The Poems that Got Us In: Piérre Ramon Thomas

Piérre Ramon Thomas shares three poems he used to get into AU’s MFA program.

Devotion

I beat my grief-stricken chest,

            That I, with

Poetic words, can’t caress

                        Your heart’s

            face.

Occluded is the wellspring

            From which both

Love and lyric mingling

                        Ought flow

            liberally from their

            place.

Coarse and jagged I am left

            From being

Love-and-tenderness bereft—

                        But the best

            of me I’ll strive to

            give.

Healing is my objective,

            If only

To make my heart subject, if

                        Only to your

           loving personage.

Misfortune of the Perpetually Single Gay Male Romantic

Instead of an epochal love,

Years, decades loving on a man,

Having a man love on me,

Our shared history engraved in vibrant pictorials on the Walls of Time,

What I have is a series of brief encounters:

Episodes where I risked death just for ephemeral moment

Of what-feels-like-love.

Please don’t ask me to count them,

And please don’t ask me their names—

I don’t deserve that level of embarrassment and shame.

Instead of being barefoot and . . . naked

Wearing nothing but a “Kiss the Chef” apron in some man’s kitchen,

Letting him taste the black-speckled vanilla custard

I’m whipping up for our crème brûlées,

I am reconsidering redownloading the hookup apps:

You know which ones!

Even though I’ve sworn them off—

For what? This must be the twentieth time—

To be reminded of a man’s touch,

What it feels like for someone to look at me with carnivorous desire.

Being a romantic, an amorist, a devotee of love

And being a perpetually single gay man

Is one of the most torturous circumstances

The universe could ever design and assign some poor soul to.

Better if I were a hedonist:

The supply of undevoted, wanton pleasure among gay men

Is never lacking. Never will.

Street Preacher

If your love for me doesn’t inspire you

To go door-to-door

Bringing the Good News to your neighbors

Both far and wide,

Of how you feel about me—

If your love for me doesn’t motivate you

To stand on street corners and medians on the roads

Proclaiming to all passersby

Willing to listen

About the man whom you adore—

If your love for me doesn’t compel you

To go about preaching the gospel according to...you,

Sharing scriptures from your Romantic Bible

Of your musings about me,

Converting nonbelievers into pastors, prophets and evangelists of love—

Then...

Piérre Ramon Thomas is a Black queer writer whose themes orbit around family, gender, sexuality, queer love, erotica, nature—just to name a few. He is rounding out his first year at American University pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. Thomas has been published in the anthologies, America's Future and Capital Queer, and in local literary publications such as Mid-Atlantic Review, WWPH Writes, and more. He is a native of the Washington metropolitan area and could be seen around the northern Virginia area trying new food, drinking white mochas, or meandering about national or state parks.