By Daniel Felsenthal
GAY45 presents poems by the esteemed writer, critic, and poet Daniel Felsenthal, whose work explores themes of queerness, sex, and loss.
Illustration by GAY45
The Beautiful People
In the corner
There is a painter
And to her right
A great
Dilettante who wears
Friendship lightly:
Reason they have
All been invited.
To their left, critics
Whose talk of Freud
Belies their lack of formal
Education, and at the head
A novelist whose treatments
And poetry are really beyond
What anybody asked for, wears
Rejection the same way, lightly,
He wears alcohol and sex, having
One day woken up to find himself
Able to be a child again.
This time fearlessly.
After the party
Back home
In his bed
She/they starts to cry
When the future comes
The beautiful people,
Too, shall number among
The countless
Who will die.
♦
On Father’s Day
We went out to dinner with a friend
Who told us of another friend
Who calls him “Daddy.”
They slept together years ago
But now our friend
Cuddles him
Speaks to him about his problems
And says, “Everything will be alright.”
“His parents are dying,” said our friend,
“Bladder cancer. Their care has fallen on him.
Also, his first film is being distributed. He just learned.”
After dinner, we walked down the street.
A boy smoked a joint
And a cab
Almost killed us.
K-Mart was closed and the Irish bar on the corner
Overflowed with hugging college students
One of whom detached from her friend
And complimented my shoes:
The air was hot and smelled like trash.
It was, in short, a night
Just like any in the month of June.
None of which we will heed
Or even acknowledge.
♦
Grief and Love and Love
Drink fresh wounds
From mourning men
Whose beds for two
You find yourself in
These men they are
Stronger than you
But your allure is
Of fading boyhood
And stoics can always
Be chiseled, shaped
They are now quieter
Than they once were
They will grasp at you
Like they have never
For example with my
Husband I jumped into
Sweetness too fast and
Love I lacked the years
To rope myself in with
But then months passed
And the first time I heard
The old man sing we had
Been married for a while
The tune was high and clarion
From the childhood of the world
I won’t tell you the name I still
Haven’t told him what it meant
He had to scar baby pink lungs
In the gray air of loss and after
He could laugh on a phone call
With a friend who also lived twice
From the other room I heard how
He did not choke on his own past.
♦
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