Annette Covrigaru: A Gay Love Poem

Photo: Joanna C. Valente

This is a gay love poem 

because it skipped school and named itself illness

spoke to strangers in AOL chatrooms, but never aloud 

and when it did, it choked.

This is a gay love poem because it was

a secret carved from conscience,

confided in friends, hidden from parents,

wondering why the fuck is this confession?

This is a gay love poem because Katy Perry was prophetic

because it consumed The L Word and A Shot At Love and

that one episode of Degrassi over and over until the MacBook died.

Because it was outed and wanted to die.

Because college. Because college girls. Because college girlfriends,

addict bonds and elusive boundaries, misled by

She’s-The-One Syndrome before twenty-two.

This is a gay love poem because depression was it’s only expectation

because it was unrealized, then overwhelmed with realization

because do labels limit or liberate or does it even matter?

This is a gay love poem because it slid into those DM’s

because Drag Race watch parties make perfect first dates

and the new Robyn album gave it rhythm, honey.

This is a gay love poem because it suddenly adores cats,

because the cat sways into the bedroom with

whirring floor fans, melded heartbeats, wishful whispers to be closer.

Because it keeps getting closer.

This is a gay love poem because it can’t want or be

or want to be anything else but this gay love poem,

 so gay and in love.

Boy Of Summer

i.

A cool gym closet, our refuge, cardboard
boxes, plastic floor hockey sticks and basketballs
like discarded adolescence, we balance on roller
skates too wide and slim, trace and retrace an
oval track that doesn’t exist, cut corners, hold
our breaths. We are bound in our bodies –
oversized tees, sweat burnt eyes, iridescent skin.
I think then say Liberating, my friend asks What?
and I don’t repeat it. 

ii.

I lick the hair on my upper lip and swallow
summers’ liquids into my Coca-Cola and mucus
coated throat. Don’t go anywhere she texts as I
follow a firefly down Avenue B because I never
knew light could float this low. I follow until I
don’t because the edge of Tompkins Square Park
swells with dribbling and laughter and fuck offs,
rhythms of antonymic motions and emotions and
for a moment I’m in the belly of boyhood, lulled
and starved.

iii.

Thigh hairs sprout from follicles crackling like
bang snaps on New Years and mom says Shave
this new you but there’s no new to this me,
only flashbulb memories and resurrected flesh.
They say skin is the largest organ and isn’t it
comforting to know we’re always exposed?
I apply testosterone to my shoulders, a tacky
gel thick with an alcoholic odor that dizzies
and gags me until I grin. It sinks through fat
and blood and tissue, barriers to pastlives, to a
boy gasping for existence, ready for air.

---

Annette Covrigaru is a gay, bigender American-Israeli writer and photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. They were awarded a Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices Nonfiction Fellowship in 2014, a Home School Hudson 2019 Poetry Residency, and earned an M.A. in Holocaust Studies from the University of Haifa. Their nonfiction and poetry have appeared in Entropy, Hobart, Cosmonauts Avenue, and FIVE:2:ONE, among others, and are collected at www.annettecovrigaru.com. Annette’s debut chapbook, Reality, In Bloom., is forthcoming in early 2020 with Ursus Americanus Press.