Like leftovers in the fridge, find a wayTo whisper to me. To smile and enchant,My way was to give that charity a fuck.I move to the side and cling to questions.I acquiesce. I bend my knees to helpZero in. Zero tingling down into my toesAnd scalp. We pass it back and forth,A singing act performed in an absoluteSilence. A nice blonde for the afternoon,Gaétan spread his legs more and more.I probed the meat with my fingers. I saw(What’s in each booth: bravely, my darling)You say, I’m going to get less splendid.I’m going to die in the very home I’m in.
Like Leftovers in the Fridge, Find a Way
Eric Sneathen
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“Like Leftovers in the Fridge, Find a Way” from DON’T LEAVE ME THIS WAY by Eric Sneathen.
Published by Nightboat Books on August 8 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Eric Sneathen.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Eric Sneathen is a poet living in San Francisco. He has published two books, Snail Poems (Krupskaya 2016) and Don’t Leave Me This Way (Nightboat 2023), and edited several others, including the collected fictions of Camille Roy, Honey Mine (Nightboat 2021). With Noah Ross, he edits and publishes new work through their press SPUNK Editions.
Don’t Leave Me This Way blends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnets inspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as “Patient Zero” of the AIDS epidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy and pornography, Don’t Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of the cut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost spirits: poignant, vengeful, and ready to ball.
"Ever a lover eager for experience, Eric Sneathen queers the sonnet by placing a different kind of impossible love at its center: the dead of the AIDS era, whose archives so infuse these lines that our shared history comes alive. With the poet’s 'promise to tell of thee like flesh forever,' this book of sticky blisses slips its readers the key to a room in literature’s bathhouse, where the voices of gay lives past and present commingle."
—Brian Teare
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