The moment arrives in which I must finally acknowledge that I have not yet actually
touched on exactly what my intimacy issues are, and it is because I am scared,
I am so so scared, and I do not know if I could have sex with someone who
I loved, or love someone who I had sex with, and every night that I do not
have sex feels like a failure, and I try to make it not feel like failure,
but if you have ever experienced the sensation of failure you will
likely understand that it has very little to do with real, genuine
success and instead is about small dancing boy monsters
who sing words like ugly and crazy and tiny into the
shameful walkway of your body, and now I must
walk home, and when I do I whisper to myself
out loud I want you to come home I want you
to come home I want you to come
home and I pretend I do not know
who you is and I pretend that
I don’t end every night
repeating this and I
pretend that I have
a home to come
to— oh, how
many nights
have I spent
coming
with no
home?
Rob Colgate (he/she/they) is a disabled bakla poet and playwright from Evanston, IL. His work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Sewanee Review, Gulf Coast, and New England Review, among others, and has received support from MacDowell, Fulbright, Kenyon Review, and Tin House. He is the author of MY LOVE IS WATER, a verse drama forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse, and FEEBLE, winner of the Poetry Online Chapbook Series Fellowship. He received an MFA in poetry and critical disability studies from the New Writers Project at UT Austin and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta, poet-in-residence at Tangled Art + Disability, and assistant poetry editor at Foglifter Journal.