night sky is blue
Come / Let us roam the night together / Singing
Life is a series of mishaps and people who pride themselves on being strange and do strange, kind things like give their 4-sizes-too-big shoes to homeless white veterans. We can’t help but learn from those we have surrounded ourselves with. Even the strange Black boys who give their shoes to white people. We spend our whole lives inextricably connected to them. They all have a piece of us, and we them. They become a part of us. This kind of connection reassures us that even in the vastest, darkest space “we are not alone.”
I love you
Our laughs mingled together because when we were nervous, that’s what we did. We laughed so our hearts didn’t catch up with our brains. It let us ignore the stares and gossip that came with being queer and out. God, I loved them. I grew warmer and warmer hearing our audible smiles steadily ring out in rich bell tones. It enveloped me, comforted me. It was the sole reason I woke up the days that I didn’t think that I would. They saved me. Every day, they saved me.
Across/The Harlem roof-tops/Moon is shining/Night sky is blue/Stars are great drops/Of golden dew
Prince, Eric, Sukhai, and I squatted low on the brick roof-top shielding ourselves from the night air, passing a mango blunt to the left.
The taste of it sat heavy on our tongues, and in the silence someone barely whispered, “I love how we can see the Congress building in the distance. I feel like we’re in a movie.”
In that moment, I looked up from the blunt and looked everyone in the face, seeing how beautiful they were. I slowly grinned because the weed revealed my feelings.
“Sav, why are you smiling?”
I grinned wider, my cheeks making my eyes slits and rubbed my gloved hands against my frozen legs. “I’m just high.” I blinked a few times to moisturize my eyes to see them more clearly: The yellow flood lights washed them out, but even then, they were ethereal. Seeing their mouths stretch east-west across moonlit cheeks made me want to weep.
Down the street/A band is playing
“I want to read your writing.”
We never realized how much we asked of each other until someone would look away in embarrassment.
“Leave her alone. If she wants to show you, she will.”
Things would be left at that and I would fantasize about them asking probing questions that linger on my skin like the itch left after inadvertently running through a field of stinging nettle. I wanted to share favorite words and colors and nicknames that our parents gave us because we were difficult children.
I love you
We talked about living but never dying. Death was always something that could be escaped except when it couldn’t. We cradled each other’s dreams blew life into them. We wanted to communicate with the spirits that we sensed but couldn’t touch. We talked, we talked, we talked. I loved it.
Come / Let us roam the night together / Singing
Poem referenced: “Harlem Night Song” by Langston Hughes
—By Sav Thomas