afterwards, bring me back me as Tom Cruise’s wig in Interview with the Vampire
By Andrew Sutherland
I want to wear intimacy
the way a 90s leading man wears a head of curls
with violent ease
the way a gay pre-teen wears Halloween fangs
with troubling sincerity
& it’s not that I think I’m not convincing
it’s only that I’m not convinced
I want to be a trick of the light
if to be truly intimate with someone
is to no longer be at all yourself
intimacy is not a fancy cape
something you put on, like an American accent at drama school
intimacy is not another Tennessee Williams scene study
it is not finally being allowed to play Blanche
although if it were a cape, oh boy would I wear it
I would vanish with the becoming of it all
I want to trickle down a neck
like it’s cinematic feeding time
& the soundtrack knows to swell for necks
make my own cells swoon
with barely a pump of the heart
how each would fall into the other!
to be shadowed by grand pianos
I want to eat Christian Slater
I want to one day look at myself
the way an alligator looks at the Eiffel Tower
with an honest-to-fucking-god tear in its eye
because the Eiffel Tower’s just a stack of alligators
& what’s an alligator if not a hungry Eiffel Tower??
I want to be stripped clean of it all
naked & approximately true, adorned with just the necessary pieces
god, I’d be so real!
or maybe I could be the costume
yes, I’d like to be the costume –
I once said to a particularly buttoned-up boyfriend that
Interview with the Vampire was the best mainstream AIDS film of the ‘90s
& I think it finally pushed him over the edge
he was the type to bring up the virus every time we had sex
without necessarily realising he was doing it
sometimes I would joke about it, like:
guess we’d better tell that condom it needs to get tested
& sometimes I would just smile quietly & remember
isn’t it about vampires? he had snapped
there’d already been a bruising chat about postmodern art
why can’t you just let things be about what they’re about?
you think it makes you sound so smart, but honestly – you are impossible
just let me have this, I thought
Tom Hanks in Philadelphia didn’t get to raise a precocious Kirsten Dunst
Tom Hanks in Philadelphia mostly just had to die??
yes, I want to be impossible
impossible curls & intimate with every cell
bedecked with something new
so let me have this
Andrew Sutherland (he/they) is a Queer poz (PLHIV) writer and performance-maker based in Western Australia. His poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction can be found in a range of publications, including Overland, Island, Cordite, Westerly, Running Dog, Portside Review, and EXHALE: an anthology of Queer Singapore voices (Math Paper Press), and his debut poetry collection, Paradise (Point of Transmission) was published in August 2022 with Fremantle Press. His recent performance works include Mother of Compost, Salome delta, small & cute oh no, and a line could be crossed and you would slowly cease to be. He is grateful to reside on Whadjuk Noongar land.