When two men kissed there used to be danger.
On television where there there once was danger, there is now vibrant color.
Color bursts & vibrates on screen, even if no one is there to see it.
Have you ever seen something that buzzes inside you?
I am watching two kids encounter each other with pure admiration.
Television shows me alternate pasts in technicolor.
Glimpses of the past will make you imagine safety where there isn’t any.
Tense is a lie, what is your present is someone else’s future.
A show I adore made me feel like we were living in a warm, pleasant future:
Two high school boys go on a date & their parents know.
A boy I adore takes me back to my adolescent past.
Most days I can distinguish between my own experience & a character’s.
Some days my own adolescence feels as if it were extinguished.
A me I loved’s past is disappeared, so I fill it with my guts.
I am watching two boys kiss on screen & for once there is no secondhand shame.
There are flames there. Right here there are burning flames.
What Keeps Us
Poems to Read in Community
Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Steffan Triplett’s “Rewind” as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself.
Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers here. Read poems by selecting below.
Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink
The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under
summer’s breath.
My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field
It was not long after the war—
and just saying after the war places him
Half-Life in Exile
I’m forever living between Aprils.
The air here smells of jacarandas and lime;
Country Song (Memory of Rain)
A bruise is a promised haunting.
“Come, just this once,” I ask, disingenuously. I mean “a thousand times.”
At the Gellert Baths, Budapest
Here in the body museum,
women speaking Hungarian
rinse one another with buckets of water,
As Though It Were a Small Child
I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I
mean,