REVERSE EVALUATION > POETRY
TRAVIS, WHO HAS LEFT HIS WIFE,
By Sean Patrick Mulroy
sits on the couch beside me, naked in his clothes. We’re drinking one last beer at dawn. The other boys have all gone off to bed, and it is quiet, now. He says, I thought I’d go back to my old life, and at this,
a small part of his lip twists. But I miss my son. The word is difficult and bound, a small fist always gripping him. The night we met, which he does not remember, we were at a friend’s show in a small nightclub, and he was sickly skinny, still a junkie, still a junkyard mutt. He slapped his money on the table with a doglike swagger, princely bastard, wolf of needles, little god of stone-thrown windows—
Travis. Strange, how fierce a man can be when he has nothing. He lives here now; an old industrial garage that he converted into an apartment on the wrong side of MacArthur. He burns through each day like cheap tobacco, teasing art and furniture from trash left on the street. A couple hours ago, when I first dropped my bags, he pointed out the chandelier above us, his first welding project. Amber showering of glass, a brittle star, he made entirely of crack pipes which he fished out of the gutter, one by one, and fused together with a torch. Its glowing, soft, ice delicate and begging to be touched. It’s beautiful, the way that only something dangerous is beautiful, once it’s been broken.
Writer, multi-disciplinary artist, and faggotry hauntologist Sean Patrick Mulroy is an internationally recognized poet and award-winning professor, A 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, 2018 Writer-in-Residence at The Kerouac Project in Orlando Florida, winner of the 2019 Margaret Reid Prize, and winner of the 2020 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, Mulroy recently completed an international tour of Europe and SWANA in support of his debut poetry collection, Hated for the Gods (Button Poetry, 2023). His work has appeared in The Journal, Assaracus, The New York Times, Peach Fuzz Magazine, and Muzzle, among several other magazines and several anthologies of poetry. Born and raised in the American South, Sean has since lived and worked all over the world, in over 25 countries on 4 continents. At present, he lives in NYC.