Noah Stetzer
Shadrach

But if you do not worship, you will immediately be cast into the midst of a furnace of blazing fire; and what god is there who can deliver you out of my hands?
—Daniel 3:15

Tied at my mouth, tongue knotted with my tongue,
this stone this knife this bitter herb—older
than Easter with rusty thumbnails digging
into the skin on the sides of my chest—
exhaled stale breath into my lungs, pushing
sand and hot and grit inside inflating
until I hovered halfway between floor
and ceiling my lips blistered with cold sores.

When two doctors cut into my chest—one
on each side, at the same time with scalpels
ignoring my clenched-teeth closed-mouth screaming
as they shoved plastic tubes into the space
outside my lungs reversing the collapse—
the air—cool water—at last, filled me up.

Noah Stetzer is a graduate of The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He has received scholarships from the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBT Writers and from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. He was a winner of 2015 Christopher Hewitt Award for Poetry and the 39th New Millennium Award for Poetry. Noah’s poems have appeared/are forthcoming at Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Nimrod, James Franco Review, The Good Men Project, A&U Magazine, The Collagist, The Volta, Tinderbox, and Phantom Press. Born & raised in Pittsburgh PA, he now lives in the Washington DC area.

This poem is not previously published.

Susan Brennan
Ode to Turquoise

I always forget what that rock is supposed to mean
Blue shock like a bit of ocean lost in the desert

Desert as in once a mountain of rock shaved down
By hundred year storms, dying species, erosive heat

Deserts with their secrets
Bones, cactus fruit, shivery lizards

Even bolts of river that they weep up unexpectedly
Like when your own bodily flood

Seeps down the back of your throat
And you taste it. Part salt. Part sweet.

And what rock is that from?
In the middle of the night

In the middle of a divorce – what treachery –
I hauled heaps of my belongings

To the doors of a church. I left them there and
In one box, my mother’s turquoise jewelry

Thick heavy 1970’s silver flaked with greening blue –
Who can carry everything from one life through to another?

And oh, how she loved those earrings, that necklace
She should have been buried in those charms

Emblems of her desire to see Arizona
To tie a knot with some clipped bloodline.

To meet, she imagined, a wilderness
Of Native Americans hammering out bits of sky

Until chips shuddered down from clouds
And lumped like that in the sand.

How I knelt, lost and lost like a wave
Frozen in its dictated motion

How I held out the little box to the night air
There was a desert in that box

A willful dust, so I laid it down in a bed of grass
At the feet of a stone faced Hail Mary

Susan Brennan is the author of numinous (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and Drunken Oasis (Rattapallax Press, 2011). She curated poetry programming at Wilco’s Solid Sound Music Festival at MASS MoCA, and is staging her poem about George Seurat’s last days.  She has written film scripts, a 1 million hit plus award winning web-series and pitched film stories, premiering at Venice and Tribeca Film Festivals.  See what she’s up to at www.tinycubesofice.com.

This poem is not previously published. In fact, it was written expressly for The HIV Here & Now Project. Thank you, Susan.

Francesca Lia Block
poet l.a.ureate

my lover is los angeles
like this city i haven’t even begun to know all of him
he’s as far away as inglewood from the san fernando
valley where i grew up
burning my skin in the smogged sun
enticing as that fallen star skyline as glamorous untouchable
and yet i’m touching him
curled up naked against the cellphone in his back pocket
“calm down” he tells me “breathe”
cradling my neck in his hand holding me so i can see us
he’s the dodgers he’s a palm tree
he’s the mountains surrounding me
that brutal sun
and a large dark sea waiting at the horizon to engulf
and cool
i get lost on his freeways
his lights blind me doubling my vision
red green and yellow blurred by cataracts in my eyes

i see a rainbow on the 405
a house with room for everyone
there are little children dancing all around us
trees are inexplicably purple
sky defiantly pink
music in the hillsides
and wild animals roaming the periphery
a drunken girl wandering the underworld looking for her orpheus
she’ll find him if it kills her
all she has to guide her
are her words

Francesca Lia Block is the Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award winning author of more than twenty-five books of fiction, non-fiction, short stories and poetry, including Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books and her most recent novels, The Elementals and the psychological thriller Beyond the Pale Motel. Francesca has published stories, poems, essays and interviews in The Los Angeles Times, The L.A. Review of Books, Spin, Nylon, Black Clock, Bullett and Rattle among others. She teaches fiction workshops at UCLA Extension, Antioch University and privately in Los Angeles. Learn more at www.francescaliablock.com.

This poem appeared on Love in the Time of Global Warming.

Rangi McNeil

Three Poems

Sections of the AIDS memorial quilt on display on Governors Island August 2014
Of the crowded ferry’s paying passengers, I was the only person
of discernable color; having the choice of Gustav Mahler or Dolly Parton,
as accompaniment to the thrum of the dun-colored waters

of Upper New York Bay, I chose the simple over the symphonic.
But what was I rightly to do with these (my) narrow hands
in that vast, green field, almost, fully aflower in grief?

My mother wakes & calls for me by my middle
name. She says, I had a piece of paper in my hand

& I twisted it; it smelled like ginger.
Ginger! O, Lamar, you would have loved it.

Her hands are limp & empty. Her heart
could well be wrapped in cotton, its beat is so faint.

If not failure at its most exquisite – a Polish cavalry
assailing German tanks – then what is it, this quickness
reduced to an eternal stillness?

The dead outnumber & litter the living. They mingle,
in daylight & darkness, with the dust atop framed photographs.
The flavor of root vegetables. And those of winter.

She was an agile, swift skiff.
My Excalibur.
My yoke everlasting.

Rangi McNeil is the author of The Missing (Sheep Meadow Press, 2003) and Occasional Poems (The Song Cave, 2015). He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

These poems are not previously published.

Joanna Cleary
blood

my veins are fat with greed
and my body is bloated with
blood, distant, naked like a prayer.
i want, i need, i always begin
while hastily rubbing my skin
until it is rough and concave
and there is nothing left but
rubbery silence that spends
hours stretching itself out
until i hear something tear.
it is a hollow sound filled
with open mouths and pauses.
my blood is childish, always
crying give me, give me, give
me, and curling itself slowly
into confession. my blood is
saturated with scabby words
that ricochet like breath off
bones and belief. my blood is
swollen, waiting. none of us
are immune to hope and i am
no exception. the heart is a
hymn that plays achingly
onward into the murky night
until my skeleton is red like faith
and the raw unanswered sunrise.

Joanna Cleary’s poetry has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Cicada Magazine, Inklette Magazine, Glass Kite Anthology, Parallel Ink, Phosphene Literary Journal, and On the Rusk. She recently became a Poetry Reader for Inklette Magazine. When Joanna is not writing, she can be found reading, eating various forms of chocolate, and, of course, thinking about writing. Joanna currently attends the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

This poem is not previously published.

Don Yorty
5

When I think of all the lovers I’ve had
it’s a blur, I’m afraid, of quantity
but there was quality in quantity
angels found in the common crowd, riffraff
whose amorous wings, far from this fact called earth
took me up in heavenly abstraction
from the orgy really to the action
of orgasm when remembered or birth
or flame or premonition, Adam Eve.
Who can tell us what has been? For love you
have to wait, be as chosen as a Jew.
Love’s not Godot though and fortunately
when I think of Love’s smile softly I can
remember those lips. Whose? I’ve forgotten.

Don Yorty is the author of the poetry collections A Few Swimmers Appear (Philadelphia Eye and Ear, 1980) and Poet Laundromat (Eye and Ear Downtown, 1983) and a novel, What Night Forgets (Herodias, 2000). His work appears in Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project 1966-1991 (Three Rivers Press, 1991). Don has a BA in Latin and Greek from the City University of New York and an MA in TESOL. A poet and garden activist,  Don lives in New York City, works on sonnets, and blogs at donyorty.com.

This poem is not previously published.

Emily Gordon
Crush

I was doing OK
till I saw you play.

YouTube is full
of your push and your pull.

A stage, a grave,
three feet of snow.

A voice like rocks.
Pickless, thumb ravenous.

These videos on autoplay
strip off the suburbs’ ovine

coat. But you’re a woolly wolf.
A tender ram. A cutie pie.

Your stance suggests, a hunch,
you’re not sucked off enough.

In recent years, fellatio
has joined my private reel.

“Since we can’t fuck, I want to know
everything about you”—I stash

this proposition just in case.
My past’s sole pluck in infidelity,

my shame in lustful thoughts.
Dumb rut. House wins. I’ll keep it

in my peanut, Deacon Jim.
But I tend to give off pheromones.

Your boy child is out of control.
I can see where he gets it. Live coals

in your skull, spring-loaded spine
braked. Hair high-voltage filaments.

Rock beats scissors. Paper beats rock.
Red-hot last sets, tour bus, seared meat

suffusing your memory. Of course
they got you. You should be tamed.

Too bad I came too late, missing
two thousand six, pressed up

to the front of the venue, as close
to the groin as I was when Iggy Pop

showed half his cock and spit on us.
You say you have stories. I can tell.

You’ve run from jealous husbands,
come to ready cunts, to women’s breath

and knees. Turn on the warning light,
recording: sweat, the center of the bra,

remixed so past and present overlay,
voices confused. Your wife’s a slim tulip,

rare arrow quivered, wrapped safe
in her resilience and your conjugation.

So why start conversations…well, I know.
Love jams. It gets you happy, hard.

You’re Jagger, Malkmus, Mould,
you want more, more, more—

not lovers, but lives. The scorch
of baby back ribs, the woofer blown,

the ears to take your stories.
A lust for your blurred sound.

Your friendly eyes have hooks.
They jarred me up, awake.

I’m filling fast.
You haven’t asked.

I don’t wreck homes.
Except in poems.

Emily Gordon is working on a musical set in 1920 and a memoir set in 2010. She lives in Brooklyn.

This poem is not previously published.

Harnidh Kaur
Detailings

Mornings start with the shuffle
of feet against the tiled floor,
whisper of cheap, fake georgette
rubbing against itself, static, buzz,
never reaching electric fulfillment,
the clip of a ceramic mug against
the edge of the glass top, making
the wood of the table grunt against
that of the bed, angry, stubborn inertia,
the muddled crackle of the newspaper
damp with the heavy water-bearing air,
interspersed with the muffled clap and
clomp of utensils being shifted, lids
clanging like the cymbals stirring out
of control from a young drummer’s hands—
quiet whirr of the refrigerator now
punctuates the shrill screech of the
food processor, rising up in crescendo
with the sizzle pop crackle of a single egg
(fried with a little shimmer of pepper
glinting off the white, black granules
wading through yellow glimmer grease),
paired with the stunned alarm of the
toaster letting off its ward, unharmed
except for the slight char echoing the
metallic binds of orange heat branding
through the carefully timed traps—
stillness is a lost language in a world
defined by violent sounds and smells.

Harnidh Kaur is the author of The Inability of Words (Writers Workshop, 2016). She is currently pursuing her masters degree in public policy from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Her work can be found on her personal blog, Forever Awkward (and Maybe Learning).

This poem is not previously published.

Journey McAndrews
The Gulf Deepens

Between the haves and the have-nots,
lies a gulf of materialism,
deep enough to bury us all
beneath piles of
plastic products,
hypodermic needles,
dirty diapers,
and broken G.I. Joe “men”.
British Petroleum now joins the ranks
of other big companies,
who cannot suture the wounds
they have inflicted on earth.
And the rest of us just want to fill our SUV’s
with cheap gas,
so we can beat the crowd to Wal-Mart
and stock up on the latest “Rollbacks”.
Outrage comes swift and easy,
then slides between the headlines
of the latest Washington scandal.
Along the way,
precious life is swallowed alive,
someone has to pay for our sins,
who will miss a few birds?
a few grains of sand?
a little water?
a few fish?
A small price to pay really,
to keep our lifestyle alive and well.
By God, to behave any other way
is un-American.
Let the fish drown in the sludge,
let the birds struggle to breath,
let the water burn.
In the end,
God will come and save us all,
right?

Journey McAndrews is a poet and essayist who was born in the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky. Her work regularly appears in Kentucky Monthly, and has appeared in Motif, LILOPOH, and Inscape, among other journals. She lives in Lexington and received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction with a minor in Poetry from Spalding University in Louisville. Journey has received an Individual Artist Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and an AWP Writer-to-Writer Mentorship. She is a Writing Mentor at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, teaches Feature Writing at Eastern Kentucky University, and is studying to become a Clinical Mental Health Counselor. She just completed a food memoir, I Eat My Peas with Honey, and is co-authoring a book of food essays and poems with poet and activist Jay McCoy.

Photo: Carrie Wilson Photography

This poem appeared in The New Verse News.

Yoko Ono Lennon
IMAGINE PEACE 2011

18 February 2011

Dear Friends,

Today, February 18th, 2011, I am 78.

I know you are asking many questions on Twitter and elsewhere about what I am really like. It’s something I would love to know, too! One day it will suddenly dawn on us …maybe.

The world situation is too urgent for us now to discuss trivial things, like what I eat for breakfast.

We are at a point in human history when we have to wake up and realize that the only people who can save the world are us.

Every hour that goes by without us doing anything about it affects us, and affects the world that we love so much.

In his State of the Union Speech, President Obama said we should do “big things.” Well, we are already doing the biggest thing anybody in the human history could ever hope for.

Together, we are creating a world of Peace, Love and Freedom, all while the negative forces try their hardest to stop us.

With their power, they want to control the whole world. But we will not let them.

That’s big.

The way we are doing it is by being conscious of the “Power of Togetherness.”

The negative forces do not have that. They are an elitist minority, dipping their heads in arrogant madness.

They always play the same game – using violence, changing laws for their convenience, and seducing us with words to get what they want.

They say if we do things their way, we will all be rich. Well, that’s not happening. It never will. Once there is great wealth, they will want to keep it for themselves.

They also use fear tactics, saying the world will be in a great mess if we don’t do it their way. Well, the world is already in a mess. Why? Because we followed them.

It’s Time for Action. It’s Time for Change.

We, the people of the world, are not dumb. We understand what the “Blue Meanies” are trying to do. We just don’t know how to stop it. And wonder if we can at all.

But we can!

We are doing it.

Take a look at this map. Each dot represents millions and millions of people who are all, right now, thinking of Peace: wishing it, voicing it, and hoping that their dream of peace will become a reality.

Map of global locations of visitors to www.IMAGINEPEACE.com 2010-11 from Revolver Maps

The map expresses what my husband John Lennon and I envisioned. I know he is smiling, thinking of how little time it took for all of us to Come Together.

IMAGINE PEACE is a powerful, universal mantra that we should all meditate on.

With it, we will achieve the impossible. Hopefully, without bloodshed.

Look at all the courageous people who are now being hurt in marches and thrown in prisons for no other reason except for carrying “Peace, Love and Freedom” in their hearts and voicing it.

I don’t want you to get hurt. You shouldn’t have to.

7 billion of us, people of the world, have the birthright to live with a healthy mind and body at all times.

You should not even get one scratch on you, and you won’t, if you don’t allow it.

So keep IMAGINE PEACE in your head.

Have a clear picture of where we stand, what we are doing, and where we want to be.

Know that we are connected in our hearts and minds.

War Is Over, if you want it!

I love you!

Yoko Ono Lennon
18 February 2011

Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer and peace activist who is also known for her work in performance art, music and filmmaking. She is the widow and second wife of singer-songwriter John Lennon.

The HIV Here & Now Project has absolutely no right to post this piece.