Song of Sappho
My love for you is a ship without sails,
knowing no harbor, sailing from nowhere to nowhere,
a game lost cleanly, a Greek tragedy on the sand of the amphitheater,
where you were the only one alive among dead decorations.
My love is Sappho’s elegies, strings, a storyteller of valleys and sorrows.
About how in this absolute world of evil the silence is stronger than
the cry of dry grass,
and no poison is more deadly, than an arrow flying into the void.
Anzhelina Polonskaya
Translated by Andrew Wachtel
Underwear Nostalgia
“Boxer shorts are no good for football,” coach said,
which meant tighty-whities for all of us in 1995,
colored briefs rare, boxer-briefs not yet common.
I was already a waistband watcher in those days
of teenage straight boys lifting shirts to wipe
sweaty faces. I came to know them by their brands:
Robbie Hanes, Jockey Jim, Frank who always wore
the FTLs with the blue and yellow stripes. How
predictable it would be to rhapsodize on “the basket,”
pushed up and out. I appreciated it of course, as you would
any playful zoo animal rearing up, pressing its nose
against the bars,
but it was the utilitarian fly fronts,
so readily associated with the easy masculinity
of fit dads reclining across two pages in the Filene’s catalog,
that “did things to me.” It’s what our teammates wore; it’s what
our fathers wore,
underwear of pubescent boners, of over-the-hill balls
beginning to sag.
In my dreams we’re all gathered in one high school
locker room, men of various ages, same style, different brands. Ryan
scratches his pouch. Darius adjusts himself without shame. Archie does
a handstand
while Dan and Mike hold his legs. This is the same casual intimacy we
had yesterday.
No one has a hard-on,
but it wouldn’t matter if he did.
Michael McKeown Bondhus
My Husband
For years I conjured up the man I would marry and
Live my entire life with. He was taller than me and more
Slender, a pipe-smoker, two years older, ordinarily solemn but
Given to rare bouts of silliness, less demonstrative than I
But more loyal, more truly affectionate. He could seethe
With anger but was good at containing it. Generous, sure of himself,
He liked it when I was honored; he always praised my writing.
His olive skin didn’t tan easily but looked best when slightly
Burned. He liked to crouch over me and fuck my face. His nipples
Were hard and black, leaking a scarcity of long black
Hairs. He was tidier than I. He remembered everyone’s
Birthdays. Trouble at work could upset him. Best of all,
He never tired of me and into my seventh decade he
Occasionally screwed me in my sleep and seemed quietly grateful in the
Morning over a breakfast of toast and butter and scrambled eggs.
Edmund White
Neither Here Nor There
At seventeen, I half-supposed my secret
wrongfulness might heal or normalize if I could turn,
by alchemy, into a girl. Would D. have wrestled me
to nakedness if he could squeeze plump virgin breasts
between his hands, instead of shoving me away
one afternoon to hide his fierce erection?
That night—reverting to my dress-up episodes,
pre-puberty, when I’d paraded in my grandma’s hats
and pumps—I locked my bedroom door
and draped a sheet around my face. I fantasized
enravishment by Darcy at high tea or rape by Grandcourt
in a boat at dawn. Arousal overwhelmed me
like a hot tsunami: surmounting wave, explosive
foam, then salts of self-disgust. That fall, when D. went back
to college in the South, the urge to change
my stripes just ebbed away. I accepted who I thought
I was, a lumpen nerd in male-ish form.
But underneath, in the soul’s oblivious tarn, a covert
river rose, then carried me, unknowingly
at first and then unwillingly, at last with buoyant thrill—
part-boy, part-girl—to a leather bar in far west
Chelsea called the Spike, where studs and queens
of many genders jostled. I floated there—
on a sea of horniness and sour beer—cruising warily
as newbies must—while bearded seals and otters circled
in the dark, eyes peeled for a guileless abalone
they could pry apart with lust.
Malcolm Farley
