A Poem by C. Russell Price

Author: Poetry Editor

January 28, 2016

This week, a poem by C. Russell Price.

 

OUR LOVE TRANSCENDS SEXUALITY & GENDER & TIME & PLACE;
TRANSLATION: NOT NOW, NOT EVER

 

This world is not right
for us, so I sit
you down and work
a new one, all hollers
and honeysuckle, all blue
and gloriously crushing.

In this assessment of intention,
you finally carry my body
and my cape of little rejections
back to Ol’ Virginia
and make-me-up
like I would have wanted.

How tired are you now
when you reach the cherry lined street?
Do the lilacs say thank you?
No—not there—not beside the collie kennel
that only once howled louder than me.
There: at the foot of the drive:

cross me, cat-eye me with ash,
call me by my dead name one last time.
Kiss my cheek and think cul-de-sac,
think normative fence, think, my love,
of all the stars where better versions are breathing,
where the soft-focused-wanted me slowly wakes.

——

C. RUSSELL PRICE, a 2015 Lambda Fellow in Poetry, is an Appalachian genderqueer poet living in Chicago. They hold a BA from the University of Virginia and an MFA from Northwestern University. Price’s chapbook Tonight, We Fuck The Trailer Park Out Of Each Other will be published by Sibling Rivalry Press in Summer 2016. Price currently works with The Offing and teaches creative writing at Northwestern.