ISSUE: Winter 2018
Who’d have thought this wine made from the flowers of wild gorse
would turn out so well? How were the flowers ever convinced to give up so much
of their coconut aroma, their slick & electric yellow? On the radio a tenor is bouncing
his voice around Purcell’s baroque arpeggios & this is the fourth clear day
in a row & that strong light is throwing shadows over the ground like gothic script.
I’ve been walking around the city being beautiful & I have photographs
to prove it (I’ve learned, recently, to make myself beautiful by a certain sweep of the fringe, or forcing a correspondence between my nails & my lips by bringing each to the same pitch of red).
To think I’ll have to go home later & try to sleep while my skin hums with all the heat
it’s absorbed these hours spent marveling at everyone’s tulips —
their heads are like little novas! Often I envy the Scandinavians for their months of sun,
unpunctuated. I think I want some kind of salad. I want to feel like a real boy, sometimes.
