I am on foot, getting lost in the town where my brother
and sister were born, where my mother
and my father met in high school, where my grandmother
and my grandfather met in high school. I want so shamelessly to belong
to someone hairy and popular.
Even though it is dark, I love
the lit interiors I walk by: the other worlds
transpiring inside them—the Ralph Lauren dining rooms,
faces on flat-screen TVs. In one house, there’s a jowly dog in a cone
that looks like an Orthodox ikon.
The idea of my homonormative life is far off.
A kid in a passing car shouts something terrible
and he is right.
This poem is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
