Joshua Garcia
Praise
I am running out of belief in praise.
My please don’t stops & oh my gods ring
like empty bells. I sit on my hands,
contemplate the man across from me,
a stranger not too unlike the men I’ve most
praised. What did I see? What did I
believe in? Their legs illuminated paths through the park.
Somehow I’ve ended up here: Good boy.
My ear caught between your teeth.
I cannot listen to music anymore. The morning
opens a canopy of silver in the streets.
I walk through it in silence.
Joshua Garcia reads “Praise”
Close
I go to the movies with someone I’ve slept with
while you are at home. The boy on the screen
is full of looks. We have paid good money to watch him
stare out of windows. After, we walk down the avenue,
side by side, & part so quickly we do not see
each other’s faces. What are you looking at? you asked me.
The wall, I told you. There was a distance between us then,
as there is now. You wanted me to write a poem about your eyes.
I don’t remember them—their color—but when you text me,
I switch trains, brush by men more handsome than you,
take a route past the hour of sleep. I come to you.
Joshua Garcia reads “Close”
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 poetry has 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.