Pictures of Ourselves at Twenty-One
Those were the days we had amazing hair.
And bodies. And ambitions. Chutzpah, too.
“Look on our manes, ye mighty, and despair!”
Storytelling
The morning they saw the body in the river
on the way to school was also the day Jessica
said how she’d known all along that Seth
was gay and she was perfectly fine with it
Makeup
We were afraid to jinx it, so when my daughter emerged
from her dark bedroom for the first time in what felt like months
and came to the table with her soft face caked in cosmetics,
we all stilled our gazes, made certain not to react
The Ghost of Frank O’Hara
The ghost of Frank O’Hara taps me on / the shoulder whispering / and what about …
A Lesson in Metaphor
Another name for a penis is a microphone.
No one told me this. The radio had to pull me aside.
It’s a metaphor, of course.
Body Talk
Sometimes in airports I leave my body behind—
my old body, I mean. I step into the younger version,
the one where I flirt with just about anybody,
who cares, because nobody knows me—