Fiction

Jay is working on his debut novel. His first short story ‘Everything Encroaching’ (2020) was published in Untitled Writing’s literary journal Untitled: Voices (Issue One, Vol 1).

Strasbourg
(from All Those Bodies And They’re Moving)

In my mind
I went to Strasbourg months ago
I have been dancing to an overwhelming silence
With an overabundance of corpses,
Mostly women
Made frail with their final choreography
Sweating off the madness
And the sadness that has shaken me,
Shaking off the excess and the burden
So I’m freer to keep on dancing like before
When I was younger,
When the world was much smaller
And I could spin it to my rhythm,
As the music enveloped me
I felt love for the first time, unconditionally,
This is a plague possessing me,
Jealous of stillness and oxygen –

Dancing to Florence, dancing to Patti,
Dancing to Kate and Nick and David
Surrounded by oceans and horses
And mountains and warcrimes and questions
Just an instrument, moved to muster
This motion, to master my own feet
Into perfection, into oblivion
I dance on a drumbeat’s edge
I want to be happy, I want to be weightless
In Strasbourg with a young man
Perpetual narcissist
Punching the air on tip-toes
Singing songs about myself –

Dancing to the death I go
Circling ‘round peripheries
Of vision and logic and sense
Frenetic with the fever
I shiver in Strasbourg
Dancing still in place
Like a tundra at nightfall
Frozen and falling
Shards of evanescent brightness
In the fast encroaching dark
Gliding, moved by a breeze
Until resting for a second undisturbed
Breathing and then off again, airborne,
Bound to cascade until the end, melting –

I am lighter
Dancing the weight off
Dancing the plague off
Ever lighter letting go
Spinning in the vain hope
I might take flight out of Strasbourg
Out of earth
And keep on dancing
In the stars
In the blackness
In the after
In my mind
Dancing –

Strasbourg (2022 Version)
(after the shooting at Club Q)

breathlessly I
dance to heavenly beats I
sing silent, mouth the words
I’ve always known in my feet
in the four cramped walls
of Strasbourg, five centuries
and four years have passed
I’m twenty-seven with nothing
left but my lungs and life to give
to the song that makes sense of me
they call this place The Neon Hades
and I long to be condemned forever
here with every friend I’ve ever loved
and every man I’ve ever fucked
a blissful chorus rendered senseless
by the song, dancing ‘til the music stops –

and still dancing, two feet move
in the drop and the exhale
of every other queer person here
in our dumb and battered city
my two feet rise and fall by turns
arhythmic in the otherwise silence
as the refrain remains within me
they want to pull me down
to join them in calm and safety
but I’ve never not been raging
the dance a manic plague to me
it’s a divine intervention
and a damning blessing
like maybe if I never stopped
I could dance the hatred out –

and then two more feet
are moving with me
to the same ancient
unnameable lack
of rhythm and sense
and two more and two
more and more and
everyone is ascendent
every body moves to its
own tune, every voice
en masse cries out
the song it calls home
bringing all our heroes
into the battle with us
David and Florence
and Gaga and Elton
Kate and Prince and Kylie
and George and Janelle
even songs I don’t know
in tongues I can’t speak
but every word is a call
to the future, to be free –

in Strasbourg
as in Heaven
subjective bliss
it blesses us
bloody, breathless
dancing to bone
and bone to dust
it’s a holy sickness
that’s always
been within us
and a warning
to our harassers
that we are godly
that He anointed us –

so try
as you
might
you’ll
never
kill us.