☀ What Sparks Poetry: Readers Write Back

April 30, 2025

To conclude National Poetry Month, we bring you a special Wednesday edition of What Sparks Poetry, our series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our new series, Readers Write Back, we asked our readers which poem, of all those we’ve published in our last seven years, has moved them most.

Erotic Crime Thriller

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

What Sparks Poetry:
Readers Write Back

"'All sex is a body trying / to tell a story with a hand / over its mouth,' James Allen Hall writes in 'Erotic Crime Thriller.' That is the crux of the poem for me, and points to all the questions it poses. Like, what does sex mean, between any two bodies? When it’s illicit? What does sex mean when your body, or the body of the person you’re with, could be the site of, a spreader of disease? What does a body mean when all the sex it has is considered illicit; when its very desire is seen as a disease? And what does a movie mean when it tells us the story of a time just before a tragedy? In watching it after the fact, is it possible to just appreciate the film for what it is, or will we inevitably look for signs of what’s to come? Will we inevitably wish we could go back in time to the world of the film and change it somehow, and therefore save the real world, the one we live in, from what hadn’t yet happened? The body of this poem comes to you, smelling of sweat and leather, and it may have a hand over its mouth but it still asks these questions, tells these stories, and demands the reader listen."

Jessie Lynn McMains

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

"Here’s the Shortlist for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize."

The following collections have been shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize: The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén, translated by Aaron Coleman (The University of Chicago Press), Kiss the Eyes of Peace by Tomaž Šalamun, translated by Brian Henry (Milkweed Editions), Psyche Running by Durs Grünbein, translated by Karen Leeder (Seagull Books, Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss (Graywolf Press).

via LITERARY HUB

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