The UpStairs Lounge
On June 24, 1973, The UpStairs Lounge, a gay bar in New Orleans, was firebombed, resulting in the death of 32 people who were locked inside. The city dismissed the need for a thorough investigation and disposed of some of the bodies in a mass grave without allowing the bodies to be identified. Nobody was ever convicted.
You compressed your chest and torso
to fit between the bars of the window,
a space no wider than the length
of an average man’s foot. On fire,
you fell like another piece of debris
blown out the window. Let me catch you.
Here, jump onto this trampoline
that never came, charge down these lines
like fire escapes, leap into the space
where you’ll never have to fall.
But who am I for you to trust?
They say it was another gay man
who started this fire, who doused
the stoop in lighter fluid before dropping
the match. And all that I have done
is write poems, more rooms
for you to enter and never leave.
Let me try something else:
You’re in the UpStairs Lounge drinking
an Old Fashioned with Reverend
Larson, talking about Acts and his sermon
on Pentecost. Mitch and Louis dance
by the jukebox blasting Cher and fire
hangs above your heads, calls your names.
– Originally appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal
from Why Can’t It Be Tenderness by Michelle Brittan Rosado
The Sweetest Exile Is the One You Choose
Beyond the body. Beyond the car.
Beyond the wire pulled loose
on a fence still waving the flag
of torn things. Beyond the tall grasses
and the shorn hillside. Beyond
the dried-up canal, the empty tent
with the dead fire outside it, the broken
reflector flashing distantly
at the foot of a burned-out barn. Beyond
this valley. Think ocean, think
lost continent. Beyond the dead
and their failures: knowledge they took
nowhere. Beyond the point
of anything calling your name. Call
your own name. Beyond the voice
no longer ringing, like a hubcap flung
into stillness. Beyond the bridge
your words make, the heartbeat’s
trapeze. Beyond the radio tower
blinking its one red light. Beyond
the emergency call boxes
spaced like old hurts you gather up
for miles. Beyond the ordinary
narrative of being. Beyond
the bird’s nest. Beyond the bird’s nest
coming apart in the rain.
