You don’t know yet that someday, far in the future, in Greenwich Village, you’ll find other boys, the ones who will spoon you on lumpy mattresses in coldwater flats, smoking and drinking coffee from a single hot-plate after love, the ones whose bodies you will devour with groans of guttural Yiddish.
3. Some nights, as you fall asleep in your childhood bed to the sound of clanging pipes, the card game your father plays with his friends in the kitchen, you close your eyes and sail into
Dizzy, open-mouthed, you land in the tangled forest where the wild ones grunt and dance the world into creation, scoop you up into shaggy embrace, and you hope to God they never let go.
b
the hairy-starred night, your breath a silver diaphanous shroud in chilled onyx air, and the sea sways like armies of arms holding up a bridegroom’s chair to the bleating notes of Klezmer clarinets.
b
Lisa Richter