Eric Sneathen, Don’t Leave Me This Way

 

You Say to the Boy OpenYour Eyes

Wind. Weather. Of thedeep rigging. Repeatedly
How frail our ship ourwaves. There. Thread
Of sails on the lips. Heldsteady. I rub my eyes.
Love ahead. The badweather. So they did. There
They poured libations tothe passing of a shadow.
Salt lips touching. Marbledfingers. Nights of oars
And weather. The score ofwing beats. Kiss me
Repeatedly dusk. The smellof him. The crew and
Horrible wind. Sun. Soour ship smashed into bits.
Purple waves. The quickblack ship is everlastingly.
There. Love. Clouds wadedboldly out into day.
We fall. Was splashingtossed companions. Sun
Scattered stubble. Littleship. Love’s gleaming sky.
I place a delphinium tilldawn the ship sailed on.

Iam deeply pleased to see a new poetry title by Oakland, California “poet andqueer literary historian” Eric Sneathen, following his full-length debut, SnailPoems (Krupskaya, 2016) [see my review of such here], the lyricly-beautifuland deeply powerful newly-released Don’t Leave Me This Way (New York NY:Nightboat Books, 2023). As the back cover offers: “Don’t Leave Me This Wayblends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnetsinspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as ‘Patient Zero’ of the AIDSepidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy andpornography, Don’t Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of thecut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost spirits: poignant, vengeful, andready to ball.”

Thereis something of Sneathen’s lyric narratives through prose poems that hold anecho of some of the “new narrative” writings of the Bay Area in the 1970s, asshowcased in the anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997, eds. Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian (New York NY: NightboatBooks, 2017) [see my review of such here], such as the late Steve Abbott(1943-1992), acknowledged through the hefty collection Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader, edited by Jamie Townsend with an afterword by AlysiaAbbott (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2019) [see my review of such here] fortheir shared blend of first-person narrative, wild energy and lyric experimentation,simultaneous sense of joy and impending doom, queer content and the AIDScrisis, and for their use of deeply person biographical material. “Gaétan’sperfect finger draws this cluster,” Sneathen writes, to open the poem “Gaétan’sPerfect Finger Draws this Cluster,” “Of gasoline azaleas. Remember that each / Onerepresents with choppy surfaces, men / Bent in upon his inviting smile.” The factsof the story are intertwined with the lyric, and the facts are important, evenwhen offered slant, or cloudy, or glossy. “Since being cast as ‘Patient Zero,’”Sneathen writes, as part of a length afterword to the collection, “Gaétan Dugashas persisted between and among texts, in an array of representations and fantasies.I wrote this book in order to listen to those fantasies. I wanted to hear theclamor of a phantasmic bacchanal echoing in the corridor of an ongoing emergency.Clad in tight jeans and a flannel shirt, it is a fantasy that cruises me underthe dim lights of the recent past. I perceive something of its winning smilebeaming beneath its full mustache.”