The Embrace
So pale, he’s almost
green, a bit yellow,
slightly iridescent—
in that second before
he touches you, you wish
you could make him
pretty again. Even
through his overcoat
you’ll feel his bones.
He mentions he’s been ill.
No details. But you
don’t shrink
because you think he has
a cold. You flinch,
then make yourself
wrap your arms around him
yes, wrap your arms around
him, because years ago you saw
beautiful young men die, men
who looked like he does now—
you know no one gets it
like this,
breathing
evaporated cries
trickling from
bathhouses long since
torn down,
arch of back to arch
of feet, limb
to limb, to
hospital bed, the unnamed
breeding wildly
in the blood.
—Rose Auslander
Rose Auslander recently wrote “The Embrace” in remembrance of close friends lost to AIDS in the 1980s, when she was a modern dancer in New York City. Her book Wild Water Child won the 2016 Bass River Press Poetry Contest; her chapbooks include Folding Water, Hints, and The Dolphin in the Gowanus; and look for her poems in Tupelo Quarterly (TQ9) and the Berkeley Poetry Review (#48). Rose has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has read her poems on NPR. She is Poetry Editor of Folded Word Press, and earned her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson.
