The Wire | In Full Velvet
A poem from Jenny Johnson's "sinuous and sensual" debut collection, In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books):
"Gay Marriage Poem"
We could promise to elope
like my grandmother did
if a football team won
on homecoming night.
We could be good queers?
An oxymoron we never
longed for. We could
become wed-locked
as the suffix was once intended:
laiko, Common Teutonic for play,
not loc, Old English for a cave,
an enclosure. Instead
of a suit, I could wear my T-shirt
that avows, “Support Your Right
to Arm Bears!” Or we could
wed in bear suits
just as I saw people do
one summer in San Francisco
standing amid a grassy median
during rush hour.
They were so personally
anonymously political
blocking the ocean breeze
in acrylic fur.
Forget such solemnities!
I want to run through streets
shouting up to all my beloveds’ windows:
Friends! In sickness and in health
I refuse to forsake you!
on Charlotte Street, Home,
Euclid, Decatur, Union,
Straubs, Rebecca, Bennett Ave.,
38th, Woolslayer Way.
In the only wedding I was a part of
I was the flower girl
who held up the ceremony
kneeling to drop equal dividends of
petals beside every pew,
refusing to leave anyone out.
Let us speak without occasion
of relations of our choosing!
Tied intricately
as the warps and wefts
amid mats of moss,
without competing for sunlight
our hairy caps are forever
lodging in spaces
that myopic travelers can’t see.
Of such loves unwrit, at the boundary layer
between earth and air,
I feel most clear.
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