and the white and steady swath
of alcohol, cotton, their blood

in the fridge, leaving the white dark
together. They are walking into a world war.

I am driving that car.
I am driving so close to the edge of the road

that I am not afraid of crashing because
it would feel like slipping into a heavy dress.

It would feel like the click of the 20-lb.
wheel of lenses the optometrist hangs on your face

and smiles through. My crash would have
a weight like that, the weight of each

strength in vision stopped by the grey world around it.
Driving that car, the edge is mostly sea grass

blowing in hysterical synchronicity
or it is only the next step of what

sea grass looks like under jacklight. Driving that car
feels like Clyde Barrow on the run

from the eroticism of heist and spray of bullets
sunk glamorously into the bank oak, lens of his sunglasses missing.

I imagine movies, but I keep coming back
to life, hands first, around the wheel that tilts away

from your life. This is the love poem—your life,
then my life—

then driving like a drill made of music
through what remains.

than I am doing, these letters East and North
invent a God I can pray to

I am sending the part of my life that burns
through the parentheses you left me in

Dear X, one letter begins,
the ocean is an upheaval of green we saw it once
turn over during Vietnam. The clouds tonight are black
as oil spills. That’s the difference between the two wars.

Or: Dear X, I miss breaking the fast with bread
we both touched. P.S. The ghost you left can’t dance
so I went to a meeting for people who want to be loved.

Love comes to us, it seems, after our rage at
not being God leaks out.

Dear X, have we insisted yet on that? For more
than being lowered into life like two angels working
on the steeple? two angels who still smoke?

Someone said what was hard
about two men together was the ramming. Don’t laugh.
We are goats pumping iron, lost in a fire of bells.
then we are men working in studios and labs on a new world order.

One letter begins: Dear X, I am working on a new world order.
It goes backwards to just before we ever saw into
the blossom of fission over Japan. With you, it is
hard to fully suffer the atrocious.

Did you know it cost 74 cents to mail a rock?

I wrote in white paint across one: my heart
is strong enough to go through this and this is no different
than writing on paper. Sometimes these letters have to speak
to something cold.

One letter ends: you came to me in a dream
and said: after we pray… And I said: we teach.

Yesteryear, in the liberal New York newspaper
there was an obit for the actor Ethyl Eichelberger
dead from AIDS who always refused to talk about
AIDS because it would make death the focal point
and he wanted to talk about living because that’s where
you could find him: in his living cartwheeling
through an artificial jungle.

Some people didn’t know anything about us
because they never read the poems or the books
or the plays we were writing until we started
dying of AIDS. But we were here before AIDS
and before gay bars and Adrienne Rich who gave women
the will to change in poems that always asked
the same hardest question: who will do this if I do not do this?

We were here before Allan Ginsberg
wrote a poem called “America” because America needed
a new manifesto: a line for the outsider
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
And so, America, I am putting my queer
shoulder next to Allan’s queer shoulder.

America,my declaration of independence
is still being written and I pledge allegiance
to the rainbow flag that Harvey Milk suggested
be designed by an artist named Gilbert Baker in 1978
and not to the American flag that goes up in flames
above these fields of the republic with every news cycle.
And not to the American flag I see when I’m driving at night
for the playlist and other music—a flag that can’t
keep up with the strong winds and so it droops
like a used condom over Newport Harbor.

I will not be complicit to the republic
for which it stands when it stands for waging war
in the matrix of self-loathing or the construct
that bizarrely separates gay rights from human rights.
I already know that the moment a feeling enters
the body is political. I am a feeling animal
queering in stages of still becoming human.

I already know that resistance means holding my life
closer than a government and I pledge to not
govern my own mind until it has stopped singing.

Years ago, living in New York, I saw a kid
down on his knees in front of the Chinese take-out
drawing a heavy line in colored chalk down
the whole length of sidewalk between Broadway and Cooper, switching colors every few feet. It looked like
he was trying to press a rainbow into the earth.
And I don’t know what the line is for
or if it will ever happen again. But I hope
it never ends. I hope it’s the line keeping the world in the sky.

How were you imprinted with love?

Washing the Corpse

Spirit always wants the door.

After he was dead they washed his body.

N…

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Happiness

When I was (as they say) in my cups
I thought happiness, too was a drug.
When it wore off, you got more of it.
Twenty-four years later & I thank God
for the rationale happiness: the steady,
consistent, lucid, funny kind of happiness
that lets you into the light world
of the nameless, which must have always
been there wondering where I was.

Andrew is happy like that: light, consistent.
And he dances whenever there isn’t any music
signalling a time to give a speech
with his whole body because maybe I hadn’t
been listening to him living.

Listen to me: I’m dancing.

Except for some days at around 4:00
in the afternoon—some Saturday, Sunday,
another winter in the living room
& the light is coming from the middle
of a movie, or we’re watching the movie
about our cats in their consistent happiness.

And the birds have less of wherever
their singing comes from—measurably
colder—when the hiss of Inwood radiator heat—
that 4:00 in the afternoon sleepy-heat
starts its medicated blanket out
from the window into the rest of the apartment
that I see it happen: Andrew darkens
from something—

something, I keep telling him (but to myself)
in my absolutely unprofessional way
that harkens back to the meaning of an hour
from the past. It could be the hour just before
his father comes home drunk & all bets are off
that Andrew first darkened. And darkens now
in the persistent tail of having to hear
his father call him through the years
every name there is, except the name
Andrew already is: steady, consistent. A dancer.

Listen to me:

Andrew didn’t exactly teach me how to be happy,
but he showed me why it is so.

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that blade-lit afternoon Gary Orrin laughed at Kennedy’s murder

bleeding through the static of P.S. 41’s cheap PA.

There’s Greenwich Village—a drowsy dandelion—I called it once—and there are the heartsick monitors of afternoons.

My mother is late to pick me up again. She’s almost better, but will neve…

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Hewes House’s new series interviews poet and writer Michael Klein

HEWES HOUSE

APR 22, 2026

We got to know Michael through the publication of his most recent book, Happiness Ruined Everything out of Galileo Press, run by Barrett Warner, and we couldn’t be happier to have helped publicize this excellent work. Just like his inte…

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The word anthology comes from the Greek anthologia, (gathering of flowers), which is sometimes what my mind is doing with ideas, encounters, things I mean to write down but which eventually dissolve because the initial vibrancy of being enchanted wears off and I’ve already moved to the next flower.

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The world is a dream I am having about the …

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Or, whether it’s because my heart has suddenly remembered what it means to break

or whether it’s realizing t…

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Or, whether it’s because my heart has suddenly remembered what it means to break or whether it’s real…

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The man I live with has trouble sleeping—not the insomnia trouble (and maybe trouble is the wrong word)—maybe the right word is troubling. He falls sleep okay, but eventually he starts to turn and laugh and occasionally slap his butt and sometimes starts talking in an unknown language I liken to the made-up language twins will sometimes use when they do…

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This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

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