Steven C. Wright

Steven C. Wright (he/him) is a queer poet and prose author from Edison, New Jersey. He has a B.A. in English from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and runs a small poetry workshop group every week. His work has appeared in Frontier Poetry, Serotonin Press, BRAWL, and elsewhere.

Easy read of the poems in the images above:

Poem starting point-blank to the mirror

CW: imagery of death and blood

I'd grab him by the throat if we weren't so busy

poking our hairlines, pulling at our eyebrows,

studying our symmetry, color-checking scleras and facial hairs,

deep breaths and gritting teeth,

gland exam, enamel panic,

pore-poking obsessive-compulsives we will always be

coordinating our outfits

then we change our face without telling each other

and it frustrates every other floating thought

out of the brain and onto the tongue

and that's why we bought scrapers

for the hallucinated halitosis, the Hippocampus, the hypocrisy, the hypochondria

we try to only hate the circumstances

but it's so easy to hate each other

that's my dead ringer, my debt bringer,

my morbid co-comorbid, my gut flusher

my time robber: he looks sick with the fear of sickness

aged by the fear of time

and we know that we will die at the same time, just not what we'll die cursing

or if we'll die cursing, kicking, screaming,

or die quiet with our noses pressed to each other

iris to iris to what's that to what's this

and it hurts how this past year died in a day

how today was killed with yesterday's gun

a dead dead ringer and I stand, tip-toed, in a pool of his blood

so I can fold my stomach over the sink

and get that much closer to the bathroom mirror

iris to iris to body is changing

but everything else stays the same

I've never known myself better, so close to my skin

I've never been touched this much

I’ve never felt less alive

I've never felt more real

Poem about my first time sobbing after being diagnosed with dry eye disease

I’m clogged, but made of nothing.

I don’t know why, but I’m sulking in Matt’s old bedroom:

must’ve crashed out from pacing right at his bed.

The air in here has always felt so dry,

which is now a coincidence and relative

irony. I breathe it in, my newest sibling,

and assure myself the truth:

that I have never been less lonely,

bored, unwell, and disappointing.

It’s my first reminder that these are my late 20s, and

it’s smelling salts for lacrimal glands. Wake up, wake up.

I don’t know how to spend time, but all time is is losing time.

For the first time since June, my own tears

hit my cheek, but it hurts my head

too much to celebrate.

I told Dan that the next time I feel my own tears,

that I’ll start crying because I will have felt myself cry. From my own eyes,

a hug after an arriving flight;

but that was two months ago, and no one’s come home.

Still crying, though. I’m clogged, but made of nothing

more than a tranquilized, caterwauling sludge

out of my throat. I’m sorry if you hear me choke

sobs, but if I close the door behind me

I’ll forget how to breathe. I miss

Matt and Zoe, but I don’t miss being 18.

I just told Tabby this afternoon, that it would be so becoming

to re-become 23. I want

to hear myself cry again,

anesthetize the hemorrhaging amalgamate

hanging out of my ears. Deafeningly, I want

to be broken back into familiar pieces. I want

to be in a room with all my favorite people. I want

my real tears back. I want to be made of something.