Joe Weaver, I Bought a Concert to Your Ticket, Joe Weaver
Alex M. Frankel
Joe was the skate rat that opened me.
We were porn lords of eighteen,
NYC lights frazzling our cherub-faces.
Joe Weaver, lifeguard in a Linda Ronstadt t-shirt.
He was so good as tongue and toe and biceps
I will never tire of reliving the equatorial heat
and snow-capped peaks of our night,
how he said “Cool, so you’re a philofficer!”
It was that pre-sanitized era of blasting salsa,
wretched office crowds and subway despair,
crime and roach spray and euphoria,
a Manhattan of geezers encircling us.
We ended up off Times Square on someone’s couch,
a few lofty minutes we were each other’s mouth odor,
pit odor, nostril, boot and neck odor,
for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer,
my mother was dying but maybe I had Joe,
we were two fine cherry-licking philofficers.
I groped for the elevator while he yawned,
about to shut and bolt the door, let forty years go by.
At the last second I asked “What’s your last name?”
and because he said “Weaver” in the meager space
left to us between doorframe and door,
I can now construct a True People Search
or try Radaris, Been Verified, LinkedIn.
Joseph Weaver, 95 Mirage Dr., Littleton?
J. Weaver, 62 Aurora Borealis Way?
Or maybe Joseph M. Weaver, 57, of Escondido
“who went unexpectedly to rest with the Lord
and will be missed by all who loved him.”
Alex M. Frankel left Spain in the 1990s to settle in Southern California and hosts the Second Sunday Poetry Series. His full-length collection, Birth Mother Mercy, came out from Lummox Press in 2013. For ten years he wrote reviews for The Antioch Review until it went on indefinite hiatus.
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