Tea Dance, Provincetown, 1982

At the boy bar, no
one
danced with me.

I danced with
every
one.

The entire
room.
Every song.

That’s what was so
great
about the boy bars
then.

The room vibrated.
Shook.
Convulsed.

In one
collective
zoological
frenzy.

Truthfully,
I was the
only woman
there.

Who cared?
At the Boatslip,
I was welcomed.

The girl bar
down the street?
Pfft!
Dull as Brillo.

But the tea dances shimmied,
miraculous as mercury.
Acrid stink of sweat and
chlorine tang of semen.

Slippery male energy.
Something akin to
watching horses fighting.
Something exciting.

My lover,
the final summer he was bi,
introduced me to the teas.
Often hovered out of sight,
distracted by poolside
beauties, while I danced
content/innocent
with the room of men.

He was a skittish kite, that one.
Kites swerve and swoop and whoop.
Only a matter of time, I knew.
Apropos, I called him
“my little piece of string.”
And that’s what kites
leave you with in the end.

There was an expiration date
to summer. Understood.
That season,
I was experimenting to be
the woman I wanted to be.

Taught myself to sun
topless at the gay beach,
where sunbathers
shouted “ranger,”
a relayed warning
announcing authority,
en route on horseback,
coming to inspect
if we were clothed.
Else fined. Fifty
dollars sans bottom.
One hundred, topless.
Fifty a tit, I joked.

It was easy to be half naked
at a gay beach. Men
didn’t bother to look.
I was in training to be
a woman without shame.

Not a shameless woman,
una sinvergüenza, but
una sin vergüenza
glorious in her skin.
Flesh akin to pride.
I shed that summer
not only bikini top but
guilt-driven Eve and
self-immolating Fatima.

Was practicing for
my Minoan days ahead.
Medusa hair and breasts
spectacular as Nike of Samothrace
welcoming the salty wind.
Yes, I was a lovely thing then.

I can say this with impunity.
At twenty-eight, she was a woman
unrelated to me. I could
tell stories. Have so many to tell
and none to tell them to
except the page.
My faithful confessor.

Lover and I feuded
one night when he
wouldn’t come home with me.
His secret—herpes.
Laughable in retrospect,
considering the Plague
was already decimating dances
across the globe.

But that was before
we knew it as the Plague.

We were all on the run in ’82.
Jumping to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,”
the summer’s theme song.
Beat thumping in our blood.
Drinks sweeter than bodies
convulsing on the floor. 

Sandra Cisneros