The Red Letters
In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.
To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.
––Steven Ratiner
Red Letter Poem #281
Sexuality
My sexual orientation is Spring.
––Canadian poet Kyla Jamieson
My sexual orientation is November, Morrissey, and Maundy Thursday. It is the toes of luminous humans peeping out from summer sandals, from Birkenstocks and high heels. Anglican chant and second-hand bookstores. Making jokes at my own expense, because I am resilient and I love a good laugh.
My sexuality is tragic: bane and blight instead of blessing and boon. My sexuality is part of the Male Awkwardness Epidemic. My groove, the thing that gets me off, is Dylan Thomas. My kink is society, the myriad communions and communities that give me life, breath, hope. My safe-words are Easy Does It, One Day at a Time, Next Right Thing. I’m just another meatball in the sauce.
My sexuality is tongue-tied: reticent and reckless, silly and submissive. Not knowing which way is up, not caring. It is all the practices to which I am loyal: prayer-beads, poems, daydreams of humiliation and ecstasy. My orientation is often dis-. It is the kneeling namaste I offer to churchmates and to poetfriends. My creak-boned homage to their ineffable splendor. My fumbling veneration of their light.
My lovelorn yearnings have made High Honor Roll, have received a certificate of Approbation with Distinction. My ten-thumbed loves, my wacky crushes: boys when I was in eighth grade, girls my senior year, nobody from my twenties to my forties. Today, my benedictions fall upon the fluid and the non-conforming; my celibate codgerhood venerates their holy footprints.
My heart’s desire, the music to which it dances, the song it sings to me even as I sleep, is to behold a friend, to hold them and be held by them, to kneel beside their feet and unwrap them like Christmas presents, to solace them with kisses and with tears.
––Thomas DeFreitas
What could possibly be more fundamental than the right of any individual to define the territory of the self and defend the borders of the communal? And yet we are seeing an intensified and widespread inclination in recent years: people who are hellbent (and I use that term mindful of its etymological roots) on usurping the legitimate privilege of others. There are tyrants who unleash the brutality of their armies to try to determine––for a separate sovereign nation––what they would never wish to see prescribed for their own. And there are some tyrannical ideologues who would oppress certain individuals simply for demanding the choice of how they should be referred to, or whom they might love. So I was not surprised to see a poet like Thomas DeFreitas––who is fond of musically elaborate verse and philosophically audacious conceits––exercising his right to self-determination via a radical act of the imagination. And because his approach is both playful and provocative, I think his poem “Sexuality” accrues a kind of persuasiveness capable of skirting the defenses of partisan belief and rational argument.
Thomas’ decision to make this a prose poem (a hybrid form which––I remember one creative writing teacher explaining, back in my ancient college days ––“looks like prose but behaves like poetry”) was, to my mind, a fortuitous one. Sentences and paragraphs feel much more domesticated than lines and stanzas, and so our minds begin reading ‘for content’ and not style, not the more subversive allure of lyricism and imagery. Right from the opening ––“My sexual orientation is November, Morrissey, and Maundy Thursday.”––I found myself backpedaling a bit, surprised by where the speaker was leading me. Still, I could not resist smiling at the alliterative flourish, and the incongruity of sexual orientation being defined by what, at first glance, seemed to be random associations: the autumnal season, a pop icon, the religious holiday. But on my second go-around, I had to pause to reflect on the emotional amalgam that was teased out so deftly: we begin with the dim and moody skies of November; compound that with the dark humor and sexual longing from the Smiths’ former front man; and intensify the collage with mention of the pre-Easter celebration marking the occasion where Jesus first gave his disciples the Eucharist, pairing it with the “new commandment" to love one another. (And in the current political climate, doesn’t that, too, feel like a revolutionary proposition?) The surface playfulness belies the urgent purposefulness of what’s being conveyed. The poem reveals and conceals––sometimes within the course of a line or two––and so we experience a kind of tentative tenderness mounting as we read. How revealing can the speaker dare to be in print’s public forum? How intimate can a stranger become, using only inky signs instead of touch?
Thomas is no stranger, though, to the Red Letters, first appearing way back in 2020 when this poetry project was just underway. His publisher, Kelsay Books, has issued four full-length poetry collections, including this year’s Walking Between the Raindrops. A chapbook, Elegies & Devotions is in production. Thomas’ style generally offers a more customary version of lyricism, but I’m always intrigued when he carves out a path into new territory. The musicality is still present here (“…bane and blight instead of blessing and boon”). But because he’s warned us––“My orientation is often dis-.”–– I was only too happy to buckle up and ride this emotional rollercoaster. And despite the jagged twists and turns, in the end, who would not want to be ‘unwrapped like a Christmas present,’ to have some beloved friend ‘solace us with kisses and with tears?’ Of course, Thomas gets to answer for Thomas; Steven for Steven; you, gentle reader, for you. Having paid the enormous fee to board this wild ride––our mortal vulnerability, our deepest attention––shouldn’t we each, at the very least, be able to determine what we’ll be called upon boarding, with whom we’ll share the experience, and how we will prepare ourselves for the conclusion when the rattling wheels come to a stop?
The Red Letters
* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:
* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:
