J.C. Elkin
Bodhisattva Guanyin

Bodhisattva Guanyin, hollow dry lacquer, 16th C. Ming Dynasty, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Guarding the exit – Jewel In the Lotus.
Mystery Princess draped in gilt silk.
Manicured, tasseled, lounging barefoot.

Pendulous lobes heavy with cares
gleaned from the cries of a suffering world.
Infinite, peaceful, wise beyond words,

Goddess of Mercy, blessed, enlightened.
Mary for Buddhists you’re sometimes called.
Do you also hear Christian prayers?

Salve, Salve Regina Guanyin.
I entrust you with my secret.

J.C. Elkin is the author of World Class: Poems Inspired by the ESL Classroom (Apprentice House, 2014). Her work has appeared in Kestrel, The Delmarva Review, ZoMagazine, and other journals. J.C. is a founder of the Broadneck Writers’ Workshop.

This poem appeared in Angle.

Daniel de Cullá
Doobie or Not Doobie

Lovers look for this snowflake
From Victor Hugo’s Hauteville House’s Garden
Overlooking the sea
In St. Peter Port, Guernsey, Channel Islands
During his time in exile from France
From many ages ago
Precisely midnight
Dominique and Me reaching spiritual illumination
As the French author inspiration for many
Of his fine works
Including Les Misérables and Toilers of the Sea
Teaching us
How to turn our miserable mess
Into a beautiful, joyful and splendid one
Saying to us from his statue:
“There’s no tyranny in the State of Exile.
Fortunately, you have a handbook that shows me
How to discover salvation
Through the pineal gland.”
Hugo described the Islands
As “fragments of France which fell into the sea
And were gathered up by England.”
A Nazi bunker built by Germans
In the II War goes round all the island
One said:
“Chaos and strife are the roots
Of all fascist boots here.”
I’m working in L’Ancress Bay Hotel
Today disappeared by a fire
As a night porter, first
And assistant of chef, afterward
The Bay is a flash of intense light
As though its very psyche
Is the fog returning
As Hugo’ spirit laughing
In happy anarchy.
I am alive and I can tell You as He:
“You are free.”
Dominique is a pretty whore
An employee of shop of clothes
Her eyes were as soft as feather
And as deep as eternity of shit.
Her body was the spectacular dance
Of atoms and universes
Pyrotechnic of pure energy
Opening her flourish haired vagina
Her cunt was my chaos
Disappointed to uncover only reference
To bloody Taoism
Revealing its scroll.
She was a diagram
Like a yin-yang with a pentagon on one side
And an apple on the other of her buttocks
Losing consciousness
In her Bloody Mary period
Being apparent that her experience
Had been whore
We discussing our strange encounter
And reconstructed from memory
The chimpanzee’s diagram
Of our Asses in Love, as Lovers Lo…
And Me asking:
Doobie or not Doobie,“Marijuana”?
She’s answering:
—Give me Cannabis, not fucking Prick¡

Mark Ward
Gown

A reverse straight-jacket
not designed to close
no matter how hard I try
to tie the fabric strips—
I’m exposed. I pull on my
hoodie over the hospital’s
cruel joke of clothes.
I sit in the corridor.
My shins are cold.
I worry that someone could
see up what feels like a dress
that barely reaches my knees.
I have dressed insanely for
cabaret, perfected Little Edie
Bouvier, lipsynched my way
through all the best parts,
a scattershot approach to drag
as art. I feel unsafe
as I wait for the ultrasound.
I watch myself pull down
the hem, zip up my hoodie,
cross my thighs so no one
can see—what? My bare legs?
My body drenched in fabric?
My discomfort that even I try
to pass, or that for a moment,
I felt like a boy in a dress
and that, for a moment,
I allowed myself to feel less.

Mark Ward is a poet from Dublin, Ireland. He was the 2015 Poet Laureate for Glitterwolf and his work has appeared in Assaracus, Tincture, The Good Men Project, Off The Rocks, The Wild Ones, Emerge and the anthologies, Out of Sequence: The Sonnets Remixed, The Myriad Carnival and Not Just Another Pretty Face. He has recently completed his first chapbook, How to Live When Life Subtracts, and is currently working on a novel-in-verse called Circumference.

This poem is not previously published.

Jason Vanfosson
The Backs of Men

I ride on the backs of soldiers
drafted for their love of love.
Soldiers who left behind
families fretting over hospitals,
futures filled with cures
for an ailing heart.

I ride on the backs of soldiers
knowing the realities of war.
Soldiers who witnessed
fires in the eyes of civilians,
souls escaping from combat
buddies and villains.

I ride on the backs of soldiers
suffering for our lives.
Soldiers who never
paraded down Main Street,
heard “Thank you for your service”
whispered in an airport.

I ride on the backs of men
never called hero.

Jason Vanfosson is a doctoral student at Western Michigan University where he researches American boyhood, queerness, and travel in children’s literature. His work has appeared in the Language Arts Journal of Michigan. You can learn more by visiting his website at jasonvanfosson.com.

This poem is not previously published.

David Acosta
Two Poems

Threnody

Anonymously winter releases its dead
And we who survive another day
Must bear the blame for those
Who failed to linger.

If they could speak,
They would bewail in echoes of ice
Their truncated lives,
Their perennial hunger and thirst
For the dead are always hungry
Thirsty to be among the living.

How to explain it all?
Only to record their loss
With a blind and fierce tenderness.
How death came early and without warning
Entered our bedrooms
Tarnishing forever the tenderest
Of moments.
We did not know
And in the face of this
I will maintain our innocence.

But today
A man I love lies dying.
How to reconcile such loss?
The labored breathing in the dark;
The broken smile. And his heart,
The only thing this illness couldn’t take
Now a timid animal of dusk.

Only this is certain
Before dawn he will fly like a shadow,
Fly like birds frightened into air.
Just now he is asking for water
Already, the thirst has begun.

Requiem

When solitude
Digs its way into the ground
Tooth and nail,
I
Unable to sleep, rise
A skeletal structure
Of darkness and fog.

Tomorrow
I will abandon this skin,
Inherit absence in its place
That other country
Where flesh is a stubborn memory
Arduously maintained,
With a frenzy of questions.

These days
Our bodies have become
Organs of mourning
We make love
Unaware that we do so
With gestures we’ve learned
From the dying.

David Acosta’s work has appeared in Mayrea, The Evergreen Chronicles, The Americas Review, and the anthologies: American Poetry Confronts the 1990s (Black Tie Press, 1990), The Limits of Silence (Asterion Press, 1991), Poesida (Ollantay Press, 1995), and Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of Latin American Poetry in The United States (University of Washington Press, 1998). He is also included as a contributor to the first anthology of Latino LGBT history in the United States and Puerto Rico, Queer Brown Voices (University of Texas Press, 2015). David lives in Philadelphia, where he is the Artistic Director of Casa de Duende, and arts organization dedicated to producing socially relevant exhibits and performances linking artists and communities at the local, national, and international level.

These poems are not previously published.

Luke Stromberg
Two Poems

Rube
Tom, you used to stink of cigarettes.
I’d find you, feet up, smoking in your chair
when I got home from work. The Phillies on.
We’d grunt—if that—for a hello. No need
for anything more formal between brothers.
You loved TV, baseball, and Marlboros.
You were the laziest person I knew.
And now you’re as gone as Harry Kalas.

But even then your blood was poison, your body
plotting its betrayal with the virus
that, much too soon, would open up the gate
for Death’s indifferent agents to slip through.
And I feel like a rube. I always thought
the Marlboros would be what did you in.

Visiting Hours

I’ll admit I stayed away.
We all know it. I prayed.
Sure, I prayed, but stayed away
From you, the shade of what you were.
No one wants to see his brother
That way: shrunken and afraid
Behind a hospital tray. I tried
But couldn’t handle it.
I stayed away. Hid from it.
I was afraid. I thought
I might delay what would happen.
The fast approaching day.

What’s there to say? You hit
Some tender spot. You lay there,
Half the weight you used to weigh.
I stayed away. I didn’t want to hear
The way your voice was all unmade.
I couldn’t stand to think of it.
We played blackjack. You’d hardly
Say a word. I shouldn’t have been that way,
But how could I convey my love?
You lifted your lids only half-way
To watch the nurse carry
The get-well bouquet away from you.

Luke Stromberg’s work has appeared in The New Criterion, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Hopkins Review, and other journals. He lives in Upper Darby, Pa., and works as an adjunct English instructor at Eastern University and Cabrini College.

“Rube” appeared in Shot Glass Journal; “Visiting Hours” appeared in Think Journal.

Vince Gotera
Letter to Islas from San Antonio

— for Arturo Islas, d. 15 February 1991

Arturo:
Flying from Dallas to San Antonio,
the jet bucked like a Mexican bronc through air,
heavy and insolent. To my left, the business tycoon,
super-professional in her Gucci pinstripe suit,
and the cowboy veterinarian from Amarillo,
ten-gallon hat, silver and turquoise buckle
on his belt, talked of allergies and poultry.
We broke through layer after layer of clouds,
the fuselage creaking, then leveled onto a new world

I could paint you in old clichés: wisps of
spun sugar at the state fair or mounded
cotton balls . . . but no, Arturo, it really
was something new. The veterinarian,
even the business tycoon, gasped in awe.
The sun dancing in and out of clouds
was the jewelled eye of Quetzalcoatl,
serpent god with rainbow wings flying
like a pterodactyl. Below, through shreds of vapor
frozen in curlicue shapes, a distant ground
of clouds, brown with haze like uncarded wool.
The promised land, the ancient land: Aztlan.

Arturo, those afternoons we “talked Lit”
in your office at Stanford Quad—how Hawthorne’s Zenobia
drowned in black water, rigor mortis
clenching her hands into claws, a suicide’s revenge
—I’ve somehow mixed that image up with your death.
A weird Byronic impulse wants in me
to see your HIV-emaciated
body bucking against Zenobia’s claws:
she is la llorona, the water witch
dragging infants into the black lake,
her hair stringy and lank like seaweed, fingernails
of jagged ice hooked into the body.

Today is Good Friday, 5 A.M., Arturo.
Cathedral statues draped in purple sackcloth,
incense, the candle with five red nails,
hooded penitentes flailing their backs
till blood flows free in red runnels—
you and I share this imprint, our childhood
marked by the dark and sanguine blood of Spain.
Today, here in San Antonio, your native
Texas, they will celebrate El Pasion de Cristo,
erect a proxy savior on a lumberyard cross.
Just like in Cutud, Philippines, where they use
iron nails, hammered in open palms.
You and me, Arturo: marked by the Spanish
Inquisitor’s fiery brand, our black blood.

I want you free, Arturo, from all that black.
I want you in those clouds with Quetzalcoatl,
clean sunlight arcing through your bones.
The wind stroking your gray hair, purging
the plague out of your limbs, out of your blood.
I want you to dance in that sky and buckle like fire,
like Hopkins’s windhover gashing its breast gold
and vermilion, sparks like fiery tongues raining
on a brown world far below.
Best,
Vince

Vince Gotera is the author of Dragonfly (Pecan Grove Press, 1994), Ghost Wars (Final Thursday Press, 2003), Fighting Kite (Pecan Grove Press, 2007), and the forthcoming Pacific Crossing. His sonnet “What Matters”  won first place in the rhyming poetry division of the 84th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition in 2015. Vince serves as editor of the North American Review. He teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Northern Iowa.

This poem appeared in The Guadalupe Review.