Two Poems by Seattle Writer Luther Hughes
Those of you picking up Seattle Met's print edition in 2024 will notice something different: we've added a poetry page, with selections from local writers curated by our new Poetry Editor, Paul Hlava Ceballos. The following poems, from Luther Hughes, are the first in this series.
This, Too, Shall Be Named
What I crave is the smell of clean laundry:
the blacker blacks of his Calvins. He throws
steak and shrimp in the pan while I knock back
another glass of Crown on ice, and I know
somewhere an uncle is proud. Somewhere,
a hummingbird is heft and full of Seattle’s sugar.
The candle on the table burps magnolia.
On TV, Patrick proposes to David on a clifftop
after an afternoon of bickering: nature
and secrets, a natural sequence. I was made
to love him that way, at the edge of the world,
lost in the afternoon lush of the life we share,
hummingbirding from nectar to nectar.
What is the distance between what is
and what is wished for? As he opens the fridge,
light pours out into our home.
Witness
A cathedral and a field of deer grazed before us.
We watched them reshape the night
into a metaphor I keep trying to master.
She pointed to a fawn resting beside its mother
nestled beneath the large white oak tree.
Your mother wasn’t supposed to have kids,
she slipped in like an osprey into water.
That was years ago when I was still a man.
Today, I’ve counted the times
I mythologized your face within
my memory’s broken wing. I didn’t remember
until someone caroled, Grief,
from their black cave. God annoys me
with their petty passion for precision.
The recollection of the deer smites me—
a reluctancy made wider by your death.
I am resistant to favor a God who thieves love.
But who am I but an arrow without its bow.
Luther Hughes (they/them) is the author of A Shiver in the Leaves (BOA Editions, 2022), listed among the best books of 2022 in the New Yorker, and the chapbook Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), recommended by the American Library Association. They are the founder of Shade Literary Arts, an organization for queer writers of color, and a cohost of The Poet Salon podcast, with Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat. Recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Rosenberg Fellowship and the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, they received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Their writing has been published in the Paris Review, Orion, American Poetry Review, and other outlets. They’ve been featured in the Seattle Times, Forbes, and Essence, as well as on KUOW public radio and The Slowdown podcast. Hughes lives in Seattle, where they were born and raised.
