It’s a beautiful fall day in the neighborhood, slushies. Kathy’s in love with the equinox, Jason’s in his bathrobe, Joe has a new porn name (“Brusque 80”), and Marion is in air-conditioned climate denial. (It’s always sunny in Abu Dhabi!).
We kick off briskly with three poems by Blake Campbell. “The right parts of the brain light up / for the wrong reasons” in Campbell’s “New Year” and our brains can’t stop sparking about the wonderful terribleness of a bad day. Editors spar over the poem’s potential meaning, threatening each other with Billy Joel lyrics, and delight over debating who’s naked, who is reinventing themselves, and who is caught up in a haunting season.
We turn to “Chicken Hawk,” a long, skinny poem that surveys gay nightclub goers from self-depecating “vulture’s” point of view. From the NAMBLA documentary to Death in Venice, from unrequited lust to line breaks, we found lots to discuss. We talk otters. And bears. And Orville Peck. Addison says it best: the poem puts us in the club.
“Dead Moonlight” is full of images that mesmerize– and make us thumb wrestle. What lingers? What fractures? What moves you– or moves through you? What makes us love the poems we love?
It’s a brusque ending, slushies, brusque. (Stay on til the end and give a listen to “At Pegasus” by Terrance Hayes at the end of the episode).
At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Addison Davis, Jason Schneiderman, and Joe Zang.
Blake Campbell grew up in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania and now lives near the sea in Salem, Massachusetts, where he works as an editor by day and a tour guide by night. He likes dogs and can tell a hummingbird from a hawk moth. His poems have appeared in, The Lyric, The Road Not Taken, and Hawk & Whippoorwill, among other publications, and his chapbook Across the Creek is forthcoming from Pen & Anvil Press.
Poems by Blake Campbell
New Year
The right parts of the brain light up
for the wrong reasons. The fat
accumulates, the teeth stain,
but something has decided to remain.
Naked, it stands before you.
You hate it. With its winter clothes
they buttoned and zippered you up in your boyhood,
before you knew,
when you felt their tightness but scarcely understood.
The heavy coat, the cardigan and scarf
cannot come off, it says.
It says it has nothing to do with you.
It suffers no hope of removal,
though you dream of scissors cutting clean through the cloth,
the rasp of cold metal just grazing the skin
when your bedroom window shakes in its frame
and wakes you. In the darkness you sit up and scratch
and succeed, sometimes, in shutting out the voice,
so to mask the silence there is only the terrible wind
beating its terrible snow against the pane.
Chicken Hawk
In this season of rainbows,
at my usual perch
over the pool table, I leer
at the lovely young—the bears and the bros
in their jerseys and baseball caps,
the twinks
with tattoos in Hebrew or Tengwar
and violet drinks,
the slick otters… But the loveliest
never look back.
I seek instead
the touch of the subdued,
the merely cute, the just
too plump to be
pounced on by their peers,
those seeking for comfort a body
of whatever beauty,
or some of my money.
Is it cruel to imagine
I share their youth?
I gave mine to marriage,
diverting desire for decades,
knowing too well
the cost of fulfillment.
Why must it come
incomplete, and with
such casualties—the wife
I haven’t yet divorced,
the son out west?
I have not entered another life;
I sit with a stiff at its outskirts,
tasting requital like a word
I almost can recall
but can’t. Mechanical
fireflies flicker, cover the walls,
and tonight, desire
seeps out of everything,
over bare torsos, into crevices,
over the blue-lit boyish faces
lost in their phones,
finding each other.
It leaks from tequila in test tubes
protruding from speedos
and mixes itself into whisky,
but it does not concentrate or solidify;
it does not
freeze into facets to catch the light.
But desire will follow
these beauties before me
down to the beach tomorrow,
when they are called like sacrifices
to the annual pageantry,
and the North Atlantic licks at their six-packs.
I can only stand on the shore and grin
as the sea in me
heaves its lobster traps
out of the depths
and strands them on the sand,
as barnacles of age
affix themselves and fan their feathery legs
into the surge.
Children who might have been
mine, you are loved,
though you do not return
my gaze,
as if you had something to fear,
as if I were
only two eyes that converge
in the V of the groin,
the advancing vulture.
Dead Moonlight
We cannot yet make out
what the fractured moon–
light tells us.
Does it indicate an end
or a beginning, casting
its usual sheen there
across the ripples? At sea,
we still cleave
to halcyon days
as they threaten to fade
and the storm wind plays
with your shock of blond hair
one cloudless afternoon
turned almost white.
We bail the water out.
We fight.
The light remains
and quavers, even
as the pulse of its parent
diminishes with distance
and the waves race
to separate what is
into what was
and what will be.
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