Alessandra Nysether-Santos
If I was a drag queen, I would be Hugs Hunny—
maybe what I mean is… one of my many selves is Hugs Hunny.
She’s the one who, at a high school party, was hand-feeding baby carrots to drunk teenagers,
then found a freshman sprawled in the damp grass and checked his breathing when he
wouldn’t respond to her melodic: “Hello, boy in the camo Carhartt, are you dead?”
And when he stirred and said all watery and wrong, “I’m fine,” as she checked the
pulse of his wrist, she asked if he wanted her to get help—
a veritable chariot to pull him in from the South Jersey rural darkness, dotted
with sparse house lights scattered among farms below a sky too starry to believe this is Jersey—
and he said no, she asked if she could bless him—I’d recently been ordained online and, she mentioned, I could also preside over funerals at sea—
he asked, “I was baptized; is that okay?” And she said, “Of course,” and blessed him.
We (he and her, but also I) never talked again after that, and such is the power of Hugs Hunny.
She would get drunk and sit in someone’s closet, reading The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, annotating and marveling at the sparkling lines by d.a. levy, Tupac, and all those desperado voices.
She would suddenly emerge from a pantry, pause the contentious country music to stand on a table and proclaim: “I will now make a State of the Party Address!”
And by god, she would, blending scraps of poetry and menthol cigarettes and regurgitated YOLOs to incite those warbling voices to song and chant.
That outlaw with her heart on her sleeve who always ended up falling in love or falling asleep early in an armchair or under a bench.
How did she always wake up just in time to tenderly care for the too-drunk and the sick?
That sweet girl who cleaned up the red plastic cups and fed even strangers the bounty of baby carrots found in the crisper of someone’s mom’s fridge,
she’s delicately pressed between the pages of a lost and well-loved copy of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and I hope the notes in the margins are still being swept by thrilled fingertips, somewhere.
ALESSANDRA NYSETHER-SANTOS is a Jersey Italian and Florida Brazilian writer, artist, and educator. Their poems can be found in places like Até Mais: An Anthology of Latinx Futurisms, the Space538 Poetry Hotline, and the North Carolina Literary Review.