Especially our own: so I’ll start with a bonfire
sometime before I met you, winter solstice
in the west, almost ocean
where I walked with my friend
at the turning beach of rocks with her dogs,
someone in orange above us fixing the bridge.
I wanted to be seen
and still do
at the barn party that night where they asked us
to sing or recite poetry into long stars,
my friend’s idealist friends with crockpots and guitars,
their world on the edge of land where they contend forever.
What I asked for was a year I could meet:
I wanted to fall in love, and I threw in the embers
words I could barely believe.
But what if I did? It was before Seattle
where I met the dark, wet space of my mind,
an empty backpack anonymous and vacant
as a December park bench that promised
any body reprieve, newspaper-soft, public.
I’d never tell anyone, but there’s a part of me
that wanted to be straight
because of what it’d promised
me. It was dating all those men
as I wandered ridiculously. I asked how with them
part of myself could possibly be missing,
but who could have even heard my question?
Shallow, eroding, frustrating, aspirational.
I wanted the story I’d been told: anything
but my life.
Instead, a shoreline cave, a floor of leaves
floating on rocking water, then whirlpools
dotted green and seaweed streams.
I started to see the storm had a sound. Washed out
in the circling stairs of a lighthouse,
one look and I knew where I was.
Why do I say this to you?
I met you in a slow stumble
to my knees, constance
and presence, surprise from the side, back home,
finding one. Luck or intention
or plucked from the ocean, tides of denial and skepticism
but all below this fixed bridge.
Yes, I was looking. For, I wasn’t sure what.
Part of me has wondered, am I making all this up?
But a queer life is one you dream up.
Freesia McKee (she/her) writes about history, place, gender, and genre. She is the author of three chapbooks, City of Honesty (Water’s Edge Press), How Distant the City (Headmistress Press) and Hummingbird Vows (Bottlecap Press). Freesia works as an Assistant Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.