Just start by
looking inside
the paper bag
sent to me in
a living room that smells of pee
and rancid air a fantastic grief
like touch hunger a sensation so large
and so impossible
that this winter
there’s barely a bougainvillea
in bloom
barely a sliver
of moon
barely any light
barely a bird
This winter he has this thing
he won’t walk
into the house
because he thinks it wants to kill him
it’s a course in
knowing our
unknowing when all of this
is over will we
find the basement empty
will we sing ourselves
out of the rooms
we've lived in
during this
claustrophobic year
so far from north
and the little house
I once thought
would be mine
so far I am
getting smaller
so my friend
suggests an exorcism
from beauty
a dispossession
against the long sigh
I'm holding out
for something new
the fact is everyone
I love dances with
a child who dances
Samuel Ace is a trans and genderqueer poet and sound artist. He is the author of several books, including Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish Books, 2019) and Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* Germinal Texts, 2019). He is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund Award in Poetry and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award, as well as a Lambda Literary Award and National Poetry Series finalist. His work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in or is forthcoming from Poetry, Aufgabe, Fence, The Atlas Review, Black Clock, Mandorla, Versal, The Collagist, Posit, Vinyl, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, Troubling the Line: Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, Best American Experimental Poetry, and many other publications. He has recently relocated to Atlanta where he lives with his spouse and their new baby.