another poem steadies its dumb gaze , a phase of myopia , on the moon ,
full in dull reproachment of the day
we wanted to know how to love each other more , make our vague hearts ,
wild with a selfsame lust for money and fame , give more , do more ,
though the idea of love felt more abstract to us
with the arrival of every new and alien day
hey ! what can we make of that ?
a study of queerness is a study against form , a way of letting the body grow meaningful
for all it refuses to do
whatever ! let’s make it new !
i found a felicity in life cruising the nightclubs in brooklyn ,
meeting friends who fucked like friends and danced , formless under strobe lights
that throw around their garish light like suns
approximating an artificial morning
under that adornment , where do i exist ?
every place has a soundtrack , the dancefloor
of our lives is made and made of sound
i wanted to make something loud when the club-lights click off
and we go home alone , together , from another ordinary night
crowned briefly with our anonymous love , who can say who we were
to each other ? where do the versions of ourselves we’ve tried on and discarded go ?
i have a song in mind it goes :
i am not the man my mother loves
i am not the woman i’ve yet to know
tell me , where do i exist ? this brief encounter , a life
of sitting on the curb outside the club
admiring the full moon , “ immaterial ” blasting out the door ,
our american spirits forgotten
in the jean-jacket pocket of a perfect and temporary friend
there’s not enough day in the day for all the life we’ve lost and want to live ,
so we made a new day to reproach the day ,
where we live carelessly without ideas of who we are or what we are able to love
( i could be anything i want )
( i could be anything i want )
looking at the moon you knew
David Ehmcke is an MFA candidate in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was awarded the Howard Nemerov Prize in Poetry. His work has appeared in the Black Warrior Review, The Adroit Journal, Peripheries, Hobart, and elsewhere. David is the poetry editor of The Spectacle and serves as a poetry reader for Guesthouse. He was selected by Megan Fernandes as the winner of the 2023 Maureen Egen Award from Poets & Writers and was selected by Diane Seuss as the runner-up for the 2022 Black Warrior Review Poetry Prize. David is a member of the team at Dorothy, a publishing project and lives in St. Louis.