Resident artist/curator for The Chroma Museum, artistic renderings of LGBTQI historical figures, organizations and allies predominantly before Stonewall, https://thestephenmeadchromamuseum.weebly.com/, Stephen Mead is a retiree whom, throughout all his pretty non-glamorous jobs still found time for writing poetry/essays and creating art. Occasionally he even got paid of this. Currently he is trying to sell his 40-year backlog of unsold art before he pops his cogs, https://www.artworkarchive.com/profile/stephen-mead

Easy read of the poems in the images above:

Little Disturbances

My lover sprays me with camphor & menthol,

a bone-penetrating Chinese remedy.

I imagine the characters of the bottle written on my body in ink.

I imagine him with a quick slick brush

signing the bumps of my spine in feather-lightness.

But I know how I am no masterpiece -

no - more Kabuki if one were to scrape

past the Hiroshima-geisha & find Plath's Lady Lazarus.

What to do with those Medusa coils, the writhing hisses,

the asp-fanged lizards? What to do with the picked-at-nerves

clicking impatiently as fingernails on cold Formica?

Outside poppies burst from their pods, a furry garnet

against sky-periwinkle.

All night their potent aroma whispers not of gossip,

but ablution, to be petal-shed quietly by dawn.

Surely they penetrate as purely as the camphor

fluorescent to my marrow,

but the funny looking glass

still tells of Loki tales in my eyes.

The Colors of My Closet

They could easily be an explosion

though they just hang out

front to back, bolts of fabric so abundant

I can't close the door.

Who am I putting on?

The resourceful bag person, thrift in each stitch?

The youngest of hand-me-downs lost in britches,

too big, too big?

The street tough runaway looking hard

to seduce survival?

The bookish introvert with pens in the sweater

for love notes or poison?

Taking it on faith, taking it on the chin,

whether in or out I'm still clothed

by a chameleon's nakedness & that creature,

never, no, quite changes in time.