Alive & Last Night in New York City
Travis Tate
Alive
I want to live, I want to live,
I want to live
where the precious are held with care. & the hands
on my belly is a way to see if I’m hungry,
if I need to be fed again, & then I get fed today & tomorrow.
I want
to reach up & there is my mother. She is flying on a plane.
Food is given to each mouth, borders of hands, of lips, of teeth.
Other borders erased.
I want to live, I think every evening before going to bed
as a prayer to not die in my sleep, for the eyelids to lift
up & for each morning to breath down the spine.
I want to marry him. I want to watch you love me in the corner
of the room, dark with the curtains pulled closed, the movie on
repeat again.
I want to see a country fall & be reborn.
I want the flat land before the sea to be open to me.
What is cursed is rectified & is given up. Here, there
are simple answers. Those answers are listened to.
God forgets you for a moment, the real dying
commenced like this the rightful thing is done,
amassed in Babylonia, cleared from ashes in the tomb.
What if we give those born after us bliss,
something slick to look forward.
I want to live in my black skin & love my black ass.
& kiss your black lips & grab your black hand in
the movie, when it's dark & our dark hands melt
into each other, your skin darker than mine
& we’re a black fantasy.
I want a finger
of freedom.
I want freedom to finger me on wet stone.
& then take that stone down, throw in the river
pulling water from its hems like molasses
until it ends up somewhere else,
or ripped from its own edges.
I want all these things. Is that too much to ask for?
Last Night in New York City
Chessy says she’ll come to the wedding & Thom smiles
& I’m into the way the three of us drink cocktails out of
tall skinny glasses. We play board games using our phones
& video chat with two people I’ve never met before, lovely.
As I lament or discuss or, move forward or, do whatever,
try to bend time back onto itself, solve something in front
of two people who I care about, it rains hard. The young boy
with his ball continues to kick it against the black grated
fence, the spiral staircase looking up at him. & he keeps going,
do what makes him happy, watching the ball slap water.
A man on my phone, on the line, says you sound happier,
which I do, hoping I sound anything like the opening of a sea.
I deserve some things:
love, yes, of course, but also:
the mare on the sand, waves, hot salt
from my face or from yours, dripping in my mouth, like candy.
Even, the bugs on the ground!
I remember that I love in all the ways that I can—
whether anyone wants it or not, I don’t care.
Travis Tate is a queer, black playwright, poet and performer from Austin, Texas. Their poetry has appeared in Borderlands:Texas Poetry Review, Underblong, Mr. Ma’am, apt, and Cosmonaut Avenue among other journals. Their debut poetry collection, MAIDEN, will be published on V.A. Press in June 2020. They earned an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. You can find more about them at travisltate.com