Rewind
by Steffan Triplett
When two men kissed there used to be danger.
On television where there once was danger, there is now vibrant color.
Color bursts & vibrates on screen, even if no one is there to see it.
Have you ever seen something that buzzes inside you?
I am watching two kids encounter each other with pure admiration.
Television shows me alternate pasts in technicolor.
Glimpses of the past will make you imagine safety where there isn’t any.
Tense is a lie, what is your present is someone else’s future.
A show I adore made me feel like we were living a warm, pleasant future:
Two high school boys go on a date & their parents know.
A boy I adore takes me back to my adolescent past.
Most days I can distinguish between my own experience & a character’s.
Some days my own adolescence feels as if it were extinguished.
A me I love’s past is disappeared, so I fill it with my guts.
I am watching two boys kiss on screen, & for once there is no secondhand shame.
There are flames there. Right here there are burning flames.
About:
When visiting my parents, I streamed a television show, “genera+ion,” in which a character encountered a brief, beautiful, queer love—all at the age of seventeen. I was so moved after witnessing the ease in which this pair approached one another, I stood up. Full of feeling as if it were happening to me. Time compressed. I went to sleep in my childhood bedroom after. Everything good felt possible in a space where once anything good had felt impossible. (The earliest seed of this poem was inspired by Xan Forest Phillips.)
Steffan Triplett on “Rewind”
from the journal TYGER QUARTERLY
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