The gays want to know how B’s trip
to the settler colony went.
He says: What can I say?
It was a lot like the settler colony
where I live, but with a great desert flair.
Street life was fabulous over there.
The city’s rainbow flags were a school
of fish—plentiful, spry,
slick in their sidewinds,
a shield of gills turned one large gill.
B slid through security checkpoint
after security checkpoint,
each playing a different era of Madonna.
All over town, men held each other’s hands
and not-hands and smiled, sun-licked
on high-rises, far from thoughts
of where they were or how or who
was below. Parties every night.
At the club, B met a twunk
in a harness who would shout things like
We’re so lucky to be alive—as in: under
the molly under the red lights
under the ceiling
under the missile defense system
and not Over There, where, like smog,
gay hate hugs the air.
But this one queer kept trying to interject.
There’s queers on the fringes too, he’d start,
queers teargassed, queers shot
in self-proclaimed self-defense
while club queers choose which tank,
which cross-body bag to wear.
And each time he’d begin to speak,
the EDM would just keep playing
louder and louder, almost like
the DJ was doing it on purpose.
Leave a Reply