Don’t tell my sister --

sometimes I listen to music

when I’m doing Pilates.

Maybe I like distraction.

Maybe I want to feel

In community.

Maybe it’s ok because

 

I ignore the beat.

 

Today I tune in spoken word,

newly obsessed,

devouring the canon of

Andrea Gibson

their words

somehow stolen from my heart

before I even knew they were there.

 

I’m rolling like a ball,

tossed by the waves of

“Orlando.”

 

My rolling becomes rocking,

destabilized.

“If you are alive, raise your hand.”

Caught off balance

I rock on

 

And then

 

i collapse

 

Tears streaming from my face

body spasms

uncontrollable grief.

Bandanas ripped away,

revealing wounds

I didn’t know I carry

so deep in my heart.

 

I hold my queerness at arms’ length --

longing to clasp it to my chest

where it tangles in a quarter-century marriage;

testament to different times,

when it was the only way

we knew to define

love etched in DNA

before language bound.

 

Bullets stopped the Pulse

of friends I’d never know.

Dances I’d never dance.

Songs I’d never sing.

Stories I cannot tell.

But my pulse is steady.

Testament to my distance

from the epicenter of this

white manmade disaster.

Each sob

an aftershock

too powerful

to ignore.

 

They rain down bullets,

an American form of climate shock

too big to process

without going numb.

I start to list them

But by the time I begin

I’m out of date.

 

January 25, 2023