frederick speers / editors' choice prize in poetry - 3rd place winner

Cruising the Lesser Triangle or Worldly Lobe

who 

   cares if 

on the one 

hand that hot gay

over there looks sad

       woah 

becoming woe 

           becoming woah

or if on the other 

       hand mountain after 

mountain of stars

  wander over us 

friend-

                                 less

there look just 

above where the green’s 

all but gone out

               of the foothills 

                      the grasses

all golden stems

   fussing

with vintage 

                                boas 

          if we can

                          call them 

that

     one day even memory 

will become a memory

what then

---

Frederick Speers was born and raised in Blacksburg, Virginia. He has studied, lived, and worked in places like Washington D.C., Boston, Amsterdam, New York City, and the Bay Area, and currently lives, works, and hikes outside Denver, Colorado with his husband Chase, a data scientist, and their two dogs. His first small book of poems, So Far Afield (Nomadic Press 2017, now distributed by Black Lawrence Press) was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry in 2018, and his second chapbook In the Year of Our Making and Unmaking was selected by Carl Phillips for the 2020 Frontier Digital Chapbook Poetry Prize. from time to time, he reviews books of poetry for the New York Journal of Books and is a reader for the Beloit Poetry Journal.