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| DONALD RAWLEY | ||
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| Steaming (for Harry Burrus) I know who I am in a Maui hotel steam room, traveling like others in May, in a low tide, after riots in Los Angeles, poisons, and God. I am steaming, watched, and watching on a tropical morning behind etched glass doors, and hot, champagne marble walls. The other men in this box have flown from obscure cities, checked off and ripped like a grocery list. They do not speak, but inhale each other's musk as a reassurance. A teenage boy stares at my penis. He is calculating his future. A businessman with flapping breasts, crossed legs, and a scarred gut, leaves his towel like a blossom on his crotch and dreams. Others assess who I am, my muscles, and back red eyes, and burnt skin. How I create my pleasures. They could have sprung from stone, soulless, white, ball-eyed, and mute. Each with a safe distance, a wife, a lover, and a speech-- but silent. I slow my pulse in sweat, breathing a damp curtain of eucalyptus hissing under one light. Sleep, forget, sleep, remember. It is all I can do. My abdomen jitters in a sucked heat. These men are flaccid and ignorant, girlish examples of religions I do not know. And we are alike. We are beaten, escaped, foreign. We are only divisions of those who cry and wait.
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| Steaming © 1993, Black Tie Press. All rights reserved. | ||
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Special Tribute Poetry Chateau MarmontLos Angeles Three AM Mulholland Drive Helen in Waiting Jonathan's End American Beauty White Water Blind Stitch
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