• To Sleep

    Derrick Austin

    Winter 2024

    Give him back already.


    Sharing a small bed, he’s still too far from me


    dallying in your ancient City of Dreams


    where cats miyav and dogs hav hav in streets paved with lapis


    and there’s no smog or penitentiaries


    and queer men can marry.


    Night was our ally:


    safely walking arm in arm


    after throwing ass in the discotheque.


    You’re doing the most.


    My arm’s numb.


    Soon the muezzin will cry his second call.


    Vans sweep the neighborhood


    before the runoff election,


    blaring conservative campaign slogans.


    Give us some time before he has to work.


    I want to lick his armpits all day long.


    Or keep him


    like this, a statue of Endymion


    whose bearded profile I wish I had the skill to draw—


    he talks too slick for his own good.


    When we argue


    (he loves to argue) I’m a child again withering before my father.

    Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions 2016).

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