He was always a fish guy. Rice. Broccoli. Simple. Tasty. The first meal he ever made for me was back when he owned a toaster oven. Fish sticks. Tater tots. It probably took him no more than fifteen minutes to put together. I watched him from the kitchen table. Now and then he’d stop what he was doing, bend to kiss me. Remark on something or other. Sip from a glass of chilled wine. Whistle softly while he plated up.

7.35 a.m. Running, not walking. By necessity, not choice. My bones still infused with sleep, wound and bound in layers of ancient T-shirts. Leggings exhausted, puckered at the knees. Puffa jacket oozing feathers as I pant, spliced open that time I drunkenly slid down a pebble-dash wall outside some nightclub. Back when there were nightclubs. The shins on me are screaming with the splints. R. is dressed for work. Black on black on black. Everything declares neat. Mary Poppins boots, double-knotted with precision, at her slender ankles (she has always had ankles like baby trees). In her proximity I am blurry and vague. She blinks at me, X-raying my soul, and her face scrunches into a smile. Suddenly R. is six again, grinning up from a Coco Pops bowl, peering down from a gnarled apple tree, side-eying me from behind a pair of legs – my mother’s, probably. Growing up,...

The poets K and G live on neighbouring islands. They have never met, but they follow each other’s writing and know the look of each other’s haircuts, vacations, spouses, G’s child and K’s nieces and her friends’ children who chalk her garden walls, pots and statues with flowers, faces and I RULE. The two poets know the look of their mutual commitment to bodybuilding. The two poets write about traumatic historical and personal events. Rather than coming up with their own words, they locate language that has been used already to write or speak about these terrible things. They carefully separate parts of this language from the body of the texts, shaping it to reveal the form of what is really there, what is really felt. Eventually another poet remarked upon their respective gym photos and suggested that K and G write about the body and its building. This sort...

First came the disappointment of Castro, in the sense of San Francisco. My friend who teaches at Stanford got a house just a few blocks from the famously gay-majority neighborhood – a beautiful two-storey place, with a sloping roof and uncultivated garden, separated only by a hill, and by a couple of traffic lights, from the Elysium I dreamed of in my youth, that miraculous quadrangle where powerful, half-naked athletes strolled around, kissing each other. The most beautiful ones made love the most and have therefore died; now there’s only an occasional old bodybuilder in overalls, a sick bison with a bottle of milk in hand, along the boulevard where small-town fairies walk looking lost like tourists on Via Veneto. In Stanford’s Andalusian alcazar, Japanese couples go to get married on Sunday, while at the foul-smelling intersections near Ellis Street my naïve excitations, kept for too long at bay (‘a...