Salt Lake City

Christian Gullette

We’re not the first married men to sneak a kiss in Temple Square, but no one cares.

The Visitor Center model of the temple looks too small to hold anyone’s pain.

A boy, I built a dollhouse from a kit. I wasn’t given any paint so it would look

different from my sister’s. Two Lego people sat in that kitchen in front of a stack of pancakes.

They never knew what part of their lives they were in. We married

one of the times it was legal. Today, I bring him to

a city that held the Olympics. A city that values stamina. A city

that sometimes wants me to see inside it, this 80s Marriott with its glass elevator.

Christian Gullette is a National Poetry Series finalist and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Pleiades and other journals. His translations from the Swedish have appeared in the Colorado Review and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the 2021 Four Way Books Levis Prize. He serves as the editor-in-chief of The Cortland Review.