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  • Voyeurs
  • Jacques J. Rancourt (bio)

Whatever I expected, it was not that the dungeon would be stone-quiet, that bodies

in this low light would turn abstract, that the demeanor of the men pacing the halls for sex would be

polite. One of them reaches out his hand to touch my torso. They, like me, came out after,

while in the center pool, the old men soak. These tunnels, dark and damp, industrial steel halls that snake,

offer doors with slots for passersby to watch. I wanted to see if the bathhouse would permit me, if walking these

halls would be like walking into the labyrinth of the past. The men in the pool, they lift themselves in and out;

they are the ones with the memories of who gathered here once, memories I have no right to inherit.

They are like a council of stars, lit blue from underneath. They laugh silently, and touch each other,

or float on their backs, staring up at the show of light on the ceiling, half in this world, half in another. [End Page 148]

And for a long time I watch them from behind the slats in the wall as they lean their heads against

each other, as water falls in pearls from their flabby arms, to see— like Polaris burning in a field

of dead stars—what still lives. [End Page 149]

Jacques J. Rancourt

Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of Novena, winner of the Lena- Miles Wever Todd prize (Pleiades Press, 2017). He has held poetry fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow.

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