An Excerpt from "Man of Letters"

By Marc Gaba

PUT BEST FOOT forward. Without trying. Upon response, leave. Allow to simmer in thought and feelings. Challenge. Forget risk, it’s a child’s game, there is life after anything. Plan. Feed. Confect. Leave. Allow to glow. Notice. Other best foot forward.

Say something true. Leave. Three steps away, turn. Say something funny. Hide the choreography. Then be on your own. Without music. Notice your size, relative to the world, that distant neighbor. Sing “Maria.” In mind be specific regarding which Maria. Walk around with the song in your head. Don’t be stupid, notice car approaching. Bask in headlights brushing against your presence: you are a Man of Letters, now become an adult remembering the girl across the table, how she knows when she’s being seen, and tell no one. You are a Man of Letters.

During the conference, forget the room of ninnies where you’ve been boxed. Forget the bathroom, the man singing like Alma Moreno, something by Tori Amos, who likes you. Forget the dim light of the bathroom, and how the switch happens to be on your side of the bathroom, so turn it off when you’re done, because you are successful. Do not leave bathroom fleeing homophobically. Pat body dry. Wear clothing. Do not remember pajamas. Go to bed. Be briefly annoyed by the light outside the hotel. Dream. Allow it. Don’t wait for the alarm. Sleep. Sleep. Wake up. Prepare for breakfast. Eat breakfast. Be pleasant without knowing why.

Notice her ass while pausing from breakfast. Let your eyes graze her back, her hair. Smell the trace she left with her morning. Go back to breakfast, go back to the required reading materials. Do your best, always do your best, but do not dazzle. Be there listening to other generations. Laugh inside yourself when you can. Understand, years later, someone’s polemics against you, but do not remember the trouble he takes to destroy your work. Remember children. Move on.

Thank God for time. By end of conference session, linger, smoking, outside. Now talk to her. About poetry. Say what you want to say, something other than what you’ve said about her work, without lying. Don’t ask her out in public. Notice her friends. Planned or not, see them. Think your own thoughts. Argue with yourself for now. Nothing is wrong, there is neither blame or fault. •

> Marc Gaba is the author of Have (Tupelo, 2011), a Dorset Prize finalist and winner of the Global Filipino Literary Award in 2012; How Sound Becomes a Name and Nouveau Bored (High Chair, 2007 and 2009); and works that hybridize literature and visual art, such as Atomic Neutral and Untitled. His work has appeared in journals and anthologies, including Gulf Coast, VOLT, jubilat, the Boston Review, and the PEN Anthology At Home in Unhomeliness (UST Press, 2008). He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2005. He has exhibited with the National Gallery, Mag:net, Silverlens 20SQUARE, MO_Space, Altro Mondo, Art Cabinet Philippines, Art Fair Philippines 2013, and ArtInformal. A reading of his second full-length play Minsan May Pumara, Minsan Ma’y Pumara was performed during the Virgin Labfest at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2013.