Virginia Is for Lovers by Nicole Sealey

Virginia Is for Lovers

 

At LaToya’s Pride picnic,

Leonard tells me he and his longtime

love, Pete, broke up.

He says Pete gave him the house

in Virginia. “Great,” I say,

“that’s the least his ass could do.”

I daydream my friend and me

into his new house, sit us in the kitchen

of his three bedroom, two bath

brick colonial outside Hungry Mother Park,

where, legend has it, the Shawnee raided

settlements with the wherewithal

of wild children catching pigeons.

A woman and her androgynous child

escaped, wandering the wilderness,

stuffing their mouths with the bark

of chokecherry root.

Such was the circumstance

under which the woman collapsed.

The child, who could say nothing

except hungry mother, led help

to the mountain where the woman lay,

swelling as wood swells in humid air.

Leonard’s mouth is moving.

Two boys hit a shuttlecock back and forth

across an invisible net.

A toddler struggles to pull her wagon

from a sandbox. “No,” Leonard says,

“It’s not a place where you live.

I got the H In V. H I—”

Before my friend could finish,

and as if he’d been newly ordained,

I took his hands and kissed them.