“Nisus and Euryalus At The Louvre” is kind of a sequel to my first verse-novel Infernas. Pre-orders are up on my website for Valentine’s day because that book is a total act of love– craft without the intention to ever sell to a big press. My work is often based on the intersection of antiquity and the echoes that queer men are forever wandering through– my passionate academic research on Dante became my passionate academic research on Virgil and vice versa. I’m inspired by modes that are deemed “out of date” and wanted this poem to function as a mini epic – playful, yet deadly serious – a modern Virgilian retelling of the doomed lovers in The Aeneid.

AAAALove poems and epistolaries by disabled queer people are often so very removed from the people who wrote them– burned, erased, and beaten to death by critics for the sake of research and shoving figures in ones face to prove a point– perhaps Whitman said it best when he wrote that intuitions discussing poetic work does little to enhance the nature of poetry or humanity at all and instead we should focus on “The institution of the dear love of comrades.”

AAAAWhat is a love poem? Something you never show anyone, until you have to show everyone. Something you show everyone, until you decide to lock it away and never show anyone ever again. I suppose, Love is worshiping a ghost until you convince him you need a guide; that you’re going to Hell together, circle after circle, forever. Writing can be perfect, but also perfectly empty if it’s not done with exquisite lived experience and love. That is the primogeniture of poetry, I think–the hellish eternal Love, not the other way around. Does that mean every poem you write should be a love poem? I don’t know. Does it mean the minutiae of Life’s centrifugal force should be balletic to the point of Poetry not being able to resist its own creation? Perhaps.