R. Zamora Linmark
Split-Second Serenity
This afternoon I read about the time
Tim was admitted to Ward G-9 for AIDS
complications. Former lovers,
magazine editors, and writers
with drag aliases also dropped by,
as themselves or as apparitions.
But every night, at around six,
his lover Chris arrived to coax Tim
into finishing his meal, weep in
Tim’s embrace, until the last second
of visiting hours. Most time, though,
Tim was alone, building a poem
that wouldn’t, couldn’t, stop growing,
as if it had a memory of its own,
tricked itself into believing that
staying unfinished meant more
time to disappear—an inverted
Scheherazade, you could say,
except we all know remembering
is tied to forgetting and cruelty.
Suddenly, I forgot where in Tim’s
unending poem—if he were already
buried by an avalanche of love
or comparing the size of death
with someone from Marseilles—but
everything around me grew calm,
a split-second serenity
that required full submission.
And I, powerless and superstitious
to such visitation, started weeping.
For the life of me, I couldn’t stop,
because Jorge was suddenly back
in full drag regalia en route to Tour Eiffel
before training it south to Rome for
a surprise splash à la Anita Ekberg
at the Trevi fountain. He dragged
along a suitcase of cocktails, rubbing
alcohol, Betadine swabs, a Styrofoam
cooler for the bags of IV antibiotics
I once watched him inject through a PIC
line above his heart. Then Stephen
chimed in, said, “Let’s happy hour.
Hula’s in half hour. Will shower now.”
His lover William, our girlfriend Lisa,
and I got there first, ordered the
Sunday special: highball glass of
piña colada garnished with pineapple
wedge and, for the sakura effect,
a floating pink parasol toothpick.
We waited the length of three slow
rounds, took turns speaking to Stephen’s
answering machine, until worry
drove us speeding to his condo.
There, we found him, standing
and shivering under the shower
for god knows how long, in a daze,
recalling nothing, everything falling,
water after water after water.
R. Zamora Linmark is the author of The Evolution of a Sigh and Drive-By Vigils published by Hanging Loose Press. He’s also published the novels Leche (Coffee House Press) and Rolling the R’s (Kaya Press). Forthcoming are These Books Belong to Ken Z, a Young Adult novel from Delacorte Press/Random House, and the poetry collection Pop Verity. Born in Manila and raised in Honolulu, he divides his writing time between Manila and Honolulu.
Oz Hardwick‘s latest poetry collection is The Ringmaster’s Apprentice (Valley Press, 2014), and he is co-author, with Amina Alyal, of the Saboteur-shortlisted Close as Second Skins (IDP, 2015). Oz is Professor of English at Leeds Trinity University, and has written extensively on misericords and animal iconography in the Middle Ages under the name Paul Hardwick.
Michael Broder is the author of Drug and Disease Free (Indolent Books, 2016) and This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Assaracus, BLOOM, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, OCHO, Painted Bride Quarterly, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians 2; My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them; Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose and Art on HIV/AIDS; Divining Divas: 50 Gay Men on Their Muses; and Multilingual Anthology: The Americas Poetry Festival of New York 2015. Michael is the founding publisher of 
Luis Lopez-Maldonado is a Xicano poet born and raised in Orange County, CA. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California Riverside, majoring in Creative Writing and Dance. His work has been seen in The American Poetry Review, Cloudbank, The Packinghouse Review, Off Channel, and Spillway, among many others. He also earned a Master of Arts degree in Dance from Florida State University. He is currently a candidate for the Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame.