Drift-Draft Drop on 17th (Afterglow, Fall-Out, Tech-Boom Zoom-In)
shimmying along newly arrived my face beaming
•
as my glance
over a stung-slapped instant trips over —
•
a tent
on the corner—unshoed—
socked feet sticking out—
at the intersection
of 17th and Castro and Market—
on Market, in front
of the shut-down
High Ends Up Barn—
falls
•
hits the brick walk like a sling-shot rock of the real
— broke-mouthless tooth —
singing a last gleaming in the refuse
* Originally published in Home: An Anthology of Lives In and Out of Place, eds. Sara Biel and Carla Brundidge (Colossus Press 2020, https://colossuspress.org/)
Missing You (Private Dancer Cover, Covid Era)
I.
Who is she? Who was she? Who does she hope to be? (Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band)
I don’t miss happy hour courtyard well margaritas at Toad Hall
or lapping up all that eye tonic-and-tease lagniappe
of the Castro muscle boys dressed
down for The Mix the heat the patios they’re
always too smokin’, anyway.
I don’t miss drag shows for the price of a $12 well drink at The Edge
so crowded, too narrow, but maybe we’ll meet new people we can
go out drinking and dancing with.
I don’t miss dancing
hot men and not-as-hot men
like me and the ones you wonder
have any value at all on the
“meat market” they call it—like that guy
eyeing me now—shaking
their thonged dongs as if their lives…
or maybe I don’t have even the slightest
whiff of longing for those hot-ass
go-go boys at Beaux
bending low on their poles
and stuffing their tips in
those perfectly cut jocks
as Tina tantalizes howlingly
(and yes, any music will do)
— How much for teabagging?!? —
Ain’t nothing free, girl!
Maybe they do, maybe I don’t
go for all that. Maybe it’s a seller’s market
(but aren’t we all really rentboys in these Modern Times, anyway)?
And to think (or so I thought) I always
just gave it away.
II.
I don’t miss escaping our tiny Castro apartment
for a patio
a warm afternoon
for the price of a $7 cappuccino
— worth it —
to work in the open air on a poem on
my $1200 laptop with a water back and
guaranteed obsolescence.
I don’t miss delicious fine dining special occasion “experiences”
with veggie plates that prove the vegetal world to be the
true realm of the sublime.
I don’t miss poetry
readings
bookstores
libraries
discovering the luminously singular pleasures
of a person’s erotic
melancholic
philosophical
bodily cum political
troubling of lines—like a new language I instantly knew
I had to know.
• • •
Maybe I do, maybe I don’t
very much miss having that
big place we only ever
video-toured, a wrap-around
balcony to write on for free
for the price
of a Bay Area mortgage
I mean
where we could throw parties
be invited to more parties
make more friends
make our lives
better for an overhyped dinner, making
community or whatever
and a life, such a life
we’d never have
to leave the house
and wouldn’t even miss the outside
world we wouldn’t even miss
leaving the country
on a cheap-as-shit roundabout flight
to Mumbai Montreal Montevideo or Madrid
too few can afford
being immersed in a cityscape
a texture and atmosphere
designed to bridge
hand and head, raise spirit from
dead matter, to gather
us in, built without doubt
by exploitation but it’s here
so why not take it all
in, all that art in
all these galleries and museums (it’s cheaper
to get the multipass) that feeds the soul
or some such
(doesn’t it)?
Then bulbous gin-tonics in the square (it did,
I swear, I felt it) I could
feel it (oh, yes, girl
they have squares there)
feeding me (or was that
on me), I felt something for sure
I did (this poor white trah-sa-shaying
Kentucky kid who
grew to think he’d never
heel a cobblestone off North America)
we should
move there
or
maybe I should stay with my husband
in our too-snug apartment writing all day
and never venture out (or almost, rarely, as
rarely as now, in the pandemic),
or maybe I should leave, get
my own place and write poetry all day
every day
jack off
or go back on Grindr even
pay for it, shit, it’s
easier and quicker god knows
and god knows time is…
poetry all night every night
I’m not hooking
up, poetry or sex and
nothing else
—but how
would I live?
So maybe a monastery
(Buddhist of course)
and meditate and garden all day and
meditate and sleep all night
to the silence-like lack of sirens
or maybe also write
some poetry or
innovative new sutras for the 21st C. or some such
and have sex with
all the other monks
or sing and chant all day
and either way
is it about cumming
or connecting,
words and nerves as receptors,
synapses and syntaxes
as transmitters
or both, are both
veritably the same
or opposites and either way—
disrobing monks or meditating,
writing poetry or planting seed,
sitting on monks or among the sage—
either way
shed myself of myself
(if we can ever truly break
out of our skulls)
and finally be nothing else but
— here —
or there
should we move there instead,
where it’s so unseemly, engorgingly gorgeous I can’t
take it? I’d love to but
how would we
live? We strategize and stretch the ways
after two days of La Biennale di Venezia
— the Art of the World —
in a drowning cathedral city almost no one
calls home this late
in the game, we little lost rats
in its narrows no car could pass, just like
Barcelona’s 12th C. Barri Gótic—no, there really is something
about a place built for walking around in
rather than driving over and through…
There must be or there once was
(once the whole city, this Roman outpost in what’s
now Spain, a real neighborhood once,
now used for day-bright boutique shopping and
nightlife tourist debauchery) once
upon a time, a life—
we probably all just missed it
like we almost missed our plane
and our cheap-ass tickets
nonrefundable of course
—shit!—
how could I forget—
karaoke at The Mint The Look Out
— Midnight Sun! —
I wish I could say I know by my heart
A chaaa-ange is gonna come…
Yes, it will…say it will…
• • •
Maybe I do,
maybe I don’t,
just now, as I type,
sitting here in San Francisco
on our sagging-seated
blue velveteen couch.
Maybe I know,
maybe I don’t
(it just feels so real
at times), late summer 2021,
standing outside
our apartment door and scanning out:
over the Castro, over the hills
of houses: Hazy morning, ringing noon, rainbow-lit night
(business signs, storefront lights),
knowing for sure (feeling
at least) this is what Getting-Back-to-
Normal’s getting back to: It’s what’s always only just
simmered beneath
that’s boiling over now.
Raging (Eco-Economics in the Age of Neo-Fascism)
San Francisco, October 2017
Afternoon leisure and lingering, a walk,
When an incensed scent of wood
Overtook the medicinal stench
Of weed on Valencia. Breathe it in.
Akin to kindling.
A kind of hearth-lit breeze.
Wine and singing days ago in Guerneville,
We fags and drag queens
Dancing warmly lit riverside
Beach party by fire pit.
Enjoying tastes along the way,
Jeff Cohn and Enkidu (swallow,
Don’t spit) along with Walt
Wines and Equality
Vines, to name a few.
The two of us
Drinking poolside a Monday noon
With the rest of the guests
Long poured out.
A final mojito
A fête accompli and now, back home, the
News Flies Open
Windscream
Sideways
Rainfire of embers
Spark Flash Blaze
Yesterday
Tomorrow
Whole towns
— Slammed down —
— Bombed out —
— Ground to —
Fog over
San Francisco
Not fog: indoor orders
Flames storming houses like a crazed Russian River
Gunning down Agua Caliente Road flooding
The valleys the hills the trees
The fire their sports car couldn’t outrun—ignited—
If only Chardonnay could shimmer back
To water to rain over
California
To bottle for
Puerto Rico: No water
To drink, blacked-out and flooded
Weeks now—Maria (flashes of
Katrina)—only a
Bounty of neglect of in-
Difference to, these in-citizens of
Whose Republic—remaining
Ignored and more and more
Running, these U.S. refugees,
To the foreign shores of
Florida—imagine Florida without power
For months—all those spoon-shoveled
Gold-silvered sand castles stormed:
— Diablo —
— Winds —
— Raging —
* Originally published in Interim 36.1
Michael Tod Edgerton (he/they) is a Queerboy poet of lyrically fluid gender and genre alike. Author of Vitreous Hide (Lavender Ink), Tod’s poems have appeared in Boston Review (annual contest winner), Denver Quarterly, EOAGH, Interim, New American Writing, Posit, Sonora Review, VOLT, and other journals. Tod holds an MFA from Brown, a PhD from UGA, and has received fellowships from Bread Loaf and MacDowell. He serves on the poetry-editing teams of Conjunctions and Seneca Review, where he is also Book Reviews Editor. You’ll find him swishing along the streets of San Francisco and online at MTodEdge.com and WhatMostVividly.com.