Stonewall and other poetry…

Well. I was moderately productive today. Yay for me! I finished the pharm homework, did one of my drug sheets, *and* wrote three poems for class. Leaving only one, I do believe, which goes in my notebook anyways and doesn’t need to be turned in. So. Here are two of the three that I wrote. The third is in desperate need of revision. As are these two, the second one especially. lah.

It’s snowing like craaaazy out. I wonder if school will be cancelled tomorrow? I hope not.

Stonewall

I don’t know how it began.
We were casually walking,
talking about French Café’s
and Mardi Gras parades.
His hand slipped in to mine,
fingers like paper-birch bark,

as we made our way through
Greenwich Village towards
the shabby bar on Christopher.
We should have been discreet,
waited until the smokescreen
of the Mafia-run dive inhaled us.

He forgot our place, me I was
simply lost in the moon on his face.
Turning out of an endless ally, our
mouths suddenly moving like a fish
silently drowning in the saltless air as
we encountered a disconcerting sight.

The TPF, an armored mass, crowding
like waves to the shore. Cat-calls and
taunts gathered in our ears, stabbed
our skin like fragmented sea shells.
We held to each other like grappling
hooks but they were many, we were two.

Into the oubliette they pulled and
dragged us. Blood like tin pooled
beneath my tongue, spilled to chin,
drizzled silently to the concrete.
My mind jolted as they pushed me
like a merry-go-round. Shoved

to the ground, seeing only shoes,
hearing his frantic panic calling
around their jeers and laughter.
I heard the flame-queens chanting
in their stilletoed chorus-girl line,
listened to the crunching and scritching

of gravel beneath Rockette-style
kicks. Tears mingled with sweat,
mixed with blood, and got lost in
saliva as I watched the destruction
of our sanctuary, until boots
obliterated my blurry view.

And then the world was black.
2.20.05
————————————
The Fabric of Our Lives

This is the fabric
of their deaths.

Swatches of corduroy
and cotton pieced with
tenuous thread, clear
like the IV tube pumping
Marinol into the last
uncollapsed vein under
birch-white skin.

As I delicately let fingers
linger on rainbow painted
denim, I allow the faces
of my boi and grrl friends
flit quietly in the corner
of my mind.

A silent prayer slips through
my thoughts before I remember
that I do not know how to pray.

Sodium and water gathers
behind half-open lids as I fight
off the designs forming-
never do I want the opportunity
to create one of these panels.

No life should be condensed
into a 3 by 5 foot rectangle.

2.20.05