Austin Segrest

Celestial Realm

What did Steve look like? I drew him once
   in purple colored pencil. Such handsomeness

didn’t hurt his chances charming Mom.
   Devious green eyes. High cheek

and forehead. Square, smooth jaw, long
   lashes, even a bit

of the English beak that runs
   on Mom’s side of the family.

He passed as straight, or, with a few
   touches, a woman (he’d sold coke in drag).

Or, as a relation of mine.
   We were in a coffee shop, mid-nineties

pre-Starbucks southside Birmingham,
   crowned in clove smoke in a corner.

It was dark roast, big clay mugs, wide
   wedges of cake.      

                                    Steve’s looking down
   at an oblique angle, gap teeth and lashes,

almost bashful (he was anything but).
   My pencil struggled with the shadows

of his cut-off sleeves, a dancer’s shoulders.
   But I captured something. Joy. First blush,

the ever only successful portrait
   from life in my life: only Steve

could have brought it out. Probably,
   he was drawing, too. Or laying out cards.

Goth girls and baggy grungers milled around
   thrifted couches and recliners

like the furniture in Steve’s own den.
   Low reddish lamplight.

                                                Outside,
   Highland Avenue wound the cusp

of Red Mountain. It makes twin
incursions into folds of the limestone,

describing two declivities, crotch-
  shaped parks, dark now, known for cruising.

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Originally from Alabama, Austin Segrest teaches poetry at Lawrence University in northcentral Wisconsin. A 2018-19 Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown poetry fellow, he is the author of Door to Remain, winner of the 2021 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize. His poems appear in POETRY, Ecotone, The Common, Ploughshares and many others.