BY STELIOS MORMORIS
Morning in the gym,
and echoing clinks
of weights hammer
the low cloud cover
outside even closer.
Snowless winter, and
I crave the empty
picket-fenced lots
baring their burned
out patches of grass,
the cut-off straw
stalks of blue and
pink hydrangea—
once as bushy as
drag queens’ wigs.
I take in the molten
snarl of dead weeds
in the residual, un-
loved spaces, slip-
ping through slats
of peeling fences,
prying chasms of
broken bricks, a
lyrical tracing of
summers past: sex-
crazed, druggy, fun.
One relic is the man
in the lifting rack
beside me, proffering
a mechanical smile
and bleached tan
tainted—or tinted?—
by rumors, like
a buoy studded with
hooks. Whose friend
or husband did he
fuck, and where, why?
Wisteria spreads—
ultimately engulfs
the whole lattice
like gossip. I linger on
the bleached ridged
shingles of the closed
corner liquor store,
and bury summers.
Down the channel
of shuttered houses
one boat is turning
on its mooring no faster
than the second
hand of my watch, a
din reprieve from my
circuitous chatter:
I spawned with men
in the turquoise surf
until you towed me
to love’s estuary.
I behold this built man
finishing his squats
who starts punching
out texts, quicken-
ing my heartbeat.
The crows agitate
on wires, mocking
the arranged stillness.
Native of Boston and Martha's Vineyard, MA., Stelios Mormoris is CEO of EDGE BEAUTY, Inc. He has published work in The Fourth River, Gargoyle, Humana Obscura, Midwest Poetry Review, the Nassau Literary Review, Press, Spillway, Sugar House Review, Verse, the Whelk Walk Review and other literary journals.
Process Note: The poem I wrote "Man In Provincetown' was a meditation on the various seasons of Provincetown, MA., where I was struck by the starkness of winter, and how it kindled the memory of summer. I think it is also a sort of view of the danger of anonymous sex, and the search for intimacy. I was conscious of keep a strict tight form to the stanzas, with short line lengths, and driving the narrative through hard, clear imagery.