. . She's a manyou wouldn't look twice at in street clothes,
two hundred pounds of hard living, the gap in her smile
sadly narrative--but she's a monument,

in the mysterious permission of the dress.
This is Esta Noche, a Latin drag bar in the Mission,
its black door a gap in the face
of a battered wall. All over the neighborhood

storefront windows show all night
shrined hats and gloves, wedding dresses,
First Communion's frothing lace:
gowns of perfection and commencement,

fixed promises glowing. In the dress
the color of the spaces between streetlamps
Lola stands unassailable, the dress
in which she is in the largest sense

fabulous: a lesson, a criticism and colossus
of gender, all fire and irony . . .

From "Esta Noche," My Alexandria, (University of Illinois Press, 1993)

Mark Doty?s five books of poems, including My Alexandria and Sweet Machine, have received the National Book Critics Circle, a Whiting Writers Award, and Britain?s T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry. His memoir, Heaven?s Coast, won the PEN Martha Albrand Prize for Nonfiction for 1996 and was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, who described the book as "a terrifying and elegant document of the age of AIDS." A new memoir, Firebird, is forthcoming in 1999.

Hosted by: Women's Studies Program

In conjunction with: College of Communications, Department of English, Department of History, Campus Honors Program, Carr Visiting Writers Series, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Medical Humanities and Social Sciences Program, University of Illinois Press, Unit One, Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual
and Transgender Concerns