After Adrienne Rich 1. Just before they signed away your right to life, you thought to hide hints behind your gasps because you knew I loved to lean into you, to listen actively as it was the closest we could ever be. 2. The grain of your voice: I did not know that memorials bore such textures. (The ivy has already strangled your name.) 3. The planes of you were changing, but you chose never to make much of it because that wasn’t how you were raised: to outline yourself in enough green to be envied, enough red to be a target. A shot in the back is the present’s plain language. I learned from you that being a cipher could be a powerful desire. 4. Wojnarowicz said when it was all over, he wanted us to just drop his body on the steps of the fucking FDA, but I don’t know if I have the heart to do that to you, you, you (who I failed to love with any grace) even as your body is something sharper now than it ever was in life because you refuse the right to amnesia, the linchpin of home and country reddened rusty by your and our brothers’ tainted blood, for our touching needed to be untouching until they were distant forms that only became hard fact in the flows of longing. 5. How am I supposed to cast this flower upon your soil, how do I tell the truth of you when the very words I need were the ones that once bound you, hurt you, stole away your name? eulogy: true praise. 6. By the time you could not move, you no longer bothered with the headlines, cheap pundits because the story still eludes the dainty fingers of press and camera: you were already too busy cleaving hard to that imperceptible space beyond their line of sight. 7. A warrior burying a warrior: (no, that’s not right.) you would want me to write, however inexact or exacting, about a life beyond reproach so that none of us must apologize for doing nothing wrong.

Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
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