Robin Becker

A I Q Y

A History of Sexual Preference

We are walking our very public attraction
through eighteenth-century Philadelphia.
I am simultaneously butch girlfriend
and suburban child on a school trip,
Independence Hall, 1775, home
to the Second Continental Congress.
Although she is wearing her leather jacket,
although we have made love for the first time
in a hotel room on Rittenhouse Square,
I am preparing my teenage escape from Philadelphia,
from Elfreth’ s Alley, the oldest continuously occupied
residential street in the nation,

Quaker Meeting, The Sixties

Seeing my friend’s son in his broad-brimmed hat
and suspenders, I think of the Quakers
who lectured us on nonviolent social action
every week when I was a child. In the classrooms
we listened to those who would not take up arms,
who objected, who had accepted alternative
service in distant work camps and showed
slides of hospitals they helped to build.
On Wednesdays, in Meeting for Worship,
when someone rose to speak,
all the energy in the room
flew inside her mouth, empowering her to tell

Yom Kippur, Taos, New Mexico

I’ve expanded like the swollen door in summer
to fit my own dimension. Your loneliness

is a letter I read and put away, a daily reminder
in the cry of the magpie that I am

still capable of inflicting pain
at this distance.

Like a painting, our talk is dense with description,
half-truths, landscapes, phrases layered

with a patina over time. When she came into my life
I didn’t hesitate.