Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Outliving Michael
by Steven Reigns
Moon Tide Press
Sept 2025, $16.95, 95 pages, ISBN: 978-1-957799-36-0
One of the poems in Steven Reigns’ new collection about the horror of the twentieth century AIDS pandemic among gay men reads:
I’ve outlived so many
of the men in my life.
The most painful has always been,
will always be, outliving Michael.
Not just the source of the book’s title, the poem speaks plainly to the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic, the breathtaking number of deaths of so many young people. It also suggests the personal importance to the poet of this heartfelt elegy. As he writes in another short poem:
After Michael died,
most of my recollections
began with
After Michael died.
The frontispiece of Outliving Michael is a headstone displaying Jon Michael Church’s birth and death dates, 1/13,1958 and 7/2/2000. A quarter of a century has passed since Michael’s death. In a poem that begins, “Toward the end, he had trouble sleeping,” Reigns recalls a note his friend had written him, praising some poets he’d seen on television. The poem ends:
But on the other side of that paper
is something I had forgotten about.
He scrawled that I should write
about him. Finding it in my papers,
all these years later,
was lovely permission.
Hence, Outliving Michael is both meditation and tribute. In a lengthy poem called “Sting” that occurs early in the collection, Reigns uses the metaphor of a bee sting to examine his fears of his own gayness. Just as he’d feared getting stung by bees as a child, so he confesses “how scared I was / of being gay, of gay men.” In bars he sneaked into with a fake ID, “the older men swarmed around me.” But years later, in a gay bar in Naples, Florida, he met Michael, dressed in drag, and everything changed.
With Michael, I began to lose
my fear of older men, to let go
of the fright accumulated
from predators of my past
and the media messages about
what they carried and passed
with sexual carelessness.
In another poem, ostensibly about Edith Piaf, in which Michael advises Reigns to listen to the chanteuse to improve his French, he concludes:
I knew she had inspired Michael.
I wasn’t mastering French
or getting laid, but I was receiving
an education in the avante-garde.
And Michael, my gentle
dutiful professeur.
Seventeen years Reigns’ senior, Michael is portrayed throughout as a caring guide, a life coach, an invaluable mentor for living in the world, with a sharp, irreverent wit and a joie de vivre. A travel agent back in the day before the internet made the job obsolete, “Michael lived for drag, a connoisseur of / camp and crass.” When Reigns first meets Michael in the Naples gay bar, it’s actually his alter ego, Blanche, whom he meets first. He is immediately impressed by Michael’s talent “to subvert and offend
with a look, a gesture, a song.
Everyone called him Blanche, but I called him
Michael, and he allowed it. Maybe as a reminder,
a tether to reality, a portal back home.
Everybody was drawn to Michael’s charisma. “Everyone wanted / Michael’s light to / shine on them,” Reigns remembers in a poem about how easily Michael was able to fall into conversation with people, in this case some random people next to whom they were having a picnic.
Gradually, Reigns becomes aware of Michael’s illness. Still in his early twenties,
I was that age when I thought I knew everything.
Thought Michael’s aging was just life, not AIDS.
There’s a great deal of nostalgia in Outliving Michael, of course, remembering a friend who died a quarter century ago, but Reigns is also remembering his own youth, with that same sweet nostalgia. Michael has gone shopping for jeans at the mall, the occasion for Reigns to make this observation about the immortality of youth. Channeling Michael’s humor, he writes:
The 32s and 31s were way too loose,
he said with excitement.
I’m wearing a 30. I love AIDS.
We laughed a long time, me oblivious
to the clock running down
and he deflecting fear.
In another poem, Reigns writes:
He started losing his thick, red hair,
kept it buzzed short, had taken to
wearing baseball caps,
the free kind with embroidered logos.
Twice in the collection, Reigns refers to the presentation of a collection of objects recovered from the Titanic that they attended together.
We spent the day at an exhibition
of artifacts pulled from the Titanic.
Plates and evening programs
stained by decades in the
dark ocean, used by people
who thought they were unsinkable,
that the party would last forever.
Not only a metaphor for his own perception of himself as immortal in his twenties, the Titanic exhibition takes on another meaning, when he writes in a later poem about their afternoon, and how he was bored by what he saw as mere debris:
But that is what I am doing to him now,
diving and forging into the past,
trying to bring every scrap of Michael
back to the surface.
Reigns was in the Berkshires when he got the news of his friend’s death. “I expected the news. I didn’t know how to grieve him.” For a while, he’d begun to notice Michael’s dementia, as the virus took hold. “I could tell from our conversations / Michael’s mind was slipping.”
Those last few months were terrible.
I tried to take care of him and couldn’t.
Our May-September friendship
didn’t allow a restructure. He wasn’t so accepting
and I, so young, wasn’t a good caregiver.
Reigns’ implicit sense of guilt, inadequacy about caring for his friend, a sort of “survivor’s guilt,” his feelings of helplessness, are all-too-familiar when it comes to watching a loved one’s demise, from AIDS, cancer, or anything. His response, to write this panegyric, feels like an absolution as well as a devotion. As he writes, “the compulsion
to write about him, honor him, memorialize him
is the only way I can give back an ounce
of what he gave me.
Amen.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.