Queer Poem-a-Day is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include adult language.
Essay on Class
by Gaia Rajan
Five roommates, three cats, radiator coughed black dust
onto cardboard boxes I called furniture
and the cats inhaled it and slunk around sneezing.
I stole oranges, bought leather wingtips
instead of dinner and snuck into museums.
I loved linen as a mechanism
for impersonation. For months fell asleep listening
to an art collector on the radio. The most he’d say
of any acquisition was that it was nice or even
quite nice which meant about two billion. And then
the details of medium, the art school
the young artist had attended, always one of the three
most expensive in the cities. The trick was always
to avoid awe. The rich participate in beauty
but do not acknowledge it. My only indulgence
was the pulpy straight romances I’d read on the bus,
the kind with a woman’s face looking up into
anonymous, chiseled arms, so fleshy
the author names were all pseudonyms
and the bookseller raised her eyebrows when I checked out.
I always imagined myself as him, so full
of veins and a sureness, velocity.
When, streetlit, he pushed her up against the brick
of the alley to finally kiss her, I gasped aloud.
Copyright © 2023 by Gaia Rajan. This poem was originally published in Frontier Poetry (2023).
About the Author
Gaia Rajan is the author of the chapbooks Moth Funerals (Glass Poetry Press 2020) and Killing It (Black Lawrence Press 2022). His work is published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Best New Poets, the Best of the Net anthology, The Kenyon Review, THRUSH, Split Lip Magazine, diode, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn and online at @gaiarajan on Twitter or Instagram.
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.
