Reuben Gelley Newman

Poetry

Reuben Gelley Newman (he/him) is a writer, musician, and library worker based in Brooklyn, NY. His poems are available or forthcoming in diode, The Fairy Tale Review, The Journal, The South Dakota Review, Alien Magazine, and elsewhere. A content editor for The Adroit Journal, a co-editor for Couplet Poetry, and a reader for Nimrod, he’s on Instagram and Twitter @joustingsnail.

 

Arthur, 1992

for Arthur Russell Enclosed in a castle of cassettes, you fortify your body with song. Being sad is not a crime, you sing to Tom, who strokes your head spotted with sarcoma, and your shrunken face brightens at his touch, and the moonlight slants onto you, two men together in a field of five-line staves, hastily sketched lyrics, the patter of the drum machine like the beat of sparrows’ wings. You swallow water in your beak of a mouth and develop cancer of the throat; your apartment an archive of every sound you ever wrote.

“ This poem, from my manuscript on queer music, historical memory, and the musicians Arthur Russell and Julius Eastman, is the most direct elegy I’ve written for Russell. It quotes his song ‘Love Comes Back,’ from the album Love Is Overtaking Me (Audika Records, 2016), and imagines Russell singing to his partner, Tom Lee, as his AIDS symptoms worsen. I hope you go listen to the sounds he wrote. ”

Listen: