Grindr 1993
I have no idea how it happened when the blizzard
hit and the wind had stopped we all just showed
up at the gay bar on the corner: Jeff and Michael
and Kevin and Frank and Darren. That’s when you saw
who was from the neighborhood and who was not:
the ones that slummed from their suburb straight houses far
enough from home that no one knew them. Weird
to realize that now: a lot of those men grown with real
jobs sitting at the bar more than a few nights each
week were going back to something else—going home
to a life without the idea of us in it. We were twenty
nothing boys throwing snowballs inside the empty bar
while Peaches the bartender smiled and yelled knock
it off—he lived upstairs at the end of the street.
Noah Stetzer is the author of Because I Can See Needing a Knife (Red Bird Chapbooks). His poems have appeared in Sixth Finch, The Cortland Review, Hobart, and other journals. Noah can be found online at www.noahstetzer.com