These Gays Are Trying to Murder Me
on The White Lotus by J.D. Isip

This time it’s Sicily,


but Tanya returns, a new husband


from the last season says she’s so fat


is maybe why he can’t get it up.

You gotta hate this guy. The clues,


everyone knows after the fact, obvious


from the first chants and the frescos


of mortals buggered by the gods.

Seeing the Essex kid follow suit


with his uncle, “I wanted gay sex,”


the writer said, “to be transgressive


again,” and there she is, a white

negligee, following the animal sound,


I think they hear when I come out,


on a first meeting, at an interview. She


says, “I don’t think that’s his uncle”

but her assistant doesn’t understand,


it’s hard to explain how I knotted up


watching this guy, barely a man, go


at it, trancelike, and I thought about

Sergio taking me to the wall in Rome


where, all of seventeen, he let a guy


bow to him and worship, and Shane


at the bar, on the same trip to Italy,

let this old man hold his crotch, smiled


at me and said I should loosen up, but


kept on losing me to call his own boy,


while I found myself far away and alone.

She was right. Eventually. Too late,


“You’ll end up in some crazy places, right?” 

the dark water, this gorgeous, horrifying 


swathe of sea, “But you’ll still be lost.”

J.D. Isip’s full-length poetry collections include Kissing the Wound (Moon Tide Press, 2023) and Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His third collection, tentatively titled I Wasn’t Finished, will be released by Moon Tide Press at the end of 2024 or early 2025. He is a contributing editor for The Blue Mountain Review. J.D. teaches at Collin College in Plano, Texas, where he lives with his dogs, Ivy and Bucky.