From our annual Literary Issue, published Dec. 25, 2019, featuring original compositions and illustrations from local writers and artists.
Unlike the price of gasoline ($2.26), unlike the weather (78° and sunny today),
I am unwaveringly gay, and though I think everyone knows this, let me say so again,
for good measure — when the firemen turn the corner and walk toward me in their blues,
my chest grows large and vulgar as the hibiscus begging for attention outside the library.
When they walk away from the gas station with their 12 oz. coffees, my chest closes like a book. Everything good I’ve received has come with a period of waiting before it.
Everything good I’ve received has come with a period of hope before it.
For good measure —
let me say, not to the woman who assumed I am celibate because I go to church.
Not to those who tell me my identity is in Christ alone (it could be if you let it).
Not even to the firemen, whom I would very much enjoy speaking to.
But to the two men who walk their dog down Rutledge Avenue and always wave as they pass. To Robbie, who asked me whether I believe in science and then kissed me under a large oak.
To Danielle, who plays the harp, sails the Charleston Harbor, and prays for another pronoun.
To Nate, who leaned in to kiss me and missed.
To Amanda, who tweeted this morning about menstruation and made me laugh.
To Vail, who wants to know what it means to be a good man (I want to know, too).
To Garyn, who told me where he bought his sunglasses.
To Adam, who kissed me on New Years Eve.
To Pete and Chasten Buttigeig.
To Gardner, who is in love.
To our dead: Barthes, Tchaikovsky, and Jackie Shane. To Channing Smith.
To God, who gave us rainbows.
To the man who kissed me in the grocery store parking lot.
To those braver than me.
And (I could keep going) to the man whose kisses I may someday take for granted.
Where you go, I will follow with the abandon of the boy who, just now —
believing in the impossibility of traffic,
believing in the impossibility that anything might delay him —
sprints across upper King Street.
With a bowed head and fistfuls of palm fronds, with my arms tucked behind me like wings,
I will follow.
Josh Garcia lives and writes in Charleston, where he is pursuing an MFA in poetry at the College of Charleston and is an editorial assistant at Crazyhorse. He was a finalist for the 2019 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Ruminate Magazine, Nashville Review, and My Loves: A Digital Anthology.
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