Queer Poem-a-Day is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include adult language.
Saturday Services at the Provincetown Shore
by Jessica Jacobs
“And Abraham said to his servant… ‘Put your hand, pray, under my thigh
that I might make you swear by the Lord.’” —Genesis 24:2
Just off the parking lot, the lesbians come prepared. Our section
a series of small encampments fortified with tents, coolers,
canvas chairs, and the occasional baby under a pop-up sunshade.
A sunscreen-slathered dealer shuffles cards onto a folding table.
But down a long mechitza of pebbled sand:
the masters of minimalism—men, with little more than flip-flops
and hand towels. Oceanfront anthropologist, trespasser
between tribes, I jog past, note how the sculpted vees of their backs
arrow to an outcropping of asses polished as tumbled stones.
At the shoreline, a man flips into a handstand, penis flapping
like a windsock in low breeze—inverted Michelangelo—until his scan
for admirers unkilters him into the surf. A seagull skims out,
wings slow-clapping the water.
Behind me, the land of women
gripping beer koozies, fanning themselves with hands
of Texas Hold’Em. I’ll return, I’m required—all my stuff
is still there. And yes, men can make a bit much of their manhood:
family jewels, third leg, second brain. But the trappings of comfort
can obscure unadorned need. And, for just this barefoot mile,
I let myself envy their economy, the premium they place on desire.
Two by two, men enter
the dunes.
Because anyone taking an oath, said Rashi, must hold in their hand
a sacred object, and because circumcision was Abraham’s first
commandment and came to him through suffering and was beloved
to him, he chose it as the object on which his servant swore. For these moments
they share, no matter what Leviticus says, pursing tight its prurient verses,
these men, too, are taking a kind of oath: Our bodies are all we entail.
“Saturday Services at the Provincetown Shore” from unalone © 2024 by Jessica Jacobs. Appears and recorded with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Jessica Jacobs, a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, is the author of unalone, poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis (Four Way Books, March 2024); Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books, 2019), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards, and a finalist for the Brockman-Campbell, American Fiction, and Julie Suk Book Awards; Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press, 2015), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, winner of the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; and co-author of Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/Penguin RandomHouse). She is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.
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.
