Jacques J. Rancourt

Tonight, walking the AIDS
memorial, I think about
the man who hydrated

his partner by feeding
him ice chips with his
mouth. Someone stumbles

down the path, maybe drunk,
maybe a little
fucked up, & I know not to make

eye contact, not to stop.
But I do stop. This man
wants to fuck

right here & now
on top of the red
earth. Back East where

I grew up, the past persists
sinister as a forest: a man hit
on another man

in a rural bar & thus
was beaten with a cast iron pan,
laid across the tracks,

& severed by a train.
Here, his lips still sweet
from the clove

he smoked, this stranger
kisses me like those men
of our fathers' generation

who'd rendezvous in parks
past dark. Never again
will I destroy the earth

by flood, God told Noah
after the sun broke
through, the covenant

signed in rainbow.
Once, I believed in God.
Convinced that the Earth

was his own
beating heart,
I talked to him out loud

in the forest at night.
I felt endless then
& knowing I wasn't

only enlarged me.
from the book BROCKEN SPECTRE / Alice James Books
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I wrote "Golden Gate Park," a poem about being solicited for sex in a public park, shortly after someone from my home state was murdered for coming onto another man. It’s a poem at the intersection of queer time—where what feels like it should have passed by now still lingers in our present and what’s still present feels like it should be by now a part of our pasts.

Jacques J. Rancourt on"Golden Gate Park"
Black-and-white screenshot of Robert Hayden during an interview
On Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.”

"[W]hat words could we have said, should have said, to those who loved us in ways we could not possibly have understood at the time? This is a universal pain, a species of regret each of us must encounter eventually in life—and nowhere in the English language is it more beautifully expressed then in the last two lines of this poem."

via LIT HUB
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Cover of Thomas A. Clark's book, The Threadbare Coat: Selected Poems
What Sparks Poetry:
Susan Tichy on Thomas A. Clark's The Threadbare Coat


"Unlike volumes that map a career, guiding readers through each book a poet has published, The Threadbare Coat offers poems from various publications sequenced to lead us anew up paths and across hillsides, to 'the fort of stillness' or 'the quiet island,' into 'woods & water' and 'sweet vernal grass,' at the speed of footsteps or the 'speed of the running wave.'"
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