You may forget but Let me tell you this: someone in some future time will think of us. — Sappho
I found this quote today in Paul Monette’s essay collection, Last Watch of the Night, after asking him what I should write about and opening to a random page. He loves quoting Sappho, and I love that about him. I love the way he reaches back to his own queer ancestors, as I reach back to him.
He quotes from it in his essay about traveling to DC for the 1993 March on Washington, then being too sick to attend the march, watching it from his hotel room, feeling the baton being passed to another generation. He died of AIDS in 1995.
“Remember us,” exhorts Melvin Dixon in a speech that was chosen to close out his posthumously published poetry collection, Love’s Instruments. He says he may not be well enough, or even alive, to attend the gay and lesbian writers’ conference next year, but “I’ll be somewhere listening for my name.”
Today I found myself thinking of Vittoria Repetto, who always described herself as “the hardest-working guinea butch dyke poet on the Lower East Side” in the announcements for the Women’s / Trans Poetry Jam & Open Mic, which she hosted monthly at Bluestockings Bookstore for eighteen years, from 1999 to 2018.
In this event’s eighteen-year run, I went exactly once. It would have been in 2004 or 2005. I was in high school, and my girlfriend was a poet. I don’t remember if my girlfriend read at the event, or if we were just scoping it out, her gathering her courage for another time. What I remember is that we were in awe of Vittoria—a real writer. At the end, she announced she had her chapbooks for sale, and then she explained what a chapbook was, a book of your writing that you put together yourself and sell to people at events.
My chapbook comes out next month. Vittoria Repetto will always be the person who taught me what a chapbook was.
She died of Covid in March 2020.
I can only think of the dead today.
One of my earliest memories is World AIDS Day, 1993. I was five years old, attending a public elementary school in Greenwich Village. 46,000 New Yorkers had already died of AIDS. There were still no effective treatments.
My elementary school participated in an observance called “Day Without Art.” We arrived to find all of the bulletin boards covered in black fabric—all of our crayon drawings, the fifth graders’ self portraits, the posters about reading, all of it. We sat cross-legged on the carpet and they explained that many artists had died of AIDS, and that on this day, we cover up the art to represent all of the art that wouldn’t be made because people had died of AIDS.
I didn’t know this observance had started around the time I was born, and that within a few years, following the advent of effective antiretrovirals, it would be reconceived as “Day With(out) Art”—highlighting the work of artists living with HIV. At five years old, I thought this observance with black drapes was as strange and eternal as Ash Wednesday.
I’ve never forgotten this. The idea that it was important to think about the art that would have been created if someone hadn’t died. The specific grief and unexpected nourishment of the might-have-been.
For me, the babies I never had, the children I chose names for but wasn’t able to conceive, were my deepest initiation into the vastness of the might-have-been.
There and not there. Conceived in my mind, but not in form. Like the art we imagine would have been made. Like the conversations we imagine might have taken place. The joy. The healing.
I can’t dwell in the might-have-been, but I go there to visit, like hanging up the drapes for the World AIDS Day observance. Sometimes it is too sad to stay there for long. But there’s something that shimmers, something I bring back with me, something alive.
I can only think of the dead today.
Kudos on your chapbook! So glad I found you here as I'm (for the most part off of FB and WOTR. Will you share a link for the chapbook when available?
Powerful and beautiful.