Rewind

Steffan Triplett

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.

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An image of the poet, Steffan Triplett. A young man with long hair and medium dark skin.

Steffan Triplett is the author of the forthcoming hybrid memoir Bad Forecast (Essay Press, September 2024) and the essay chapbook Constraints (New Michigan Press, 2024). His essays and nonfiction appear in The Iowa ReviewFence, Lit HubVulture, and Electric Literature, and have most recently been anthologized in It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (Feminist Press, 2022). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in FoglifterColumbia JournalThe Shade JournalPuerto Del Sol Black Voices Series, and Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat, 2018). He is the Managing Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) and a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Triplett has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Outpost, Lambda Literary, and the National Book Critics Circle.

Winter 2024

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