MAYDAY

Heterosexual Middle Age Males
by Terry Adams

Contributed By:

I lie down with you, I feel my beard crush into your beard,
I remember pressing my 14-year-old face
to a mirror to feel the prized whiskers
crumble back to me.

I finger the lumps on your balding head and you feel me.
Our hair has retreated.
Our stomachs have moved softly out into the world.
When you rise and walk to your shoes

I see the wear, the used look. You hang from your frame
like towels. No soft drink will ever claim you
on TV. I think of you as old full flowers
hanging at dusk from a fire escape

in an alley above a stage door
where those trim young guys would see us hugging and
imagine the AIDS virus boiling off us like flies.
Because I have not stood up, you come back,

drop to one knee, then the next, sway a little in your weight,
and fall on me with a growl that says
we are wrestling, asking would anyone
want to touch you, how shall I try to love you,
how shall I love myself?

 

 

Return to table of contents for Issue 10 Fall 2016.

Filed Under: Poetry

Further Reading

Wasteland by Ghalib
(Translated from Urdu by Tony Barnstone and Bilal Shaw)

Again I recall her tear-glazed gaze. My heart and liver call out, thirsting for my lover. Doomsday had not yet paused for breath when I recalled the time you left. Oh, Desire, your simplicity makes me recall my lover’s witching glance. Excuse my longings, O thirsty heart. When I call out, I recall my lover. […]

Reserved for the Son by Bryan Paiement

I experienced my first and only peep show when I was thirteen. My father, Pierre, was coaching a junior level hockey team in a tournament in Montreal, Quebec, where he grew up. I wasn’t old enough to play, so I tagged along as the team’s “stick boy.” Fifteen hours north of our hometown of Roanoke, […]

WOUND an entry from A Whaler’s Dictionary by Dan Beachy-Quick

Ahab is not driven by pride; he is a man guided by wound. This wound is worth meditating on, for it can explain more than anything else the nature of the relationship between an I and a You. When Ahab lost his leg to Moby Dick’s scythelike jaw, he simultaneously struck out with a dagger […]

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