Father’s Day for Gay Boys – Dan Vera

One beside another—brothers
Seven diviners
of what lies beyond the truths we have uncovered. 
One makes three, then four, then more
until we move beyond mere numbers. 
There is thunder over the city tonight
and of the million hearts we may never see
here in the circle we make commitments
we push the limits of earthly loving. 

Electricity visits again,
and the black skies pulse with light—
currents of power by some capillary action.

Sons kiss their fathers. 
Sons kiss their fathers to sleep
and the rose-eyed boy remembers himself again. 

We are not the sons they ordered
with their patriotic dreaming. 
We are not the sons they expected to come down the line. 

But we unfold
beyond such kind paternal ignorance. 
We unfold within the measure of our time. 
And we make peace with the fathers inside of us. 
And we give birth to a hidden, long-carried joy within.

Dan Vera, an American poet of Cuban descent, was born in southern Texas. He is the author of Speaking Wiri Wiri (2013), which poet Orlando Ricardo Menes chose for the inaugural Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize, and The Space Between Our Danger and Delight (2008). In his compassionate, humorous poems, Vera explores the shifting nature of identity. In a review of Speaking Wiri Wiri for Lambda Literary, Charlie Bondhus observed, “so much of Vera’s work is about a simultaneous ‘splitness’ and ‘togetherness’—between Cuba and the United States; between English and Spanish; between revering history and lamenting its fallout.” Vera himself has said of his work, “I love discovering these layers of meaning that serve as a trap-door for anyone trying to be rigid about identity: our own and others.”
 
Vera cofounded VRZHU Press, is the publisher of Souvenir Spoon Press, and serves as managing editor of the journal White Crane. With poet Kim Roberts, Vera curates DC Writers’ Homes. He has served on the boards of Split This Rock and Rainbow History Project. He lives in Washington, DC.