by Derrick Austin
I studied Italian painters, Giorgione, Titian.
At one job, I’m a glorified secretary.
I answer the phone in my professional voice
and sell gaudy urns to luxe addresses.
My neighbor listens patiently, amused by my young life.
We’re the only Black gay men in our building,
so he has me over for Sunday tea. I fill our cups.
For the heart, he says, adding whiskey to his.
In the 80s, on a fellowship in Spain,
he practiced arias and translated Romani ballads.
After a concert, he presented Leontyne Price
with flowers wrapped in sheer blue paper.
Today, I argue Another Country is Baldwin’s best novel.
My neighbor shares a recipe for chicken paprikash.
Gone like that, he says, flipping through an album of friends
in their youth with fades and thick mustaches.
They could quote Mahogany. They cut up
in the house-inflected dark of a dancefloor,
worldly and glamorous as a Venetian painting.
I refill our cups. A splash of whiskey in his tea.
Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016). His third collection, This Elegance, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in Spring 2026. He is currently at work on a hybrid non-fiction book about ekphrasis.
This poem previously appeared in American Chordata.