Selected by Derrick Austin
Aubade Where Nobody Leaves
My husband’s thumb on the edge
of his lip. A tiny pool of spit
darkening his pillow, his mouth
always open. He slips into deep sleep
so damn easily, like a child
who hasn’t experienced fear.
A bruised grapefruit from the fridge
cut in half and spiked with sugar. A startle
of sparrows on the elm out front.
Today I am not a ten-year-old boy
afraid of his mother.
I walk the crushed gravel of my driveway,
polyps of dew on the plastic sleeve
protecting the newspaper.
The bullfrogs sound masculine,
a smoker-cough chorus.
I can see my neighbor on his knees,
a silver spoon in his hand.
He’s digging at the roots of weeds,
loosening the soil.
It looks like he’s eating the earth.
Beyond him, more houses—
plaster walls containing rooms,
rooms containing bodies, bodies
containing everything
we are, and were. A mangy rabbit
streaking across the lawn.
Purple cabbage in the front flower bed.
A grown man walking back inside
to nudge another man awake.
Born and raised in rural North Carolina, Mickie Kennedy is a gay poet who explores queerness, family, illness, and what it means to rebuild after trauma and tragedy. His work is a window to an integral time in gay history, when AIDS was its zenith and sex was synonymous with death. His debut poetry collection, Worth Burning, was published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2026, and his chapbook, Glandscapes, won Button Poetry’s 2025 Chapbook Prize. Recent poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, POETRY, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Sun, Copper Nickel, Nimrod, and Black Warrior Review.
Selected by: Derrick Austin is the author of three poetry collections including This Elegance, forthcoming from Boa Editions in May 2026, Tenderness (Boa Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (Boa Editions, 2016) selected by Mary Szybist for the A. Poulin Jr, Poetry Prize. Black Sand, his first chapbook, was published by Foundlings Press in 2022. His debut collection was honored as a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the Norma Faber First Book Award.
