queer theory and color theory walk into a bar

and ask me,

Were we written out of history, or just

painted over?

I tell them: remember us in a garland of flowers, crowning hair as

golden as a lyre. Yes, Sappho, it hurts.

Do you see? Our bodies in the dust of the Parthenon,

silhouettes tattooed on shards of orange clay.

We have bled enough to fill the sea, part it, fill it again,

wine-dark like the word of law that hunts us through the ages.

In Rome, like the boyish lovers of the Emperor, we dress in the

deepest purple and look at the world from a throne, just once.

Stormé, watch over me. I’ve come down to the sunless water of

the Hudson River, where the good ones go to die.

I’m standing in the Seventh Circle like Dante warned

and it is tiled wall-to-wall, mint green & slick as a bathhouse.

Downtown, they’re parading where we used to riot—who knew

that celebration & survival were the same color?

I’ll tell you. It’s charcoal gray: asphalt, loose gravel, a police baton

cleaving the middle of us. Have I answered your question?