Joshua Garcia

Passages

Blood rises to meet your chin scraping my back
I lie on a bed of nails to simulate this feeling—-
not you holding me down but my body blushing.
How many times have we been through this? Last night
I dreamed of an endless hall of curtains. Heavy, velvet.
One after another, I pulled them apart, pushed myself through.
My arms were sore in the morning. How many times
will we talk about this before something changes?
I go to bed in a red kimono & wake up in a cool blue room.
When we are finished, you caress me with our silk,
paint roses on my tender & inflamed skin.
Even our bodies, wide awake, are consumed by image.

Joshua Garcia is the author of Pentimento (Black Lawrence Press 2024), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and has received a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University and an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship from The Poetry Project. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.