Poem
Bob Guter
RECOVERY ROOM
The large one holds me fast,
the smaller one sucks
ravenously
till all my blood is
drained.
Shuddering, I wake from silent-movie
vampire dream.
I fear to sleep again, smell
memories of ether
in corners of the room
but do sleep,
and dream once more:
a green suburban landscape
where a father mows his lawn
(soft whirr of lethal blades)
and waves to me
with guilelessness evoking
long-forgotten summer days.
His fresh-cut grass smells first
like something I remember
(bleached laundry in the sun)
then more like something I desire
(semen spent).
The father smiles,
he waves again.
I'm stumbling now in his direction
past a house with shuttered windows
where someone I once loved
lies dead,
but as the edges of the dream dissolve
(black fades to blue, wet redness blots out thought)
my legs drop off.
Two stumps
smear bloody markers in the grass.
Crawling now, I know I'll never reach him,
the one who beckons,
the man who leads me on.
Bob Guter
Bob Guter edits BENT: A Journal of CripGay Voices (www.bentvoices.org), which he created in 1999. His writing has appeared in The James White Review and the inaugural volume of Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction (Carrol & Graf). In 2003 he co-edited the anthology Queer Crips (Harrington Park Press), winner of a Lambda Literary Award.
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