Golden Gate Park
Tonight, walking the AIDS memorial, I think about the man who hydrated his partner by feeding him ice chips with his mouth. Someone stumbles down the path, maybe drunk, maybe a little fucked up, & I know not to make eye contact, not to stop. But I do stop. This man wants to fuck right here & now on top of the red earth. Back East where I grew up, the past persists sinister as a forest: a man hit on another man in a rural bar & thus was beaten with a Cast Iron pan, laid across the tracks, & severed by a train. Here, his lips still sweet from the clove he smoked, this stranger kisses me like those men of our fathers’ generation who’d rendezvous in parks past dark. Never again will I destroy the earth by flood, God told Noah after the sun broke through, the covenant signed in rainbow. Once, I believed in God. Convinced that the earth was his own beating heart, I talked to him out loud in the forest at night. I felt endless then & knowing I wasn’t only enlarged me. Originally published by The Journal; Appears in Brocken Spectre (Alice James, 2021)
Audio: Jacques J. Rancourt reads “Golden Gate Park”
Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of BROCKEN SPECTRE (Alice James Books, 2021) and NOVENA (Pleiades Press, 2017). His poems have appeared recently in THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE KENYON REVIEW, IMAGE, and POETRY, and his honors include a Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. The recipient of a 2025 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives and teaches in San Francisco.
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