The Raven (excerpt)
by Edgar Allan Poe

(For the full poem, click read more below.)

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—

Only this and nothing more.”

“Once Upon a Midnight Dreary”

There’s no poem more synonymous with Halloween than Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” Even if you’ve never read the whole thing, you probably know the rhythm of its most famous lines:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary…

It’s a poem that practically sounds haunted. Poe’s mastery of meter—specifically trochaic octameter—creates that heartbeat of dread, the steady pulse of something inevitable drawing closer. It’s hypnotic, musical, and just a little bit claustrophobic, which is exactly what makes it unforgettable.

First published in 1845, “The Raven” cemented Poe’s reputation as a master of the macabre. It’s a simple enough story: a grieving man, alone at night, haunted by memories of his lost love Lenore, and visited by a mysterious talking raven whose only word is “Nevermore.” But that single refrain becomes a psychological echo chamber. The poem isn’t just about a bird—it’s about despair, loss, and the way grief has of turning every question we ask into the same hopeless answer.

The imagery is classic Gothic: midnight shadows, rustling curtains, lamplight, and a chamber filled with memory. The bird itself feels almost supernatural, perched high above the door like a prophet of doom—or perhaps the physical embodiment of the narrator’s own unraveling mind.

So why has “The Raven” endured for nearly two centuries as the quintessential spooky poem? Because it captures the feeling that true horror doesn’t come from monsters or ghosts—it comes from our own thoughts in the dark. The fear that we’ll never escape our sorrow. The whisper that maybe hope really is gone forever.

And yet, there’s a strange beauty in it too. Poe’s language is lush and musical, the kind of poetry that demands to be read aloud by candlelight on a chilly October night. Every “tapping,” every “Nevermore,” pulls us deeper into the darkness until we almost welcome it.

The Voice of Vincent Price

For me—and I suspect for many others—the poem truly comes alive through Vincent Price’s iconic reading. That smooth, sinister voice, tinged with both elegance and dread, feels as though it was made for Poe’s words. Price doesn’t just recite the poem; he inhabits it. Every syllable trembles with tension and theatrical flair. You can hear the madness building, the grief curdling into obsession, until that final “Nevermore” echoes like a spell being cast.

It’s impossible for me to read “The Raven” without hearing Price’s voice in my mind—a voice that turns the poem from literature into pure atmosphere. His performance reminds us that Halloween isn’t only about visuals; it’s about sound—the creak of the floorboard, the rustle of wings, the trembling cadence of a haunted heart.

Maybe that’s why, year after year, we return to “The Raven.” It reminds us that Halloween isn’t just about fright—it’s about fascination. The allure of the unknown. The comfort of knowing that even in our deepest gloom, someone else—perhaps Poe himself—has been there before.

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted—nevermore.

Happy Halloween, everyone—and if you’ve never listened to Vincent Price read “The Raven,” treat yourself. There’s no better way to spend an October night.

About the Poet

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre. Born in Boston and orphaned at a young age, Poe led a turbulent life marked by poverty, loss, and artistic brilliance. He is often credited with pioneering the modern detective story, influencing early science fiction, and perfecting the Gothic short story. His poems—especially “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee”—combine musical rhythm with haunting emotion, exploring love, death, and madness. Though he died at only forty, Poe’s legacy continues to cast a long and ghostly shadow over American literature—and Halloween wouldn’t be the same without him.

Now and Then

By Charles Bertram Johnson

“All life is built from song”
In youth’s young morn I sang;
And from a top-near hill
The echo broke and rang.

The years with pinions swift
To youth’s high noon made flight,
“All life is built from song”
I sang amid the fight.

To life’s sun-setting years,
My feet have come—Alas!
And through its hopes and fears
Again I shall not pass.

The lusty song my youth
With high-heart ardor sang
Is but a tinkling sound—
A cymbal’s empty clang.

And now I sing, my Dear,
With wisdom’s wiser heart,
“All life is built from love,
And song is but a part.”

About the Poem

When did you first realize that you had gotten older?

For me, it happened when I received an email from a young Marine. He addressed me as Sir and kept referring to me as Mr. ________. I know he was only being polite—showing respect as Marines are trained to do—but it stopped me in my tracks. That single word, Sir, carried a weight I hadn’t quite felt before. It wasn’t the formality that struck me, but the realization that I’d somehow become the older person in the conversation.

I’m the oldest person at the museum now, and though I have friends who are older, most of the people around me are younger—college students with endless energy and a sense that life stretches far ahead of them. I work with them every day, and I see in them the same bright spark I once had. Over the past year, especially with my health issues, I’ve come to accept what I used to quietly resist: I am middle-aged. Not just in years, but in how others see me—and in how I’m beginning to see myself.

Charles Bertram Johnson’s “Now and Then” captures that awareness of time’s passage with both poignancy and grace. It traces a journey from youth’s exuberant song to the quiet wisdom of later years. The refrain that begins as “All life is built from song” evolves into something deeper: “All life is built from love.” Johnson reminds us that while youthful joy may fade, it transforms into something richer—an understanding shaped by love, endurance, and perspective.

In the gay community, that realization often feels even sharper. We live in a culture that idolizes youth—smooth skin, perfect bodies, the illusion that desire belongs only to the young. But aging brings its own kind of beauty, one rooted in truth rather than performance. When we let go of chasing who we were, we can begin to appreciate who we are.

My youth may have left nearly twenty years ago, but it left behind something far more lasting: gratitude. The song may sound softer now, but perhaps that’s because it’s finally being sung with love.

About the Poet

Charles Bertram Johnson (1880–1956) was an American poet whose work appeared in the early decades of the 20th century. Though little is known about his life, his poetry often explores the quiet transitions of aging, the nature of love, and the search for meaning in ordinary experience. In poems like “Now and Then,” Johnson captures the gentle shift from youthful exuberance to mature reflection, reminding us that the truest songs of life are often those sung softly in its later years.

Meeting Ourselves
By Vachel Lindsay

We met ourselves as we came back
As we hiked the trail from the north.
Our foot-prints mixed in the rainy path
Coming back and going forth.
The prints of my comrade’s hob-nailed shoes
And my tramp shoes mixed in the rain.
We had climbed for days and days to the North
And this was the sum of our gain:
We met ourselves as we came back,
And were happy in mist and rain.
Our old souls and our new souls
Met to salute and explain—
That a day shall be as a thousand years,
And a thousand years as a day.
The powers of a thousand dreaming skies
As we shouted along the trail of surprise
Were gathered in our play:
The purple skies of the South and the North,
The crimson skies of the South and the North,
Of tomorrow and yesterday.

About the Poem

Vachel Lindsay’s “Meeting Ourselves” is a gentle yet profound reflection on life’s cyclical journey—how we travel forward only to encounter the echoes of our former selves. The poem captures a moment of recognition and renewal: two travelers retrace their steps and find their footprints mingling in the rain. It’s both literal and symbolic—an image of physical return and inner reconciliation.

Lindsay’s use of repetition and musical rhythm mirrors the rhythm of walking and the heartbeat of realization. The biblical echo—“a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day” (2 Peter 3:8)—reminds us that time itself folds and blurs when we reach moments of self-understanding or spiritual peace. The mingling of “old souls and new souls” beautifully suggests that transformation doesn’t erase who we were; it redeems and embraces it.

For LGBTQ+ readers, especially gay men, this poem may hold an added resonance. The act of meeting ourselves can evoke the powerful experience of coming out or reconciling with the self we once had to hide. Many queer people spend years walking in two directions at once—forward toward authenticity, backward toward fear or memory. When Lindsay writes, “We met ourselves as we came back / And were happy in mist and rain,” it can read as a quiet kind of liberation: joy found not in public sunlight, but in the private, tender mist where two selves—and perhaps two men—meet without shame.

The comrade whose footprints mingle with the speaker’s invites another layer of interpretation. In early 20th-century literature, male companionship often carried an intimacy that could not be spoken openly. The simple image of their tracks interlaced in the rain becomes, for a modern gay reader, a symbol of shared experience, endurance, and connection—love that exists naturally, though quietly, within the elements.

In that sense, the poem feels like a reconciliation not only of the self but of desire: the realization that one can walk beside another man and find peace, joy, and completeness—“happy in mist and rain.”

Ultimately, “Meeting Ourselves” speaks to anyone who has learned to love themselves after a long climb. It’s about journeying through struggle or distance, only to discover that the person waiting at the end of the trail is a wiser, gentler version of who we’ve always been.

The mingled footprints remind us that our past and present selves—and the people who’ve walked beside us—can coexist. We do not need to abandon the person we were to become the person we are. In mist and rain, under skies of “tomorrow and yesterday,” we find that the journey has brought us home to ourselves.

About the Poet

Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) was an American poet known for his musical, chant-like verse and his belief that poetry should be spoken and performed aloud. Born in Springfield, Illinois, Lindsay traveled widely—often on foot—exchanging poems and drawings for food and lodging. His works often celebrated spiritual vision, democracy, and the common man, blending mysticism with American folk imagery.

“Meeting Ourselves” was written during Lindsay’s later period in the 1920s, when his poetry turned increasingly inward and mystical, exploring the soul’s search for renewal and divine connection. Though his fame waned late in life, Lindsay left a lasting mark on American poetry for his pioneering rhythmic style and his ability to transform ordinary experiences into moments of revelation.

While there is no definitive record of his sexuality, Lindsay’s poetry often conveys an intense affection for male companionship and an ideal of spiritual brotherhood that modern readers sometimes interpret through a queer lens. His recurring themes of duality, self-reconciliation, and soulful connection invite a range of readings—including those that speak deeply to LGBTQ+ experiences of identity and inner harmony.

“Meeting Ourselves,” like much of his work, reminds us that the greatest journeys are those that lead inward.

 

Art,
By Herman Melville

In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.

About the Poem

Herman Melville’s short but powerful poem Art distills into a few compact lines the contradictory forces at the heart of creation. It opens with a scene of calm:

“In placid hours well-pleased we dream

Of many a brave unbodied scheme.”

Here, Melville acknowledges what many of us know too well—ideas come easily in quiet moments. Our minds are full of “unbodied schemes,” bold plans and visions that exist only in imagination. But dreaming alone is not art. The difficulty lies in giving those dreams form, in pulling them out of the ether and shaping them into something tangible.

Melville describes this process as a marriage of opposites:

“A flame to melt—a wind to freeze; Sad patience—joyous energies; Humility—yet pride and scorn; Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity—reverence.”

Each pair of opposites illustrates the tension of creation. Art requires both the fire of inspiration and the cooling restraint of discipline. It requires patience to endure long labor, and bursts of joy to keep the work alive. An artist must balance humility before the task with pride in their own vision, instinct with study, raw emotion with critical judgment.

These contradictions are not obstacles—they are the materials. To create something of value, the artist must bring them together, “fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart, / To wrestle with the angel—Art.”

That final biblical allusion is striking. In Genesis, Jacob wrestles through the night with an angel, demanding a blessing and emerging wounded but transformed. Melville suggests that to make art is a similar struggle: a contest with forces larger than oneself, leaving the artist changed, exhausted, and blessed with creation.

For Melville—better known for his sprawling novels like Moby-Dick—this poem is a confession of the artist’s burden. Creation is not a smooth act but a wrestling match, a fusion of contradictions, a labor of both agony and ecstasy.

I find this poem resonates deeply with the creative process in any form—whether writing, painting, composing, or even living an honest life. We all carry “brave unbodied schemes,” but only by engaging in the struggle, by wrestling with the angel, do we bring them into the world.

About the Poet

Herman Melville (1819–1891) is best remembered today as the author of Moby-Dick (1851), one of the towering works of American literature. Yet his career was far from smooth. His early sea novels brought him popularity, but his later, more ambitious works—Moby-Dick included—were commercial failures in his lifetime. Melville turned to poetry in his later years, publishing several volumes, including Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) and Timoleon (1891). His poetry often reveals the same themes as his prose: the struggle of humanity against vast forces, whether nature, fate, or, as in this poem, the act of creation itself.

Here is a bonus poem for the week. It was today’s Poem-a-Day from Poets.org.

Poem of September 24
By Samira Negrouche

translated from the French by the author

Who crosses into you when you cross

Who crosses when you don’t cross

Who doesn’t cross when you cross

Who crosses when you can’t cross

Who doesn’t cross when you don’t cross

Who doesn’t want to cross

Who thinks they’re crossing

Who doesn’t look at you while crossing

Who might take the time to look at you.

_____________________________________

Poème du 24 septembre

Qui traverse en toi quand tu traverses

Qui traverse quand tu ne traverses pas

Qui ne traverse pas quand tu traverses

Qui traverse quand tu ne peux pas traverser

Qui ne traverse pas quand tu ne traverses pas

Qui ne veut pas traverser

Qui croit traverser

Qui ne te regarde pas en traversant

Qui prendra peut-être le temps de te regarder.

About This Poem

“Written with eight other [poems], forming nine poems of nine lines, this poem is part of a public installation called Signs/Promises. It can be read as a geopolitical statement or as an intimate whisper to yourself or to someone else. It is an invitation to question and envision all the layers of displacement that are required to be able to cross a border—real or symbolic—to meet another. It reminds us how fragile the understanding of another reality can be and why we should keep remembering it, especially when we think we are aware.”—Samira Negrouche

About the Poet

Samira Negrouche is a writer, poet, and translator whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Pente Raide [Steep Slope] (Actes Sud, 2025), cowritten with Marin Fouqué. Negrouche’s book Le Jazz de oliviers [The Olive Trees’ Jazz] (Pleiades Press, 2020), translated by Marilyn Hacker, was short-listed for the 2021 National Translation Award, as well as the Derek Walcott Prize that same year. A translator from Arabic and English to French, as well as a medical doctor, Negrouche lives in Algiers.

Nothing Gold Can Stay
by Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

About the Poem

Robert Frost is one of those poets who can take just eight short lines and capture the weight of beauty, loss, and the passing of time. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” is deceptively simple—something you might read once and think you’ve understood—but the more you sit with it, the more layers it reveals.

At its heart, the poem reminds us that nothing beautiful lasts forever. The first flush of spring, the gold of new leaves, the brilliance of dawn—all are fleeting. Frost connects this natural cycle to the story of Eden, suggesting that even the purest moments of perfection can’t be held onto. Time moves forward, and everything inevitably changes.

I think this poem resonates so strongly because we’ve all had moments we wish we could freeze. Whether it’s the joy of youth, the fire of first love, or even a golden autumn day in Vermont, those moments are precious precisely because they’re fleeting. Frost doesn’t just mourn that loss—he honors it. By recognizing impermanence, we’re reminded to hold on a little tighter, to notice the beauty while it’s here.

It’s no wonder that this poem has found its way into popular culture too—most famously in S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, where it becomes a message about innocence and holding on to what makes us shine before the world tries to wear it away.

For me, “Nothing Gold Can Stay” isn’t just about nature, or even about youth. It’s about the reminder that life itself is made of fleeting golden moments. We can’t keep them, but we can cherish them, and maybe that’s enough.

About the Poet

Robert Frost (1874–1963) is often remembered as one of America’s quintessential poets, though he spent nearly a decade in England before his work was first published. He returned to the U.S. just as his career was beginning to take off, and over the course of his life he became one of the most widely read and beloved poets of the 20th century.

Frost’s poetry is rooted in the landscapes and rhythms of rural New England. He wrote in plainspoken language, but beneath the simplicity lies a deep philosophical and emotional complexity. His poems often explore the tension between humanity and nature, the fleetingness of beauty, and the choices that shape our lives.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times, more than any other poet, and in 1961 he read at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Despite his public persona as the homespun New England sage, Frost’s poetry frequently wrestles with darkness, loss, and impermanence—making “Nothing Gold Can Stay” a perfect example of his gift for distilling profound truth into the smallest of spaces.

For those of us in Vermont, Frost feels like a neighbor as well as a poet. He spent the last decades of his life here, teaching at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English and writing in the Green Mountains he loved so well. He is buried in Bennington, Vermont, not far from where visitors can still walk the landscapes that inspired so much of his verse.

Freedom and Truth
by Margaret Fuller

To a Friend.

The shrine is vowed to freedom, but, my friend,
Freedom is but a means to gain an end.
Freedom should build the temple, but the shrine
Be consecrate to thought still more divine.
The human bliss which angel hopes foresaw
Is liberty to comprehend the law.
Give, then, thy book a larger scope and frame,
Comprising means and end in Truth’s great name.

About the Poem

Margaret Fuller’s poem Freedom and Truth offers a meditation on what freedom really means. She insists that freedom is not an end in itself, but a means to something higher — to truth, to comprehension of moral law, to the divine. Freedom without truth, she suggests, is an empty shrine: a structure without a god inside. For her, true human happiness comes from using liberty not merely for self-indulgence, but to understand and live within universal truths.

Reading Fuller’s lines, I couldn’t help but think of the chorus of Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” (made immortal by Janis Joplin):

“Freedom is just another word for nothin’ left to lose…
And feelin’ good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues.”

Though written more than a century later, these lyrics capture a strikingly similar tension. For Kristofferson and Joplin, freedom stripped of attachments is both exhilarating and hollow. It means release, but also loss. Like Fuller, the song suggests that freedom alone is not enough; its meaning is found when it leads to something more — in this case, authentic connection, soulful music, and the raw honesty of experience.

This resonates deeply with the American Transcendentalist movement, of which Fuller was a central voice. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?” — reminding us that liberty matters only in so far as it sustains deeper purposes. Henry David Thoreau sharpened the point in Walden: “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.” Both Emerson and Thoreau, like Fuller, argued that freedom was valuable only when it brought us closer to truth, authenticity, and the divine.

And yet, we see in our own age how this lesson is often forgotten. Freedom of speech, one of the most cherished liberties, is frequently used as a cover for spreading hatred, division, and outright lies. But freedom of speech divorced from truth is no freedom at all — it becomes the empty shrine Fuller warned against, a hollow liberty that erodes rather than sustains the human spirit.

Fuller’s 19th-century vision, Kristofferson’s 20th-century lyric, and our 21st-century struggles meet on common ground. All remind us that freedom cannot be idolized on its own. Whether in the pursuit of higher laws, in the fleeting transcendence of music and love, or in defending speech that is rooted in truth and justice, freedom gains its true meaning only when it opens into truth.

May we never forget that freedom without truth is a shell. Truth gives freedom its soul.

About the Poet

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) was one of the great voices of the American Transcendentalist movement, though her life and legacy often stand in the shadow of Emerson and Thoreau. I’ve always been inspired by the Transcendentalists, but I find myself especially drawn to Fuller — not only her writings but also the way she lived her life, ahead of her time and unwilling to conform to society’s expectations.

Fuller was the first editor of The Dial, the Transcendentalist journal, and the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), one of the earliest works of American feminism. In that book she declared, “Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself.” That call to self-examination and truth resonates as much today as it did in her century. She also wrote, “Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.” For Fuller, freedom was always tied to growth, to becoming more fully human, more fully alive.

Her life took her far beyond Concord. I’ve long had a fascination with American expatriates of the 19th century, and Fuller became one herself. In 1846, she traveled to Europe as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune. It was there that she found herself drawn into the currents of Italian nationalism — what would later grow into the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian unification.

Fuller fell in love with Giovanni Ossoli, a young Italian revolutionary, and bore his child. Their relationship had to be kept secret, both because of politics and because of society’s judgment. At one point she even entrusted her baby to the care of another family, only to find he was treated poorly — a decision that haunted her. Eventually, Fuller, Ossoli, and their child decided to leave Italy for America, carrying with them her manuscript history of the Roman Republic.

Tragically, they never reached American shores. In July 1850, their ship struck a storm and sank off Fire Island, just short of New York Harbor. Fuller, her husband, and her child all drowned.

The Dreams of the Dreamer
By Georgia Douglas Johnson

The dreams of the dreamer
Are life-drops that pass
The break in the heart
To the soul’s hour-glass.

The songs of the singer
Are tones that repeat
The cry of the heart
‘Till it ceases to beat

About the Poem

Georgia Douglas Johnson’s The Dreams of the Dreamer is a brief but piercing meditation on the power and fragility of artistic expression. The poem likens dreams to “life-drops” trickling through “the soul’s hour-glass,” evoking both the preciousness of our inner visions and the inevitability of time’s passing. Songs, meanwhile, are cast as echoes of the heart’s cry—repetitions of human longing that endure until life itself is spent. The economy of Johnson’s language underscores the intensity of her theme: art is not incidental, but essential, even when born out of sorrow.

Johnson begins with the figure of the “dreamer.” Dreams, she says, are like “life-drops”—fragile and fleeting, but essential, like water to the body. These dreams fall through “the soul’s hour-glass,” suggesting both the inevitability of time and the slow draining away of what sustains us. Dreams here are not idle fantasies, but pieces of the self—hopes and desires that slip away as the heart breaks.

In the second stanza, Johnson turns to the “singer.” The singer’s art is not mere entertainment but a repetition of the heart’s cry. Music is presented as a translation of sorrow, carried outward in tones until the very last beat of life. Just as dreams are vital but fragile, songs are beautiful but born of pain.

Read in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, the poem reflects how art and creativity served as lifelines in the face of systemic racism and social limitation. Dreams and songs became vessels through which Black artists preserved dignity and expressed pain, hope, and resilience. Johnson, like her contemporaries, understood that creativity was both survival and resistance.

At the same time, the poem resonates deeply with the experience of many LGBTQ+ people. For generations, queer lives have been marked by hidden dreams and muted songs—hopes often confined by the fear of rejection or the demands of conformity. The imagery of “life-drops” slipping away through the heart’s breaks speaks to the quiet toll of living unseen or unaccepted, while the idea of the singer repeating the heart’s cry “’till it ceases to beat” captures how art has so often been the only place queer voices could safely exist. For LGBTQ+ readers, Johnson’s words may echo the endurance of self-expression in the face of silence, shame, or erasure. The poem’s beauty lies in its universality: it honors both the dreamer and the singer as figures whose inner truths cannot be contained, even when the world would rather they be quiet.

About the Poet

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880–1966) was one of the most important Black female voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Though she lived much of her life in Washington, D.C., her poetry and plays brought her into the circle of leading Renaissance figures such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Johnson published four volumes of poetry and numerous plays, many of which grappled with themes of racial injustice, gender roles, and the inner struggles of Black life in America. Her home became a meeting place for writers, activists, and intellectuals, known as the “S Street Salon.” Despite the obstacles she faced as a woman and as an African American, Johnson’s poetry endures for its lyrical precision and emotional honesty, capturing the complex textures of longing, loss, and resilience.

Postscript: I have a lot of pictures of men in beds saved—some waiting in anticipation, some just waking up, some lying there wide-eyed, some alone, some with a partner. But none of them really felt like a dreamer. This one did. Something about the way he holds the bed linens, the calm on his face, the way he’s settled in—it just spoke of dreaming. Maybe you see that too, maybe you don’t. I could have picked someone daydreaming, but I kept coming back to this. Because while daydreams let us play with ideas, it’s in sleep that the truest longings surface, when our minds stop steering and let the dreams simply be. And maybe those are the real dreams of a dreamer.

Palm Springs
By Christian Gullette

We drink Fernet by ironic sculptures
under misters that make our bangs damp.

It’s our anniversary,
though that time feels faint.

We are searching for a place
to escape his diagnosis,

laws against gay marriage,
our leaky, flat roof.

Every Memorial Day
and Labor Day, we go to the desert.

Sometimes also the Fourth
of July.

Palm Springs rewinds things.
We almost buy that mid-century chair

proud of our rule that love for it
needs to be immediate.

At the Parker, a guy with a calf tattoo
brings drinks.

You can ask for anything here.
We toast to another year without cancer.

After dinner, we wander the hotel hedge maze,
nowhere to go that late but home.

About the Poem

Christian Gullette’s Palm Springs is a poem of sleek surfaces and simmering tensions. The desert resort town—so often painted in mid-century glamour—becomes here a backdrop for longing, performance, and queer recognition. Palm Springs is both mirage and mirror: a place where artifice and authenticity blur, where the hot light reveals as much as it conceals.

The poem doesn’t settle for nostalgia or kitsch. Instead, it examines what it means to inhabit a space so layered with history, expectation, and desire. Gullette’s Palm Springs isn’t just a sunny escape; it’s a charged landscape where intimacy pulses against the façade of cocktails, poolsides, and desert views.

Queer poets have long re-imagined spaces marked by leisure or luxury as sites of deeper reflection, and Gullette does just that. Palm Springs is lush but not naïve, glamorous but not shallow. It suggests that behind every stylish lounge chair or glimmering pool, there’s a body hoping to be seen, a self negotiating the terms of love and exposure.

As readers, we are left with a sense of recognition—of what it means to find ourselves in a place where beauty and fragility intertwine, where queer desire is both illuminated and complicated by the desert sun.

About the Poet

Christian Gullette is an acclaimed poet and translator based in San Francisco. His debut collection, Coachella Elegy (Trio House Press, 2024), earned critical praise and became a finalist for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. The volume has also been featured on several “must‑read” lists from LitHub, Electric Lit, Alta Journal, and Debutiful. Ron Charles of The Washington Post Book Club lauded its “cool, elegantly controlled poems,” while Publishers Weekly described it as “tender and deliciously sly.”

Gullette holds a Ph.D. in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley, where he explored themes of sexuality, race, and neoliberalism in Swedish literature and film. He also earned an MFA from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and an M.Ed. from George Washington University, following a B.A. in English from Bates College. As a translator, he works professionally with Swedish texts—including poetry by Kristofer Folkhammar and Jonas Modig, as well as cookbooks by Roy Fares, Lisa Lemke, and others.

He currently serves as editor-in-chief of The Cortland Review and has taught workshops for the Kenyon Review Online Writers Workshops and the Poetry Society of New York. He was awarded a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship in 2022.

A longtime resident of San Francisco, Gullette lives with his husband, Michael. His work intricately interweaves personal grief—including living through his husband’s ocular cancer diagnosis and the loss of his brother—with the luminous terrain of California’s desert landscapes, exploring themes of desire, mortality, visibility, and renewal.