rain looks like snow when it falls backdropped

by redbrick and formstone, when you can see

gravity telling each drop to race groundward,

become groundwater again until it is time

to evaporate and set up shop in the sky? yesterday

the key bridge collapsed and it made me want

to believe in something like a water cycle for humans

sent sailing in clouds. i have nightmares

where we are driving over the bay and are suddenly

swallowed by brackish surge, helpless. i cannot look

at the muddied patapsco anymore without thinking

about death tangled in the steel jaws of a broken truss.

i want us to move around like the water—sometimes

shapeless, but always abundant in the atmosphere.

i want the world to say you are finished with this form

but you are not done here yet. i want to meet all

of the lives i’ve seen shortened in a castle somewhere

warm. there is no retrieval system for a past

when death stood looming still, but at a respectable

distance. there is no such place, no cycle—only grief.

beignet dust sugars to sweaty palms, sweetens

the sensation when i bite my nails to stubs. an oyster

in new orleans swells like labia minora tickled hello

and i am with my queer friends still thinking

about what i said in the car on sunday morning:

i didn’t know i was queer until i had sex with a woman.

then i was certain. then came gender. as we walked

out of the bookstore this morning, i heard a man say

girls are girls and boys are boys, that’s how they were born

and i wondered for a moment what it must be like to feel

so loyal to a concept that, if dismantled, could be a win

for even him. i remembered how it felt to dull

a shimmer for the sake of seeming normal, then strode

under the pride flags above, camera drawn.

nat raum is the poet laureate of the void; their corporeal form lives in Baltimore. They’re the author of the abyss is staring back, random access memory, camera indomita, and many others. Find them online at natraum.com or astral projecting inside a Royal Farms.