SHER-O/QUEER-O/BING-O!

A golden shovel for Maureen Seaton

When I learned we would meet that day at Giorgio’s, my

knees turned right then to strawberry Jell-O. Life

has got my number, I thought, & today Life has

called it up on the signboard—NOW SERVING ONE very

lucky me who, at 33, sat across a little,

wobbling table from you for a chance to

bask in your sprightly light, your generous laugh. O, do

you know what it meant to me to be with

you there, eating frittatas & queering the air all around us? Belief

has carried me farther than fear has slowed me down. O, do

you know how much I wanted to tell you,

though flushed & blustered, aslosh (your word!) with awe? O, believe

I’ve loved you longer than I’ve known you. Know your poems are home to me.

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Julie Marie Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, she has published 13 collections of poetry and prose, most recently Skirted: Poems (The Word Works, 2021) and the book-length lyric essay, Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing (The Ohio State University Press, 2020). Wade reviews regularly for Lambda Literary Review and The Rumpus and makes her home in Dania Beach with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats.