rubble of a hospital
blast, a toddler squalls, two
bare hands, bloody and raw, let light
in, brick by brick;

…in the heart of a bomb—
tick tick tick;

…in the heart of a man,
blood so thick;

…from behind my tight
eyes a tear works loose
into the sun-blind day;

…caught in the clench of my mouth,
pinched within my stitched-shut lips,
a song, a gift, waits its turn;

…deep in the lines of this poem,
where darkness searches
for a light that will not burn.

Kris Spencer – Porte de la Chapelle

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Kris Spencer
Porte de la Chapelle

his dreams are boats
in this watched city
they put spikes in doorways
a concrete pyramid
    in a window well
the benches are round
he wonders why
they want to make
this place of dreams
    a sprung trap
he has never seen
the sea he wants to cross
he remembers goats
    perched in
    olive trees
    staring out
sleeping on cardboard
beneath the underpass
there is always
the movement of the trains
like waves crashing
everyone is covered here
his turquoise coat
and pink shawl
    tied in the Tuareg way
he has his father’s face
    lined by years of searching
his mother’s hope
    hidden in a scarf

Guy Russell – A Visitation by Proxy

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Guy Russell
A Visitation by Proxy

In 2013 I spent a month in Verona, staying with a local family, going to Italian classes in the daytime, and having a lively social life in the evenings. Often after a night out I’d walk part of the way home along the Lungadige Panvinio beside the river, feeling happy, adventurous and high. On the late evening of this story, I was wearing a pale dress and had a piled-up hairdo which made me look taller, but it was March, so I’d covered my party clothes with a long dark coat. I was just coming towards the Croce Verde office when in the distance ahead of me I saw two men grappling and pushing in the middle of the street. I thought at first they were fighting, but as I neared it became clear they were lovers having a fierce row. The one on the left was marginally taller, with longer hair and a sneering face. The other, short-haired, began to plead and cry.
       I slowed, not wanting pass them too close, and was considering whether to detour up a side-road when the first man pushed the other to the ground, strode over to a parked scooter, and sped off. The other picked himself up, shouted something tearful at the now-empty street, and started walking away ahead of me along the riverside. Several times, though, he stopped to lean over the balustrade, looking down into the Adige as if to a kindlier inamorato.
       When I saw this, I quickened my pace, while still keeping a distance between us, in case I needed to dash forward and pull him back. He was quite oblivious of me, and shortly came out at the Ponte Garibaldi. As he did, I saw my bus coming, quickened my pace and caught up with him just as he got on. Sitting near the back, I continued watching him. He still looked so abject, slouched forward with his head in his hands, that I remained concerned. When the person beside me said scusi, I moved down the bus and took the empty seat beside him.
       ‘It’ll be all right,’ I said to his bowed head, in my imprecise and strongly accented Italian. ‘He’ll either sort it out with you, or if he doesn’t, you’ll be much better on your own.’
       He gave a start, and looked up at me with amazement and considerable fear.
        ‘What?’
        ‘Have hope,’ I said. ‘Everything will be fine.’
       He was staring at me still. I’d never inspired such a stare: it had respect, terror and utter belief. ‘But–who are you?’ he whispered.
       I shifted my coat a little, to give a glimpse of my white dress beneath. ‘I’m your guardian angel,’ I told him. ‘Now close your eyes. When you’ve opened them, you’ll feel much better.’
       Without a moment’s hesitation, he obeyed. My stop was coming up, and I quietly alighted. As the bus moved past, I saw him through the window with his eyes still closed, awaiting my orders.    AQ

Mantz Yorke – Innerscape

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Mantz Yorke
Innerscape

Now through the fleshy wormhole,
the camera transmits to the monitor
an orange disk in the blackness of space.
Not arid Mars, for this planet is outside-in,
Its surface traversed by rivulets of red.

The probe scans this monotonous terrain
till it lights upon the target–
a small, off-white cumulus,
like bubbles blown by a straw.

A metal loop sweeps again and again
into the cumulus, shredding it into wisps
that quickly disappear,
then a ball rolling to and fro
cauterises the scar.

Purple eclipses the disk–chemo
infused to kill any malign residues.
Someone switches off the monitor:
the procedure is complete.

Numbed by a spinal block,
I’ve been able to see for myself
(so I don’t need to be told, post-oblivion)
the tumour’s been excised.
At last, the beginnings of hope.

Caleb Coy – Last Day In April

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Caleb Coy
Last Day In April

We all found out you had lymphoma and I presented you with a set of anointing oils and a pebble inscribed with the word HOPE. The rock might as well have said LUCK, or PAIN. And you cried at the oils but not at the rock. Everyone flooded you with little cards with gold angels on them and words about love and prayer and friendship and family on the inside, and they sent you daisies and poinsettias and you never liked any of the flowers. Not even Dad ever knew your favourite flower was violas. I wish you would have told him your favourite flower was violas.
       The oils were frankincense, Rose of Sharon, Lily of the Valley. They came in a little wooden case and I couldn’t tell the difference between the three of them when I smelled them. But I told you to use the frankincense because I did the research on it, and I would check the bottle every week to see if you were using it, and I think you were. You kept them on the top of your hope chest where the perfumes used to be, like it was part of your ritual in the mirror every morning.
       Dad closed the door after we fought and wouldn’t let me in, but I want you to know I could hear him through the door and I know it was all his regrets coming out in tears. He didn’t share them with me, and I don’t know if he shared them with you, but I want you to know I heard him. And then later when I found him in the garage I knew he only did it because he couldn’t breathe because he was so unhappy it was toxic. I think that’s why he chose it that way, in the car. I like to think he was ashamed of himself, because that’s how I know you’d want me to remember him, instead of by what he said when you and him fought. I know you’d rather me remember him as ashamed of himself than angry at you.
       Remember in that cold afternoon in March when I came to visit you, and I sat by the window reading a book and you had the blinds pulled back. I was staring out at the tarmac and you asked what I was reading and I said “a Ferris wheel”? I said that because I didn’t like to look at you sick and that’s why I brought the book with me and the book was Running with Scissors and I’ll always remember that, but only because of the Ferris wheel. But I was reading and I looked out the window and instead of pavement and wind socks I saw a circus and a Ferris wheel, because I remembered that when I was six you took me up in that Ferris wheel and we reached the top and I wasn’t scared because you were there, do you remember? And I always remembered your face then because you were so happy to have your son at the top of the Ferris wheel and him not be scared by the height but instead he was thrilled. I can tell you this now because you’ll understand it but when I was five and in that Ferris wheel I wanted to marry my mom. I mean it in the way that you were mine and nobody could replace you. And so later I never wanted to ride it again because when I did it would be with a girl I would marry, a girl like my mother. But that’s why I said it, and probably also why I didn’t look back at you that day in March, because I just wanted to stare at your young face forever.
       There are so many pretty things in the world, Mom. I made you drawings of rainbows and cardinals and geckoes and skies, and you held on to them all. I found them again in a box in the closet underneath the wooden Santa figurine and the pack of Viceroys and the unopened sexy board game. I’m not embarrassed about the drawings, or the sex game or the smokes. I know you think they are beautiful still—the drawings, I mean—like how you said God looks at our vain ugly colours and our pain and calls it beautiful. Then he calls it up and away, like how the closet was full but your bed was empty.
       I didn’t want things to get all complex and tangled up, Mom, but I kissed a girl before I even asked her out because she said her mother was dying, and I told her my mother was dying. I hope you’re not mad because it was the truth and I really meant it, even though I wasn’t really sure if I was saying it because I was thinking of you, or because I wanted her to kiss me. I think you’ll understand it, and I wish you could have gotten to know her, but I didn’t want things to get all tangled and they did.
       On a Saturday when it was kind of paltry the elders came over and laid their hands on you, they poured the oils I gave you, and it dripped down to your shoulders where you rubbed it in, and they called for the healing power of the Holy Spirit. Bobby Tiede led the prayer while I sat in the corner with my hands curling over my knees praying to myself, staring at the lighting fixtures and the porcelain robin on the fireplace. I was hoping that between the frankincense and the healing power of the Holy Spirit we would never have to utter prayers like those again.
       Her name was Michelle, by the way. We were just at a party at a friend’s. It was after you and Dad had that fight. We were the only ones who didn’t want to be there and we found each other in the yard, because when you’re at a party and your mom is dying everything is enchanted in a way nobody else sees, and I know you know what I mean by that. She wasn’t standing over the rails or anything like girls do when they want to be found or they’re mad at what their stupid boyfriend did. She was hanging off to the side of some fake conversation with fake people and feigning interest and waiting for someone else who saw the moonlight like she did, for someone like that to come over to talk. I promise I didn’t bring you up right when she said her mother was dying because if I had it would have been sleazy and I don’t want you to think of me as sleazy. And I promise that wasn’t the night I gave her a hickey and she ran her hand up my leg and I wasn’t planning on anything like that happening while you were sick.
       So remember that day when you found her earring on my bed and asked me about it? I lied because I was terrified, and I didn’t want you to go thinking about me that way, because it would stifle what hope you had left. And her father wouldn’t even let me see her again after that, at least that was what she said. She told me from the bottom of her doorstep. There are so many pretty things in the world, Mom, like how you said God looks at them. And it was beautiful when she grabbed me by the wrist and took me with her and I said I didn’t want to go and make her father mad, but we left anyway. She took me with only her pyjamas and her jacket on, and we didn’t do anything, but we talked all night and I held her.
       When I found the drawings I made you I also found all the cards people sent. I found the photo album too. I can see why you put all the cards away, because you didn’t want me to see them everywhere and you knew I’d be getting more later. I got even more after I found Dad. I cut out the picture of you from when you took me to the fair and I put it in a frame by the window so when the light hit it just right in the morning you’d be transfigured, like how I’d pictured it would be when they laid their hands on you.
       Up against the wall I’m crying in my pyjamas and my jacket on, because I’m looking at your picture and I had to get away and I’m at the train station and I don’t even have a ticket or know where to go and I just want you to please come and get me but I know you can’t.
       It was two-thirty and black outside when your heartbeat stopped and I dropped my book and your eyes were closed because you had said goodnight already and I tucked you in and kissed you. And the doctor shook his head and later the chaplain came in and then the elders and everyone else would pour in to the house later and I just looked out the window and tried to find the Ferris wheel. And the room filled up with it all, and then the petals fell off the flowers and Dad threw them out and none of them were violas.
       It’s the last day in April and I’m caught under a hazy spring cloud and you’re gone, Dad’s gone, and Michelle is gone because she broke up with me because of what her dad said we were doing to her mother, who will be gone too. And when I woke up I thought you were smiling at me but it was just the sun on your picture. When the sun hits the picture just right, you’re transfigured, and you are young again and you are my mommy on the Ferris wheel with me, and it never stops moving, never stops bearing us up.
       There are so so many pretty things in this world, and you taught me the Lord made them all, but I’m still waiting for the violas to bloom and I thought that if I’m on the train and I look out the window I’ll see the fields of violas flourishing and never ending, and I’ll see your face in them smiling and young, and I’ll see the Holy Spirit moving across them, picking them and taking them up. And I don’t want everything to be tangled when I look for the violas and I can’t find them. I don’t want a mess like what I found in the closet or in the garage, even if it’s a beautiful mess, because in that mess is only memories and some of them I will never understand and they’re taken up and they’re gone.
       There are so many pretty things in the world. The hour God made you and Dad and violas and Michelle, and the hour I held her in my arms and I kissed her hair and that was it and she fell asleep and I closed my eyes and I listened to her breathing against me. And I took one of her earrings while she slept so that I could keep something of her in case she was going to be gone, which she was. And I know the Comforter comes like you said and I know the healing power, and I know he lifts us up and it all comes pouring out like oil upon an offering and everything is called up and up and up and I just want to tell you that me and Michelle, I took her to the fair, and we were riding the Ferris wheel, and that was the moment. I couldn’t buy her any flowers at the fair, I could only try to win her a stuffed panda, and the man tried to guess her age and he guessed too old and I think it was because her mom was dying and she felt so old in the world even when I held her. It’s cold in my pyjamas in this train and I have a book but I keep looking out the window hoping I’ll see you transfigured into a field of flowers, but it’s still too early for them to bloom. I’m looking for you now, and you were called up, and we were riding the Ferris wheel, Mom, we were riding the Ferris wheel.     AQ

Simon Brod – Grandfather’s Ghost

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Simon Brod
Grandfather’s Ghost

1.

Feeling my way inside,
past injuries, scars,
childhood mistakes,
I found my grandfather’s ghost
jabbing me in the ribs.

He must have always been there
but I hadn’t noticed,
only been dully aware of the clamp in my shoulder,
the load I was lifting, day in, day out
with my neck and jaw.
Now, all at once,
everything hurt—

white heat stabbed my breast,
ice cold stunned my lower back,
I was winded, deafened,

legs strained for support that had gone out of reach,
right cheek and brow spasmed,
ribs cramped
to make space for one last gasp

after his fall from a chair
in a prison cell in Vienna
in 1938
where he’d tied his own knot.

I said I see you now.
Can you please let go?

2.

The scenes of his life are grainy.
A small town in a flat landscape.
Trees. Fields. His father,

a maker of clothes for farm work.
Ten brothers and sisters.
No money, but warmth, laughter, song.

He craves colour, goes on a journey.
On foot. To the city.
Quick to charm,

he parties, studies, marries up.
Her uncle gives him
a fancy apartment, a job:

movie agent.
Looking down from the balcony
at the small people below,

he must have thought
Just like the movies.
Happy ever after.

3.

Now the score gets thicker, heavier.
Suddenly it’s laden with double basses.
A jackbooted black-winged deus ex machina
grabs him by the scruff of the neck and I’ll bet

he felt it coming, he’d been expecting
something like this, sooner or later:
the moment they laugh in his face and he chooses
to offer a knowing look to camera,
eyebrow arched, hands open,
corners of the mouth turned down.
They’ll write a reason to arrest him, one that’s in character:
he played the parvenu, or settled a debt,
or tried to subvert the future. Again.
Like it was a habit.

They have him in prison, in shadow, in silence.
Words don’t work here. He’s writing his last:
a letter to grandma. It’s tame for the censor.
Keep me within, in your loving remembrance.
Our sons, our sons, are better forgetting.

4.

There’s no last scene.
Officially, your death
was suicide.

I believe I see you
taking the lead,
eyes bright, cheeks hot,
carried by your own charisma,
playing the hero,
talking your way into a deal,
giving yourself up
so grandma and dad and his little brother will live.

But what would a camera have shown?
Were you calm or trembling?
Was it all your own work
or was the scene set, were you taking direction?

No, it was your idea. You called the shots.
I’m sure of it. Always the go-getter,
the daredevil, the eater of fate.
In natty clothes, now rumpled and worn,
pockets empty, bright-coloured braces
still peeking out from under your jacket.

I can’t imagine you
simply waiting,
doing nothing.
I can’t imagine you
not being able
to find a way out.

5.

What anger got stuck in your throat that day?
What unfairness, what terror, did you try to swallow?
What never-said words?

I cannot give them voice, only know
how your ribcage locks like a prison,
jaw tightens like a slip knot.

All I can do is bring you rest,
arms around the base of your shoulder blades,
the small of your back.
I touch your jawbone, the sides of your neck,
hold your feet,

take the strain from shocked bones,
feel them soften,

fill my lungs like a newborn
and live.