HELP ME OUT!

This is what I need from you.  I am not asking.  When that man over there leans in close to your ear and whispers, “Is she married—that woman—your friend—is she spoken for?”  When the woman at the office, notorious for her nosiness, remarks she just met a “nice young man” she would like to set me up with.  When that group of teenagers, smiling and stumbling over their words, confide that they want to be just like me—a writer—someday, and “please, could you tell us, does she have a really hot boyfriend?”  Tell what you know, tell the truth!  Don’t shrug innocently as if you haven’t sat across the dinner table with my partner and me dozens of times, as if you weren’t sure whether or not I was “spoken for.”  Don’t say—don’t you dare say!—“Oh, she’s not married,” or plead the Fifth, or blush and turn away.  I am not asking; I am demanding.  It has been ten years of euphemisms and mistaken identities.  This is not my sister, my friend, my cousin, my colleague.  This is my lover, my partner, my life’s companion.  And yes, it is sexual, and yes, it is committed, and yes, we are more than aware that there are plenty of fish—plenty of male fish—in the goddamn sea.  Do you understand me?  I am not asking.  Do not evade the question.  Do not play dumb.  You—yes, you—whoever you are—you look that gaggle of high school girls straight in the eye and tell them, as if it were the simplest truth in the world—because, to me, it is—“No, but she does have a really hot girlfriend.”

Julie Marie Wade is the author of Wishbone, a Memoir in Fractures, Without: Poems, Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems, Tremolo: An Essay, When I Was Straight: Poems, Catechism: A Love Story, and SIX: Poems. She has won numerous awards, including the Colgate University Press Nonfiction Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes, eighteen Pushcart Prize nominations, and many more awards. Her work appears at the Academy of American Poets, The Kenyon Review, The Lost Angeles Review, The Rumpus, and many others. She teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and reviews regularly for The Rumpus and Lambda Literary Review. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives in the Sunshine State.