Early on, we swam at dawn after hours dancing in a throbbing nightclub. We undressed on the dock. Half high, half strangers, under sky pale yellow and grey. Both night and day, black leather boots under a pile of damp jeans tube socks and tank tops.
I am not light but you carried me like sleep on your back. My arms wrapped round your chest, chin resting on your crown. We leapt like this, together, into waves. Under water, we separated surfaced, climbed a slick, wooden ladder.
One more time! you yelled naked, shivering, lake dripped down your thighs.
This morning, in our cold shower, we bicker about how to pay for the furnace while I’m out of work. Your arms striped with foam, lathered fingers tangled in my hair. Encaustic sapphire eyes.
At the breakfast table you sit across from me in a matted white terry robe stolen from a spa weekend, belt lost, hanging open, flashing the ginger and silver jut of your furred belly.
It’s my turn to wash our dishes. My hands in a skin of thick, pink rubber plunge into the sink. Crackling suds overflow to our soaked counter.
Gordon Taylor is a queer emerging poet who walks an ever-swaying wire of technology and poetry. A 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, his poems have appeared in Narrative, Rattle’s Poets Respond, Nimrod, Arc, and more. Gordon was the winner of the 2022 Toronto Arts & Letters Club Foundation Poetry Award and a finalist in the 2023 Gival Press Poetry Award. He writes to invite people into a world they may not have seen.
Photo © Raine Roberts. All rights reserved. 
