Tonight, walking the AIDS memorial, I think aboutthe man who hydrated his partner by feedinghim ice chips with his mouth. Someone stumblesdown the path, maybe drunk, maybe a littlefucked up, & I know not to make eye contact, not to stop.But I do stop. This man wants to fuckright here & now on top of the redearth. Back East where I grew up, the past persistssinister as a forest: a man hit on another manin a rural bar & thus was beaten with a cast iron pan,laid across the tracks, & severed by a train.Here, his lips still sweet from the clovehe smoked, this stranger kisses me like those menof our fathers’ generation who’d rendezvous in parkspast dark. Never again will I destroy the earthby flood, God told Noah after the sun brokethrough, the covenant signed in rainbow.Once, I believed in God. Convinced that the Earthwas his own beating heart,I talked to him out loud in the forest at night.I felt endless then & knowing I wasn’tonly enlarged me.
Golden Gate Park
Feature Date
- August 12, 2021
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“Golden Gate Park” (poem) from Brocken Spectre by Jacques J. Rancourt, to be published by Alice James Books in September of 2021.
Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of Brocken Spectre (Alice James Books, 2021) and Novena (Pleiades Press, 2017), as well as a chapbook In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018). He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and a residency from the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Raised in Maine, he lives in San Francisco.
Farmington, Maine
The University of Maine at Farmington
"What does it mean to have survived a plague? Are we obliged to remember a disaster, or are we best called to make our own joy independent of the past? The poems in Brocken Spectre document a queer new age—one in which the AIDS crisis has abated, though the lost quietly ghost the periphery of this writer’s imagination. These moving and memorable poems speak from edges of longing and loss while they create important new narratives of meaningful connection."
—Mark Wunderlich
"Delving into the nature of memory, both cultural and emotional, the poems of Brocken Spectre are sharp, dauntless, and unflinchingly lucid. Navigating the powerful undertow of amnesia and a future that has already passed by, Jacques J. Rancourt’s lyrics alert us both to time’s layers and to the wonder of its elasticity. I admire the great tenderness these poems convey toward those who preceded them and how, in Rancourt’s hands, hauntings become inheritances worth having, even in a world on fire."
—Mary Szybist
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