Readings: Come Hear! 2026 at The Center

This year felt a little fraught to be honest when it came to the Come Hear! Poetry Marathon for the Rainbow Book Fair at NYC's LGBT Center. In the weeks leading up to the event, my chosen artists kept meeting disasters that precluded their participation: one had a family emergency, one fractured his ankle, and one had a car crash. And then one got a residency and one got Broadway tickets. But everything turned out fine in the end, with two of my favorite go-to poets, Malcolm Tariq and Joey De Jesus, joined by newcomer Chela Crinnion and memoirist Steve Turtell (not pictured above). The smaller size of the group also gave me space to share some of my own poetry this time around so I focused on poems which I'd largely ignored at previous readings for my last collection, Fassbinder: His Movies, My Poems, poems such as "Lola," "Lili Marleen," and "In a Year of 13 Moons" -- the last of which I'm resurfacing below since Crab Fat Literary Magazine, the website that originally hosted this sestina, is no longer online. Deep thanks to my curatorial collaborators, Regie Cabico, Irene Villasenor, Nathaniel Siegel, and Tracie Dawn Williams.

In a Year of 13 Moons

Way back when, I made a lovely girl,

not a real girl but as close to real

as I was gonna get. I wore a polka dot

dress with an elastic neck that I could pull

down for effect. Some might rightly wonder

why I aspired to the gawky grace of a young

Jane Fonda. All I can say is: I was young

and foolish. A fairly unconvincing girl,

perhaps. But a winningly unaffected wonder.

Wigless, without makeup, I squeezed the real

me into brown silk. Didn’t even bother to pull

up my boxer shorts. At 10 p.m. on the dot,

I arrived at a party where a hostess named Dot

briskly ushered me towards a sinewy, young

man in a toga. He, in turn, proceeded to pull

me into the crowd as if I were the Modern Girl

to suit his Ancient Greek. (Not real

but close enough so no one cared to wonder.)

I had no reason to resist, no time to wonder

of intent. Instead, I danced a dot-to-dot

from one man to the next as real

and unreal whirled around me. Some young,

insistent voice shouted, “You go, girl!”

And go I did, convinced I had a kind of pull.

I felt so irresistible. But to pull

is one thing; to push, another. The wonder

of it all is how my good-gone-bad-girl

act grew bold. I actually spat a half-eaten dot

of olive at some dude’s head, a young

guy who turned and spat saliva back for real.

My would-be suitors left in search of real

housewives while I could neither pull

myself together nor my skirt down. Young

couples formed. I unraveled. Small wonder

that I felt like the third elliptical dot

no matter where I stood. Not girl.

Not boy. Not faking. Not real. I wonder.

Did I pull it off? (I don’t mean the dress.)

Being a girl was wild. Being young, much better.

Photo by Sok Song.