Dudgrick Bevins
Three Poems
I Still Cannot Give Blood
I still cannot give blood,
and it isn’t because
you were positive and I was negative, but
because when we tangled, we tangled four
hairy legs and when you came
inside me,
in the little latex sac, you were cumming in
the void of my ass. And even through I’ve
managed to stay uninfected,
and even though
I’ve kept a shear sheath of rubber between me
and every lover since I watched two thirds
of our friends and fuck buddies
have tattered
bleached white sheets pulled up over their
heads — mothers, nuns, and dykes picking
up what’s left and putting it in boxes.
I said,
give my queer blood to queer people. I said,
let me save the life of an intravenous drug
user. I said, surely some baby
is drawing
first breath, now, unaware of just how doomed
they are with mother’s milk and poison veins,
give my blood to them. I said,
I didn’t come
for the juice and cookies — I came because
there is always a war raging, and my blood
is not queer or clean: it is simply life I bleed.
Generation Between
From a generation between
certain death
and undetectable intimacy, men came of age
thinking they wouldn’t (or shouldn’t), men
who saw themselves only in frailty
and a
televised corpse on MTV’s Real World. I want
to tell them they’re lucky to have seen Pedro,
as lucky as they were to see him wed
as they
were to see him dead. So much quiet, then a
cacophony of our faces, our friends; too long
and gone, after we needed to hear
their moans
of decadence: we danced into denial with
Regan’s Hollywood smiles and spiritualist
eyes, until dormancy
took hold of our cheek-
bones and AZT went in — two half jiggers full
in our cosmos, shaken. A decade of faggot
fiends on film:
every bloodsucker a cocksucker
and contagious — ready to turn every good
boy with eyes who watched the warning, that
too, a was welcome.
I walked your ghost out with
me at night, into the bars and sex clubs turned
galleries. When you swallowed my arm it was
because you wanted to know
where you
ended and I began: we made a round river,
looping past ourselves—each other—Paul
Bunyan and Babe’s blue balls.
I saw you thru
glass eyes darkly, limitless infinitude, we had
one pulse. But on stage, paint enema and
fish hook crown,
carving a castle as the queen
of tarts — blood paintings: a human
printing press singing “hallelujah!” All I saw,
was a question: where and when do I end?
In Our House
There are places I cannot go
in our house
anymore. There are places where I see you,
smiles and cigarettes, talking with your hands,
smoke dancing
in an argument with the air.
“Couch,” I address him sometimes, “have you
felt weight? I wait today.” And, “no ghosts,”
we agree.
The circles for pacing get smaller:
the refrigerator brings me chills, pangs of
loneliness thinking of the fading bodies inside,
the mysterious light — off;
the bathroom,
where washcloths fell from slumped shoulders
into water dinged with piss and dead skin,
soap and slough;
no afterimage in the closet;
lack of reflection in all mirrors; the bed in the
bedroom, half untouched, empty of weight
and heavy with lightness.
Where can I walk?
One cat runs to places where cats go and
humans can’t find; another to rooms too
haunted for spirits to visit; and our third
cat
dead. Mewing at your feet as he follows you
from a dawn dew cover bed and into the
kitchen when the refrigerator light
shines out
as you take remove the cream for your coffee and
the last half of a can of tuna to dump into
the bowl where we put pictures
of ourselves
so the cats wouldn’t miss us when we were
on vacation. I don’t go into the hall anymore.
I think I hear your keys in the door, and purring.
Dudgrick Bevins is the author, with Allen Lanning, of Light Travels Further than Sound (Kinstugi Books, 2020), and the author of My Feelings are Imaginary People Who Fight for My Attention (The Poet’s Haven, 2018), Route 4, Box 358 (bd-studios, 2018), and, with luke kurtis, Georgia Dusk: Where We Were Born bd-studios, 2017). Bevins is a queer interdisciplinary artist from Deliverance country in the north Georgia mountains. Now living in New York City, he teaches literature and creative writing to high school students in Harlem.
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