James J. Siegel
The God of San Francisco

Some believe the God of San Francisco
has taken his throne
at the top of Twin Peaks—
A mighty Mount Olympus
nine hundred feet above the city
where the kingdom of heaven
embraces the kingdom of The Bay.

At that elevation it is difficult not to see
that something greater guides the way,
watches over all creatures and creation
coming and going
by bridge and by air,
by cable car and ferry.

Watch as the west erupts with light,
the sun that drops into the Pacific
burning brighter than an angel
entering the atmosphere.
Watch the fog that follows,
floats like the Holy Ghost
down the rocky hillsides
to hang over Hayes Valley,
the Haight-Ashberry—
The sweetest incense
of some Catholic mass.

Yes, it is difficult not to believe,
but they are correct in name
and name alone —
My savior has a bar stool
at the Twin Peaks Tavern,
a window seat to watch the world
where Market street meets Castro,
and the rainbow flags flap in the cold
of another West Coast wind.

I go there when I need religion
at a happy hour price—
a Bud Light baptism—
when I need a good lesson
that God has yet to leave us behind.

He sits alone,
his hands turned to vein and bone.
But buy him a martini—
vodka with two olives,
extra dirty—
and he will tell you anything
you need to know,
from the gold rush to North Beach
where the sailors wore dresses
over their anchor tattoos

to Jose Sarria and the Black Cat,
the Nightingale of Montgomery Street.

Yes, those were the days
when the prophets wore pearls,
when the Bible was burlesque,
and the saints mingled with the sinners,
the night a lightning strike
of arias and police sirens—
“God Save Us Nelly Queens.”

He raises a glass to the nevermore—
The Continental Baths,
the Elephant Walk,
to Harvey and his bullhorn.
A drink to the things that slipped away,
the bullets that shattered brains,
the murder called manslaughter
ushering in those White Night Riots,
the shattered glass of City Hall,
cop cars turned to funeral pyres,

And he remembers death
coming like it did in Egypt
stealing the first born,
the second born,
any young man who fell in love
with the twilight over Polk Street.
The obituary pages
doubling everyday
with the black and white faces
of the men who colored the Castro.

He can tell you how he washed the feet
of skinny boys with lesions,
boys in hospice beds
wheeled to the window
for one final look of the city at dawn,
then wheeled to the morgues
with no family to claim their remains.

So he took them—
all of them—
ashes upon ashes
collected and released
where the ocean waters worship
the glory of the Golden Gate.
He scattered them
in South of Market bars
where the men in leather tap a keg,
toast the life of another dead brother.

And he set them free
where the winds bow and bend,
genuflect for the San Francisco sky.
All the bodies that danced
in Folsom neon and Freedom Day parades,
in disco light and speakeasy darkness,
in the soft ballet of love and life,
they flutter and float forever
where the oceans wear
a halo from the moon,
and the towers of Twin Peaks
glow in the resurrection of the night.

James J. Siegel is the author of How Ghosts Travel (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2016). His poems have appeared in the journals The Good Men Project, The Cortland Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Assaracus, and The Fourth River, as well as in the anthology Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men On Their Muses (Lethe Press, 2012), edited by Michael Montlack. James received a scholarship to the Antioch Writers’ Workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio. An Ohio native, James has been living in San Francisco for over a decade.

This poem is not previously published

Noah Mendez
Negative

ass held high like a big red target
never asked if i’m clean just
grabbed hips and
slipped in like my holes were
made to be filled just like that
so easily with no bloodshed
and no resistance
like a takeover i never
got to prepare for
i am asked if it
feels good
if i
am coming soon
i am never asked if
i feel safe

Noah Mendez is a 17 year old trans man whose poems have appeared in the Rising Phoenix Review and Brouhaha Magazine. Noah was a 2016 Urban Word Poet Finalist and recently received an honorable mention for a poem contest through City College. His work can be found at emergincy.tumblr.com

This poem is not previously published.

Margaret McCarthy
Fever Dream: Sick in a Foreign Country

Desire unfurls
and she finds herself in undiscovered territory.
In her dream she spots its banner in the distance;

dream-like, it beckons her and dream-like, she follows.
Slowly, it waves her to its province, a country
whose weather seems bizarre to her;

she has never felt rain this warm.
It pelts her in brief, violent storms,
soaks her and departs; then

a too-large sun
drugs her with its monumental heat.
She stumbles over the lush, languid vine growing

everywhere, a native type she can’t identify
that casually,
but surely wraps itself around all in its way;

it entwines the whole world to itself.
She reaches for the jewel-like, silken-petaled
bloom it harbors,

it shrinks and withdraws at her touch.
Confusion settles on her like humid air
and a sense of some boundary being lost.

Soon, she begins to feel strange;
she tells herself, Ignore it—
it will pass when you’re acclimated here.

But she is wrong, so wrong.
There is no adjusting to this climate,
the dense, hot-house air

that smothers with the perfume of odd flowers,
this overwhelming vista that withholds itself
while it consumes.

Then, one day, where her heart should be,
she discovers in its place
a bud,

closed, hard and jewel-like.
And then she knows: this landscape grows inside her.
She cannot remember the moment of penetration.

Once she had veins and blood, but now
there is the vine and its stranglehold;
it entwines the whole world to itself.

Infected, exhausted in this uninhabited place,
she sickens.
Her limbs begin to feel heavy,

her whole body feels as if it’s underwater.
Drowning
she cannot drink

eaten up
she cannot eat.
She sleeps and sleeps,

weeps and sweats.
A fever that no water will abate
wastes her,

racks her like the peculiar, maddening storms of this place,
to leave her trembling, strung out and broken off
like a snapped branch.

In her delirium, she is directionless as mercury;
she alternately burns and freezes.
She tries to concentrate.

She draws a map of all that she remembers of this place
and puts this on the wall near her bed;
she studies it and studies—

convinced it will tell her where she is.
But she is lost, so lost.
The map becomes a face, an abstract portrait

with the features of some flawless lover—
the eyes, gems; the skin, a flower;
a picture of every wish

denied.
Obsession frames it, this work of art,
that sees the world only in its own terms.

Priceless, it, too, owns her,
the one picture she can never part with;
her own body a husk by now, her own face a shell.

She refers to it again and again,
this masterpiece.
She waits

and waits for its sphinx-like mouth to speak
she listens and listens

Margaret McCarthy is the author of Notebooks from Mystery School (Finishing Line Press, 2015), a finalist for their New Women’s Voices Award. McCarthy’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines, journals and anthologies including The Pagan Muse:Poems of Ritual and Inspiration (Citadel, 2003), Working Papers in Irish Studies, Gargoyle Magazine, Shaking Like A Mountain, Poetry New Zealand, and California State Poetry Society Quarterly, among others. Margaret works as a photographer in New York City. She publishes an electronic broadside, A Vision and a Verse, combining her imagery and poetry.

This poem appeared in Working Papers in Irish Studies.

Oz Hardwick
Two Poems

Reverberation

Do not flinch from the day’s whisper,
the words on the page, the reverberation
of air. Grip them tight in prickling palms
until your eyes weep flowers.

For there are those who would steal names,
wind dead artists in neat flags
in sterile rooms that none may enter.
Draw your pen from stone. Write the day.

Fall

In a castle open to the stars,
a girl, neither princess nor servant,
sews a coat of leaves, red and gold,
threaded with earthscent, cries of crows.

She can’t remember why, but knows
that, come morning, she will wrap herself close
in its moist rustling, crown her locks with frost,
and step her shadow through chestnut lanes.

Oz Hardwick is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The Ringmaster’s Apprentice (Valley Press, 2014), along with a collaborative volume with Amina Alyal, Close as Second Skins (Indigo Dreams, 2015), which was shortlisted in the Best Collaborative Work category for the 2015 Saboteur Awards. Oz lives in North Yorkshire, UK, where he teaches creative writing at at Leeds Trinity University.

These poems are not previously published.

M. Robin Cook
A Cycle of Memories

All I Did See

All I didn’t see,
all I discovered, speaking
about illness, telling stories
about individuals daring sickness,
about iconic disease, sending
anyone in deep—savage,
arrogant, ineffable, daunting sycophant.
All it did, seething
as I did, shitting
as it did slither,
as it did slough
along its dread, slow,
antisocially insistent damnable sentimental
acuitās, I didn’t see.
And I discovered. See?
He is very
S.I.C.K.

Goodbye Columbus, 1985

After a little while we stopped asking
where so and so went—we knew
that like an empty scabbard, he’d gone coming

from the baths like gas chambers, steaming—
once bright, erotic playgrounds, electric blue—
by odor of the health department, closing.

He’d left in a rush, bottle-stop gleaming,
in a wisp and a while, we knew that he knew
all along. The Watchtower, blue blotches, free reading

today at the clinic! These strange glyphs we’ll be deciphering.
Bring a friend. If there were to be a test, we’d test him, too.
But hurry, we’re not lingering; you’d best be scurrying.

We’ve a long and frigid winter’s longing
for just icily moving, glacier-slow, you
along darling.

Abundance

An entourage of embedded acronyms
adorned the lives inside our rainbow.
At its furthest end there was no gold,
just the icy and cum-drenched, the blood-addled,
copious bounty of AIDS,
always it seemed full blown
in those days—
those early
last days.

M Robin Cook writes: I am a transwoman, 54 years young. I write fiction, poetry, and the occasional essay; I draw and make music. I am interested in doing my small part to de-marginalize my community. We suffer the effects of the eraser; we disappear between the lines. We are always at risk and in need of so much. I love art, and I also believe it can be a critical force for change in the queer/transgender community and in our relationship(s) to the world. A dialog occurs between art, artists, and audiences which can help delimit and codify cultural boundaries. As we produce these works, and as they are recognized as being distinctly queer/trans* artifacts, we empower that move toward culture. It is an exciting time.

These poems are not previously published.

Stephen Zerance
Gun Porno

A shot in my ass, four pills back,
I’ve never wanted a gun so bad—
a gun in my hands,

your gun, my gun, transgression,
clack clack clack—this is fun,
holding my breath

till I pass out, my first
taste of blood, thirteen, a gun
pointed at me, one single shot

rang through the house, the magic
of murder ringing, singing,
calling out your name.

I’m building a mansion
where doors open
to solid walls, with my gun

I sleep in a different
room each night
or I’ll die. I want

to be tougher, spit
in my eye, throw my arm
to a corner, sit spin stop

the ride. I’ll have staircases
to nowhere, decoy
rooms, a roulette parlor

where I speak with the dead.
Who’s next? I’ll catch
love with a gun, play alone

with guns, my gun, your gun, a gun
to give me life, and I’ll bleed money
for a gun to stop the rise.

Stephen Zerance is the author of Caligula’s Playhouse (Mason Jar Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in West Branch, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Assaracus, and Knockout, among other journals, as well as on the websites of Lambda Literary and Split This Rock. He received his MFA from American University, where he received the Myra Sklarew award. Stephen lives in Baltimore, MD.

This poem is not previously published.

James Allen Hall
Reagan Red

National Portrait Gallery
March 12, 2016

Nancy Reagan hangs in her red dress
across from the crowded washrooms,

ensuring no hanky-panky goes down red
in the men’s room, not on her watch,

no nancyboys allowed, though I like to
think of her whiling away in “that shade

of scarlet forever known as Reagan red,”
the smell of unflushed waste enveloping her.

Leaving the gallery, a woman whose life knows
each brick alleyway in D.C. follows me down

the steps, closes in on me at the crosswalk,
takes a sudden swing, misses me. Her eyes

are bloodshot; when I confront her, she hides
one hand behind her, holds the other palm-out:

No offense. This is what living with the Reagans
is like. That red legacy—would that it could die

in me. I’m living with her coursing through
my veins, the reaginic culture of her

nearly undetectable, Reagan+, her breath
hot on the back of my bared neck.

James Allen Hall is the author of Now You’re the Enemy (University of Arkansas Press, 2008), which won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Recent poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Arts and Letters, and Agni. He teaches creative writing and literature at Washington College in Maryland.

This poem is not previously published.

Shakira Croce
Our Song

Empty cars held us
in the pale grey turning
to square lights of the city.
The ambulance driver steps out to smoke,
tapping ashes on Park Avenue.
It came from Desert Storm,
and you keep it still stamped,
colors faded and oblivious
lying next to a half-empty pill box.
You choose the music tonight.
It’s as simple as offering protection
from a line on the rise
in another CDC report failing to remind us
it’s no longer a death sentence.
Sometimes we can forget it all:
put our song on repeat and dance
swinging arms around each other,
hearts beating wildly.
There’s a greater communication
in that movement of the hip,
straighter than a needle
and wider than a lover’s exhale
to reach the need.

Shakira Croce is a writer in Queens, New York. A Georgia native, she studied writing at Sarah Lawrence College and completed a Masters at Pace University. Shakira’s poetry translations have appeared in Babel magazine, and recently her poetry has been featured in the New Ohio Review, PoetsArtists, Tansactions, Ducts.org, and the Red River Review. Shakira currently works as Communications & Public Relations Manager for a not-for-profit health plan, Amida Care, which is New York’s largest special needs health plan for people living with chronic conditions such as HIV/AIDS.

This poem is not previously published.