Barbara Rockman
Summer Theater: Still We Lust After
Because it was going to be Monday and the theater dark, the first boy I loved drove past midnight with our band of line readers for the famous actors and light techs for the famous directors, prop makers and scrim painters, across the Bay State to the sea.
We spent the night on Plum Island, most duned, uninterrupted beach I’d ever walked. I lay down on the soon dawn sand and when I woke, across my body sandy tracks, claw prints of a huge bird that had crept up one side, crossed over, wandered off and disappeared.
And there he stood, the beautiful long-haired boy smiling over me, dangling the stick he’d drawn with.
The next week I stood by as he bowed his long frame into a glass booth on Main Street of the Berkshire town where we worked. “I’m going to lie.” And to a draft counselor on the other end of the black phone, “I’m gay. What can I do?”
His number closing in on that war. My wanting his long bone hands to want my untouched breasts. It wasn’t of course a lie: not the jungle massacres nor his love of men nor the pandemic that would silence him.
Barbara Rockman is the author of the poetry collections to cleave (University of New Mexico Press, 2019), and Sting and Nest (Sunstone Press, 2011), winner of the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award and the National Press Women Book Prize. She teaches poetry at Santa Fe Community College, in private workshops, at Esperanza Shelter for Battered Families and with OutsideIn Arts with people living with mental illness.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Once again, today’s poem is about the loss of a loved one to AIDS, this time in the form of a prose poem. Write a prose poem addressing any aspect of HIV/AIDS—risk, testing, prevention, treatment, living with, loss of a beloved, shame, stigma, pride, etc.