Argentina
In Buenos Aires
The thunderstorms
Roll in off the pampas
Like crashing surf
The city is a sand castle
Pretty
Insubstantial
Illusory
I fell in love there
With a poor boy
From “la provincial”
He was beautiful like a seashell
We gathered trash
Along the beach
At Punta del Diablo
For free beer
But I lost him
In the froth of surf
That battered the foundations
Of the great dream city
Later there was a rich boy
From Recoleta
A vase
An objet d’art
But unlike the seashell boy
When you put your ear to the vase boy’s
Beautifully scripted heart
There was no sound
Like lightning
But with no sound
Of thunder
After
I went away
Out across the pampas
To where the thunderheads rose up
There I met a gaucho boy
Who told me:
“They pop up like toadstools
Proud and towering
And go away too soon”
Trebor Healey
MRI
Strapped down on my back
in a sci-fi spacecraft,
I wait, like an astronaut,
for liftoff.
— Linda Pastan, “MRI”
After he mummifies me in white blankets
and secures my ears with old headphones,
a black, tipped-back tiara, the kind tech
slides me into this dark, narrow tunnel,
akin to an old morgue’s cold chamber,
only this weird geometry pumps out music
I once danced to nearly naked and sweating
in a plastic, wide-bar cage while guys
with dollar bills watched and wanted
perfect thrusts, squats, and glazed eyes,
their own cheap, firm grasps, a chance.
Not now. Some thirty years on, I lie here
obedient as a dead, bloated extra on SVU,
my eyes gauging closed space, and I want
to rip off the cheap shroud, noise blockers,
and silly gown, have the bouncer hoist me,
lithe, tanned, thonged, onto the platform so I
can grind for familiar scanning as trance
or techno pulse an expert meeting
whose warm mouth offers fireworks
and no regrets—
unlike this affair that leads right to the doctor’s
sterile office, disinterest, and pat speech.
Billy Clem
Meditation
I can’t sit still. Even my stomach wants
bustle, flurry. To move, to drive, to dance—
towards a picture, a voice. You, there. You.
This is how desire sits breathing, plants
itself in my body—no one looks askance—
twists its trouble through every bone, tissue,
muscle until it has what it wants. Shakes
me awake in the middle of the night—
no one sees the lack of idle repair—
until submerged in the languish, makes
me muse on the mystery, all that might
be, all that, in my imaginings, I dare.
Distraction both welcome and unwelcome,
lift this fog, this descent: bring rapture, come.
Amy Spade
