Text
— for those departed and surviving in Orlando and everywhere
I am struggling now to comprehend my pulse, how I still have one,
after all the opportunities I've had to die with my hands
at the wheel after too many drinks in bars as I waited
to become my uncloseted self. And now I have nothing to do but pulse
with crackling rage as I raise an empty glass,
mourning the fact that you, Orlando, lost so many hearts
and hips and hands, all wanting to give themselves over to the other hearts
beating like hell on the dance floor before the clock strikes one.
You. Alive. You. Raising your luminous drinks to the glassy
air. You. Raising your brown Orlando hands
to the heavens in the heat of your last dance at Pulse.
And, of course, you don’t know this. Don’t know that death waits
around the corner like a drunk in a car. You are just waiting
for last call, for your early morning heart
to drum faster, to keep perfect time with its perfect pulse
as it moves closer to each slick body on the electric floor, to the one
you will leave this world with tonight, with your hands
locked tight, pressing each other's calloused palms, your glassy
eyes looking forward to the next time you raise them like a glass
clutched in the grace of everything that the body waits
to release when it releases itself from the tenuous grip of hands
in the act. And doesn't your Orlando always resemble the heart —
resilient, restless, eager to demonstrate how it is one
with the divine, how it yearns to live from within its own pulse?
And now I am pondering the woman who sat next to me, our pulses
quickening on my porch steps before we kissed then shuffled our crazy hearts
back into the deck to hide in the shadows of the one
true thing that I know I have been waiting
to discover with another. And now all the pulverized bar glasses
resemble diamonds on the dance floor, and a pair of smeared sunglasses
sleeps in the massacre's aftermath, inside and outside of Pulse.
Orlando, the world will wake Sunday morning with news of your hearts
murdered, and in the fifth stanza I've dropped a line in shock. My hands
go cold with grief. I don't know if I can spare the time to wait
for the one who could be the one while everyone in Orlando is one
heartbeat away from shattering like blown glass
floats that hands once held precious, waiting
for love to pulse. Yes, pulse. And still, I have one.
Originally from Boats for Women, Salmon Poetry, 2019, and first published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, special issue, Pulsamos: LGBTQ Poets Respond to the Puise Nightclub Shooting.