It is only because of individuals like you that we are able to promote contemporary poets, translators, presses, and journals each and every day. A gift of any amount will enable us to continue our mission.

donate
James Allen Hall

Cruising (1980)
It's just a flimsy mattress
in a hookup motel, a night
when the moon is a single stud
in a leather sky. Just a bed
smelling of spilled poppers,
until two men enter.
Then it's a story: one lays
himself naked, face-down,
offering his wrists, ankles
to be rope-knotted, the thrill
of seeing what exists after
extremity. The movie's first
image: a hand floating
in a helpless river, cross-fading
into a couple of male cops
forcing two queer sex
workers, their painted mouths.
All sex is a body trying
to tell a story with a hand
over its mouth. Because this
is erotic crime, what follows
are hours of leather bar dancing,
the ball-sweat skulking
off the celluloid, and plenty
of interrogation. The killer
spreads like a plague—
first one nondescript actor
plays him, then another,
until the undercover cop
catches the serial virus, this
being 1980, the end of innocent
beds, of innocuous jocks,
foam parties, condomless
trade. As if the director—
in conjuring the end of taboo
in strobe light, in dim urinals,
in park bushes, under the
spinning doom of moon—
in trying to make us subject
has subjected us to ravage instead.
My friend says I'm dramatic,
says you can't blame art
for epidemiology. Forgive me.
I have come here to the river,
to the bed, to the foaming edge
of time, to 1980, a year before
the first reported cases. I have
come with my one good hand
and all my blood and I will say
anything to save us.
from the book ROMANTIC COMEDY / Four Way Books
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
William Friedkin wrote and directed "Cruising," starring Al Pacino as a cop who goes undercover to catch a killer preying on queer men. The killer seems to jump bodies (he is played by different actors throughout the film). The film ends with Pacino staring into the camera while his girlfriend tries on the leather jacket, cap, and aviator sunglasses we see the killer wear throughout the film. 

James Allen Hall on "Erotic Crime Thriller"
Color headshot of poet Leila Chatti
"A Conversation with Leila Chatti"

"The poem(s) originally came about this way, fragmented and disparate, like something glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. Silence is as much a part of this as the words are, if not more so. Language and ideas came in wisps, and I tried to capture this accurately—words would appear, suddenly, and then vanish, sometimes mid-thought. This is the experience of miscarriage—out of nothing, back into. Writing this felt like collecting rain in my hands."

via THE RUMPUS
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Logo of Milkweed Editions, the publisher of Melissa Kwasny's forthcoming book
What Sparks Poetry:
Melissa Kwasny on "Sleeping with the Cedars"


"Most of us are frightened of the future and grief stricken at what humans have done to the earth. As I see it, one of the unique tasks of poets, especially at this time, is to be in imaginative relation with the Earth. And to use language as a tool toward that effort. To have an imaginative—as opposed to an abstract or intellectual—relationship with the earth is to be in attendance to what Denise Levertov called 'other forms of life that want to live.'"
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
Write with Poetry Daily
 
This April, to celebrate National Poetry Month, we'll share popular writing prompts from our "What Sparks Poetry" essay series each morning. Write along with us!

Write a poem in which the speaker interacts with someone or something (real or imagined, living or ideal) who communicates back, if at all, in a language outside of everyday speech. The speaker tries to read the signs of the other, tries to understand the world more, or what underlies the world, via the interaction.
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2023 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency