I can't escape myself. After thirty years, I am still crawling on this planet. I still collapse with loneliness, love unreasonably and barter for affection.
I went on a vision quest and lived on a hill for days. I learned to tell time with my fist and how to go without. I hiked for miles trying to find myself, and when the sun was high, I hid, and at night, when everything became a darker version of itself, I slept under the widest sky I've ever seen and let the Earth heal me.
And then I come back to Oakland, to cement and gunshots and no stars, and all I have here is a roof, and a car and a cat, and it's more than enough, but it's not the widest sky I've ever seen. And then I read your poems, I gather them into my arms and smell them like sweet, cactus flowers, and they feel like spaceships and suddenly, I'm back out there again, on a hill in the high desert, in the dark, under galaxies, and it's pretty fucking wonderful.
— Claudia, August 13, 2014
Jim Eigo has written on theater, dance, art, literature, sex and the design of clinical trials. He helped design two reforms of AIDS drug regulation, accelerated approval and expanded access, reforms that facilitated the delivery of many treatments to people across the world. His short fiction has appeared in such volumes as Best American Gay Fiction #3, in such periodicals as The Chicago Review and at such online venues as Cleaver Magazine and Bohemia. His first published art work appears in The Poetics of Space from Intima Press.