new from above/ground press: Sinister Queer Agenda, by Travis Sharp

Sinister Queer Agenda
Travis Sharp
$5

Part Five: Romance in late capitalism

I.

It was like a gay romance on Netflix
of which I had seen many
if not all and therefore
I had a strong sense
of what came next:
we made eggs for one another
with a gay zeal
we went down on one another
with sentimental music
in the background
we stared at one another’s
shoes we went to a friend’s
wedding it was really
stunning but full of
wealth everywhere
with nice shoes and nicer
haircuts in the straight
to Netflix film version
there is a token lesbian
and a token sassy black man
and a token unsexed or oversexed
genderqueer person with bad fashion sense
the occasional gay announcing he’s
a top by wearing
gym shorts in February
but in the documentary version of
what really happened there were
lots of happy white gays
reaching for the bouquet
the man I was with said
that will be us
referring to all of them grasping
referring to rabidity


to animus
to both definitions of animus
to some beautiful anathema

II.

We get home
referring to some shitty moldy apartment
we take off our clothes
referring to the clearance rack at Goodwill
we lay down in our bed
unsexed and sexless
the ritual of getting ready took
too long for both of us
and after working
our collective seven jobs
filling out applications
obsessively checking our
credit card statements
shuffling money from
savings to checking and
back again we give up
the notion of fucking
and just sleep for a while

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Travis Sharp is a teacher, writer, and book artist living in Buffalo. He co-edited Radio: 11.8.16 (Essay Press, 2017) with Aimee Harrison and Maria Anderson. He’s an editor and designer at Essay Press and a PhD student in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. Poems and essays have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, The Bombay Gin, The Operating System, LIT, Puerto del Sol, Big Lucks, Entropy, and in other things and places.

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