prompts: hot, humid, water & sweat
CW: bordering on explicit
Remus Lupin had ceased to be shocked by words. Bodies comprised of crooks and holes and ridges wrapped in skin that stretched and breathed—that could overwhelm him. But words? At 36 and publisher of the gay poetry zine, Assonance, he thought he had read everything. He had printed poems about blond boys in bathhouses, public masturbation, the slick sound the handle of a heavily vaselined whip makes as you work it into your lover’s ass. What he hadn’t read—that is until this morning over breakfast—was a poem about himself.
His top floor apartment was silent and still. He could hear his bare footsteps on the kitchen’s hardwood floor. The flick of the button on the coffee maker, the drip of coffee hitting coffee, the pop of ready toast.
He sat at the table and placed his mug on the most recent submission to Assonance, where it left a damp ring. A perfect circle around the poem’s title and dedication:
It was not the “R.L.” that caught his attention. R.L. could be any number of people’s initials. No, it was the title. His reaction to it was visceral. He could feel the press of a hand against his stomach.
Summer in San Francisco is cool 50s, but thinking about that skin against his and it was the very tip of a New York summer, the slow end of August 1971.
He took a sip of coffee and read:
I am thinking of August on asphalt.
I am thinking of fire hydrants split
and spilling. The cigarette butt pulled
from your lips, a tiny fire that sizzles in the crook
of the curbed river streaming to the ready drain.
You could fry an egg on the sidewalk,
you said.
And I think of a delicate shell cracking against
cast iron. Later a pool of viscid liquid.
Your stomach hard asphalt, hot iron.
We clung to subway poles, touching
sweat to metal, but not each other.
Shuddering with the clatter
and the seconds suspended in blackness
released to the blank eyes of underground animals.
Yours on me though, glassy with trust
and alcohol. Remarkable
that you would come home
with me.
We ascend into New York’s silence.
The mumble from stoops, glass
shattering the air at 2 a.m.
no different than the air at 2 p.m.
in its murkiness.
The street lamps wear wet halos.
My palm leaves a damp print
on the stairwell wall
as I kiss you into graffiti
under a dying bulb.
In my room, it is too hot to speak
of touching
so we drag the bare mattress.
You backwards, me burdened.
Still wordless.
Wordless with laughter, laughter
at our clumsiness our need our risk our hope.
Our corner of the roof and sky.
Your skin a sunset, gold and glazed in
pink and purple.
I place my palm in neon against
the flat of your abdomen.
Hot asphalt, hard iron, sperm smeared and hazy
in your sweat. It fits perfectly
in pink boundaries.
My wrist dispersing light.
We should not be here come morning,
but we are. Folded into our corner
the way you fold against my chest.
Laundry flickers dull colors above us.
A shirt sleeve lax in the still air.
I feel you stir as I stir.
The stiff fabric of starched jeans pinned
on the line. I hold you motionless.
It is too light for this.
And yet if we are silent. Wordless.
The slight shift of your leg.
The sheet barely rustles.
And I need nothing more.
You asked.
Of our future.
Is what I did not say.
The mug slipped in Remus’s hand. He wiped his palms against his pajamas. He could feel the sheen of sweat on his stomach, at the roots of his hair, like his body wanted to relive the words.
He’d met Sirius Black at a bar in Greenwich Village. Some kids must have unscrewed the outlet of a fire hydrant because water poured down the street. He’d accepted a cigarette and leaned against the brick wall feeling like it was too hot to have even this small blaze near his face. As they walked to the subway, he flicked the butt into the rush of water flowing between the street and sidewalk.
Everything was there. The subway ride, the kiss in Sirius’s stairwell. The stifling heat of his Upper East Side apartment, so oppressive that they couldn’t bear to have their bodies next to each other, so they’d drunkenly dragged the mattress up a flight of stairs. When they emerged onto the roof, they weren’t alone. Several other mattresses dotted the tarpapered landscape, each with bodies sleeping restlessly. They’d hesitated, but found a far corner tucked behind an outcropping of chimneys. Someone had strung their drying laundry between one of the chimneys and an antenna pole and they lay beneath it.
He’d come on his stomach from Sirius’s hand wrapped around him, and as he lay there naked and sticky, they’d realized that the building next-door had a neon sign in its window. A pink palm, purple script above it reading Psychic, Know Your Future. From that angle, the sign’s illumination left a glowing palm on Remus’s belly, and Sirius placed his hand within the outline, fitting it perfectly, the base of his palm resting in the pool of come.
They were naked under a thin sheet on a shared rooftop when they woke the next morning, and they knew they should dress quickly, hurriedly drag the mattress back to Sirius’s bedroom, but instead they’d had sex. Spooning, barely moving, trying not to make a sound. The very stillness of it a pressure and a release.
“What are you thinking?” Remus asked.
Sirius said something about the heat. Neither of them mentioned the future. Remus boarded a flight back to San Francisco, never got a phone number, but he left his card behind: Publisher, Assonance.
word count: 1000 (exactly!)
I wanted to write a fic about gay poetry zines post-Stonewall (real thing) and New York before AC was common. Then it turned into a poem.
