Jan-Henry Gray

Queer Poem-a-Day is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include adult language.

On Therapy

by Jan-Henry Gray

$ON THERAPY say yes when anyone asks, it can happen all of a sudden, without the writing on the wall, some proof that the person is yearning, clawing for language, craving clarity, with grace, with gratitude, over time, as a gift and not an exchange, therapy not as a luxury but as a practice, health breeds health, daily, glacial pace, ill-equipped, incremental dissolution, uncanny estrangement, mirroring, mirroring, Maya says that all we have is time and we can only control how we make use of it, our time, our pleasure, this civilization is sunsetting, discover, recover, team or family, at sunrise, it's easier to go, it's easier to go it alone, the two-body problem, the new lover's arms, the fragments, the pages without dates, you call everything you don't want to think about a distraction, because the old narratives have failed, to walk away, to live without revision, to fix your own problems, to be unburdened by regret, the films are filled with the romance of heartbreak, a shock to the system, the dread of untangling your own logic, in boxes, in books, in rhetoric, your tics recorded in the pauses, your face refracted in the silverware, who keeps what and why, who knows to accept help, finding (yourself in) what you've written, the relationship has an end—one that doesn’t feel like one$

About the Author

Jan-Henry Gray is the author of Documents, selected by D.A. Powell as the winner of BOA Editions’ Poulin Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Selected Emails. His poems have been included in various anthologies, including Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins, 2024), Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (Nightboat, 2024), as well as Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, Queer Nature, and Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color. He’s received fellowships from Undocupoets, the Cooke Foundation Award, and Kundiman. He was born in the Philippines, raised in California, and worked as a chef for over 12 years. He is an assistant professor at Adelphi University and teaches in their low-residency MFA program.

Queer Poem a Day

Queer Poem-a-Day is founded and co-directed by poet and professor Lisa Hiton and Dylan Zavagno, Adult Services Coordinator at the Library and host of the Deerfield Public Library Podcast. Music for this fifth year of our series is “L’Ange Verrier” from Le Rossignol Éperdu by Reynaldo Hahn, performed by pianist Daniel Baer. Queer Poem-a-Day is supported by generous donations from the Friends of the Deerfield Public Library and the Deerfield Fine Arts Commission.

On Therapy

About the Author

Queer Poem a Day

Install Deerfield Public Library