Time Is What Keeps the Light from Reaching Us
by Aaron Carico

I fill this room with the echo of many voices. The sun comes and floods this empty room, I call it my room.

I listen to your voice, David. Onscreen, you’re wearing a Ronald Reagan mask made of latex, like the ones from Point Break, and you’re looking at photos of Mark Morrisroe, one of him splayed on a bed, hard cock against his thigh, a twink pinup. “Mortality no longer feels like some abstraction I can push away to the age of eighty or ninety or whatever. There’s no longer a luxury of pushing the idea of mortality away.” You’re walking around Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. It’s fall 1989. Morrisroe died that July. You unfasten the mask, take it off, and you read the scrim of text that covers your own photos of Peter Hujar’s corpse. Your words shield your lover’s dead body. Peter had died almost exactly two years before. Your voice is propulsive, a juggernaut. It vibrates with fury.