In this new series called Pub Crawl, every post will include a journal publication of mine—in chronological order from earliest to most recent—with some commentary about the genesis of the poem, craft issues, and anything else interesting or edifying that comes to mind. This week’s Pub Crawl features “After,” the second poem I ever published. It appeared in La Petite Zine (winter 2000), an online journal created and edited by Daniel Nester.
After
You come late.
The others have gone
and left me here
expecting no one.
I wasn’t waiting for you.
The waiting is over,
but leaving isn’t easy.
It must look strange to you,
this world
of darkened corners,
hands and knees.
It only gets colder
after midnight.
The crackheads never go home.
How young you are—
I smell it on your hair,
feel it in the flush of your skin.
I wanted you only
for the usual cut and run;
but now that you’re here,
I don’t want you to go.
See where you have come—
this is a different time;
this is after.
A few of us remain,
but nobody knows
if we are survivors
or merely hangers on.
You still have time—
there’s no glory here
and some say no love,
where bodies are counted
and sheets are burned.
Go back the way you came.
Go home and sleep.
The Publication Stuff
Like my first publication (last Pub Crawl’s “What the Falconer Sees”), “After” was a solicitation. I mention that because, well...because it blows my mind! I came to poetry as a writer rather late compared to most, when I was about 30. I made my first submissions to journals in 1994, and between 1994 and 1999, I made 102 submissions to 36 different journals (some journals more than once) without any acceptances. So when Tom Devaney solicited me for Brooklyn Review online in December 1999, and then took “What the Falconer Sees,” I was gobsmacked. Similarly, when Dan Nester solicited me for La Petite Zine (in October 2000) and took “After” (along with two other poems), I was again humbled and surpassingly gratified.
It is a bit difficult to tease out precisely how I connected with Dan back in 2000, but it had something to do with what seemed to be an entire poetry subculture around the MFA program at NYU (in which my then boyfriend was a student); the New York editorial staff of Painted Bride Quarterly, which was headed up by co-editor (and then NYU doctoral student) Marion Wrenn; and the Four-Faced Liar, a notoriously decadent dive bar in the West Village—and particularly bartender Shafer Hall, who kept all sorts of things flowing on W. 4th between Jones and Cornelia Streets.
Okay, enough about all of that.
The Autobiographical Stuff
I wrote this poem in the mid 1990s. The genesis of the poem lay in my Brighton Beach years, when I lived in a studio apartment that hugged the boardwalk and kissed the shore of Lower New York Bay. I had grown up in a state-subsidized middle-income high-rise co-op in Coney Island called Luna Park, named for—and erected in the footprint of—the celebrated amusement park where Thomas Edison in 1903 electrocuted an elephant named Topsy to demonstrate the superiority of direct current to alternating current.
I bought that apartment in Brighton Beach in 1989, at the age of 28, so I could be near my aging widowed mother. I had by then recently discovered that under the boardwalk was a cruising site for gay men. To say that I participated eagerly in the under the boardwalk sexual culture of Brighton Beach in those years could not help but be an understatement. And many of my poems reflect that fact, milieu, reality—whatever you want to call it (we will no doubt touch on a number of them in the course of this Pub Crawl series).
Incidentally, if you want to get a feel for what it was like living in the Coney Island-Brighton Beach area in that era, watch Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 indie masterpiece, Requiem for a Dream, based on the 1978 novel of the same name by Hubert Selby Jr.
I tested positive for HIV in October 1990. “After” is one of what I might call my “core” AIDS poems—although of course, true to my form, it never mentions HIV or AIDS. I don’t think any of my AIDS poems mention HIV or AIDS.
The Craft Stuff
In “After,” I waste no time establishing the I/you dyad of speaker and addressee. The time is “late,” and the place is “here.” That temporal adverb “late” is doing a lot of work. The reader may think at first that the poem is set late in the day or late at night. Which it well may be—the time on the clock per se remains elusive. But what becomes clear is that the addressee is not so much late as belated. Some sort of party appears to be over. Some sort of guests appear to have gone. It’s dreamlike—The speaker did not think anyone else was coming, and he has only stayed because he can’t seem to leave. I’m not going to try to account for “I wasn’t waiting for you,” but I think it may be one of the most devastating lines I have ever written.
And I’m not going to be coy about this poem. At the end of the day, it is indeed yet another sex under the boardwalk poem. As I alluded to above, these sex under the boardwalk poems tend not to be based in any actual episode of real sex under the real boardwalk. In fact, if “After” reflects any real-life activity, it is more the hours I would spend there, late many nights, waiting for sex that never happened. And on nights like these, I would at some point start to write a poem in my head….
In this instance, I was thinking about the big lonely beach under the night sky, out beyond the dark shelter of under the boardwalk. The party that was over was a party I never really got to attend—The crazy wild 1970s party of gay male sex in parks and alongside highways, and in bondage and leather clubs under the Westside Highway in the Meatpacking District like The Anvil, The Manhole, and The Mineshaft. I wasn’t too young for that party; on the contrary, I was just the right age. But I was afraid of that party. In a quip of mine I liked to think was Wildean, I used to say I never wanted to do anything I would not feel comfortable telling my mother about!
The fact is, that deeply rooted fear of losing my mother’s love and approval, while it was in a sense the walls and door of my closet, also saved my life. To be blunt, if I had not been afraid to enter those clubs under the Westside Highway, I would have gotten the shit fucked out of me by the time I graduated high school, and I would have been dead barely out of college. I’m not exaggerating or being melodramatic. I saw it. It happened to guys I knew. It happened to guys I loved.
Okay, this has gone on long enough for a Substack post. You all don’t need me to tell you what this poem is about. Suffice it to say, the addressee in “After” is someone who sort of reminds the speaker of himself some years before, and the speaker both wants to connect with that young interloper and to protect him—perhaps even from the danger posed by the speaker himself.
If you liked this post, please consider clicking the ❤️ below. I welcome your comments, too, on the poem itself, or any aspect of this post, or anything you would like to share about the writing or reading of poetry.