Matthew Schnirman
Poem [Not one…]

[Not one angel arrives
in fever.]
In a dive

somewhere

around SoMa, looking
like a homo among the drags

of chicken-bears and freaks

and tweekers, Julienlifts
his shirt.

He shows that shingles hurt,
explains how

he’s just broke enough
to paint,

then jokes

that he’s six T-cells away

from a really good day.

As if the body were wilds
that go on forever.

Matthew Schnirman received his MFA from the University of Arizona. His poems have appeared in Phantom Books, CutBank, Whiskey Island Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and other journals. He lives in Seattle where he was a 2015 Jack Straw Writer and a former fellow at the Richard Hugo House.

This poem appeared in the 2015 Jack Straw Writers Anthology.

Quraysh Ali Lansana
Bible Belted: Math

Pro-Black doesn’t mean anti-anything.
—El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X)

there are at least twenty-seven
white people i love. i counted.

four from high school
five from undergraduate

years, maybe three from grad
school (one gay=bonus points)

and an assortment of compelling
melanin-deprived miscreants

in chicago and countrywide
two brothas in the afterlife

remain why i add rather than
subtract

Quraysh Ali Lansana’s most recent books include the anthology The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop, co-edited with Kevin Coval and Nate Marshall (Haymarket Books, 2015) and the poetry collection The Walmart Republic (Mongrel Empire Press, 2014), co-written with Christopher Stewart. Forthcoming titles include A Simple Gift (Penny Candy Books, 2016) and Clara Luper: The Woman Who Rallies the Children, co-written with Julie Dill (Oklahoma Hall of Fame Press, 2017). Quraysh is a faculty member of the Creative Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a former faculty member of the Drama Division of The Juilliard School. He served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University from 2002-2011, where he was also Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing until 2014.

This poem appears in The Walmart Republic.

PreetamDas Kirtana
Why Survive a Plague?

All of these candlelight vigil-years later and I remain on the sidelines: baffled and still so afraid.

Longtime AIDS activist and AIDS survivor Spencer Cox died at age forty-four from complications of the disease. Spencer was at the front lines of AIDS activism for over 20 years. First with ACT UP and then with Treatment Action Group, he helped get activists a place at the table with the pharmaceutical industry and federal agencies and sped up the development of life-saving AIDS medications. But in 2012, just a few weeks after fielding questions at a premiere of the documentary “How To Survive A Plague,” in which he appears in archival footage in the vigor of youth and health during the heyday of ACT UP and TAG, Spencer Cox died at Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. In the months before his death, he had become depressed, started using meth, and stopped taking his HIV meds. “He saved the lives of millions, but he couldn’t save his own,” his longtime friend and fellow activist Mark Harrington was quoted as telling The New York Times.

I can’t help but wonder if, rather than ask how to survive a plague, a more relevant question might be, “Why Would You Want To Survive A Plague?” This is the documentary I want to see.

I’m reminded of a couple of analogous situations that have prompted similar questions.

During my relatively brief but vital period of participation in 12-step recovery groups, I was frequently annoyed by often well-meaning people who would explain that these various substances, from cigarettes to cocaine, were bad for us; as if this fact would be a revelation to the addict. What a stunning denial in assuming that we WANTED to survive! What about our lives and the society we’ve created together made sticking around more attractive than our willing descent into addiction and death?

Secondly, I’m reminded that here, in this part of the American Southwest where my husband and I now live, there are a good number of people that the rest of us call conspiracy theorists but who think of themselves as survivalists. Personally, I’ve never been interested in surviving in a world where I would have to litter my yard with the bodies of those hungry and stupid enough to come after my stockpile of kidney beans. But there is a population of people, perhaps even a growing percentage of people, who want to survive NO MATTER WHAT. Again, I’m not among them.

I remain on the sidelines: baffled, wide-eyed, and more than a little afraid; but unwilling to survive no matter the cost, to be “safe” regardless of the isolation, to remain “on the beach” no matter what or who else is washed away in the tide of loss and suffering.

I was on the sidelines then too.

Sidelined and baffled:

In 1988 other gay men were scared enough to be unwilling to use a clean drinking glass in a longtime friend’s home. “I brought my own, thanks,” he said. “Weird,” I thought.

Sidelined and wide-eyed:

I’d been “out” all of what felt like ten minutes after a lifetime of fear from zero to eighteen. And now, now that, maybe, I could learn to not be afraid, now that maybe I could learn that I could be loved, now I was supposed to be afraid to love? No. No thanks. I’m here. I’m queer. I’m getting use to it. Fuck fear.

Sidelined and more than a little afraid:

On bathroom floors, hit square in the head with an aneurysm. In hospital hallways. With lesions and rare cancers and thin as a suggestion of our loved one under a sheet, the bodies piled up. Friends would not stop dying.

But unwilling to just “survive,” to be “safe”…alone.

Between marches and tears, between hospital visits and hospice trips; between funerals and dancing triumphantly to Sabrina Johnson’s house anthem “Peace in the Valley,” between the sound of ventilators and Doc Martens on Pennsylvania Avenue pavement…on the sidelines of fear, in stolen, precious moments of abandoning grief and remembering that we are men, gay men, gay men hurting, gay men loving; loving and hurting and grieving and healing in each other’s arms and between each other’s legs.

I was neither martyr nor saint nor “bug-chaser,” but a few of us could not, would not let fear win or even rule. A few of us would rather risk full contact and contagion rather than guarantee sanitized isolation. It was never more than then: the moment. It was life and death. It was loss. It was loss that was legion. It was love and the high risk and actual cost of love. It was personal. It’s always personal actually.

Every support group conversation, every “safer sex” talk or article rightly discusses the importance of the HIV-positive person disclosing their status with a potential partner; discussions include the respect involved in doing so. Most go on to advise that in dealing with the nearly inevitable rejection that will follow disclosure, to not take it “personally.” Don’t take it personally? How? This advice feels cold, removed from relational reality, and ridiculous to me.

Really? Don’t take it personally?

The man who, moments ago, was my lover is not avoiding me, you say, but just avoiding the virus. As it turns out we’re kind of inseparable, my virus and I. So you see it’s more than a little difficult to not take it “personally”.

It was personal on the phone, sharing secrets and laughing together.

It was personal at dinner as we nervously avoided using the L-word trembling on our lips; both of us worried that labeling it “love” would make it immediately evaporate.

It was fucking hot and deeply personal in the bar; as deep as his tongue in my mouth in the dark corner near the men’s room, as personal as his panting promises and plucking my attentive cock through the parting spaces of the 501 rivets stretched across my crotch.

It was personal when he said he wanted me, when he said he needed me, when he talked about nights and days and forevers;
but
in the steely, unbearably heavy moment when the color drains from his face,
when it feels like some soundtrack has been interrupted and all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room,
the moment when he simultaneously swallows dry
and loud enough to be heard, says, “oh,” and reaches for his shoes and you know, you know that this is it, again, one more time,
one last time, maybe,
and you know,
as your heart sinks so low so fast as to now always be under foot,
that this,
this was
not
personal.
And you’re on the sidelines…again.

Like I’m on the sidelines here in this conversation. I think many of us are. I think most, if not all of us, are actually on the sidelines.

The documentary “How To Survive A Plague” and the deep loss of Spencer Cox bring us and this issue back in to focus. After contributing so much and surviving so long Spencer is gone and we’re left with the mystery and questions of why someone who fought so passionately for and with all of us would have stopped taking his own medications and hastening his own death. Apparently surviving is not enough. How do we live and love and heal together? The profound lack of purpose, loss of passion and belonging that filled, or rather emptied, Spencer’s post-activist life has rightly been implicated. I fear this is true of many of our post-AIDS-as-a-death-sentence lives.

On Saturdays, I work at a coffee shop in the village near where my husband and I live. Last fall a cheery, extroverted, 50-ish man came in, ordered his coffee and stayed for a spell. He welcomed every distraction from his laptop and greeted and made lively conversation with each new customer that came in. In our conversation I learned that he had lived in this village twenty years ago, had lost all of his friends to AIDS, and had just been discharged from the hospital a few days before after another round of treatment for his own cancer. I was filled with sadness, a sense of camaraderie, and curiosity. Here was someone like me: someone else who had, inexplicably, survived the loss of his friends, the decimation of his world; but he seemed somehow happy. He laughed easily and made jokes with strangers. He must know something. He must have learned something for which I’m still searching twenty-five years later. I had to know and before my mind could reconsider I heard my mouth ask, “Are you glad that you survived?” His immediate answer was a hammer to my heart. Without reflection or hesitation he said, “No” and I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there a moment, my mouth open like a stupid fish, my breath caught again on that knot of grief in my throat that has never quite dissolved and my eyes welling up with tears. I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t know what to do.

I do know that I’m not alone and that maybe, in this one situation, I wish that I could say that I am. But I’m not alone and neither is that laughing and lonely man from the coffee shop. There remains an entire splintered, scattered, and searching population of us here
and still here
and still not knowing why. Why are we here? Why are we still here?

How do we step out into the tentative silence of a potentially momentary cease fire and find each other, not ourselves, but each other
and some molten and molting, melding, merging and morphing real community beyond sexual freedom, beyond heterosexist proving, beyond medical search and rescue, beyond political muscle, so beyond all of this that we’re back,
back to just you and me,
and then three
and then more,
broken and beautiful
and diving
together
so deeply into our common humanity
that we at last hit the Divine.

PreetamDas Kirtana lives in New Mexico with Kevin, his spouse, the love of his life. PreetamDas blogs at 2greatcommandmentpreschooler. His work has appeared in Dayton City Paper, semantikon.com, zackhunt.net (the blog of Zack Hunt) and calebwilde.com (the blog of Caleb Wilde). PreetamDas performed as part of Listen To Your Mother Albuquerque 2015.

This essay in not previously published.

Richie Hofmann
After

When the sun broke up the thunderheads,
and dissonance was consigned
to its proper place, the world was at once foreign
and known to me. That was shame
leaving the body. I had lived my life
from small relief to small relief, like a boy pulling a thorn
from his foot. Wet and glistening,
twisting toward light, everything seemed
recognizable again: a pheasant lazily dragging
his plume; the cherries dark and shining
on the trellis; moths hovering cotton-like
over an empty bowl; even myself,
where I reclined against an orange wall,
hopeful and indifferent, like an inscription on a door.

Richie Hofmann is the author of Second Empire (Alice James, 2015). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and Poetry, among many other journals. Richie received a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He received his MFA from Johns Hopkins University and is currently a doctoral student in English at Emory University in Atlanta.

This poem appeared in Second Empire.

Sara Teasdale
There Will Come Soft Rains

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools, singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) was the author of several collections including Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems (1907), Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911), Rivers to the Sea (1915), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Love Songs (1917), Flame and Shadow (1920), Dark of the Moon (1926), and Stars To-night (1930). She was born in St. Louis and moved to New York in 1916 where she lived until her death.

This poem appeared in Flame and Shadow.

Christoper Soto
Untitled

A few weeks ago I walked into the doctor’s office to get a routine physical & blood work. Nothing to be ashamed about. The nurse, when reading off my papers started to whisper the tests I was getting. “HIV” she said as if it were a secret something to be embarrassed about, as if my faggotry had pre-diagnosed me, and I began thinking of Susan Sontag’s Illness As Metaphor in which she writes, “In Stendhal’s Armance (1827), the hero’s mother refuses to say ‘tuberculosis’ for fear that pronouncing the word will hasten the course of her son’s malady.” And Karl Menninger has observed (in The Vital Balance), “The very word ‘cancer’ is said to kill some patients who would not have succumbed (so quickly) to the malignancy from which they suffer.” Here HIV becomes an association of everything “bad.” Here HIV becomes a metaphor for whatever the imagination will allow. Here HIV is not allowed to be MERELY a disease or part of a person’s health. Here health is criminalized. Lately I have been thinking about shame as another form of disease. I have been thinking about that nurse in the office and my test results. And I don’t want to be ashamed of my health or yours.

Christopher Soto (aka Loma) is a queer latinx punk poet & prison abolitionist. They were named one of “Ten Up and Coming Latinx Poets You Need to Know” by Remezcla. They were named one of “Seven Trans and Gender Non-Conforming Artists Doing the Work” by The Offing. Poets & Writers will be honoring Christopher Soto with the “Barnes & Nobles Writer for Writers Award” in 2016. They founded Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color with the Lambda Literary Foundation. They cofounded The Undocupoets Campaign in 2015. Their poetry has been called political surrealist and focuses on domestic violence, queer youth homelessness, and mass incarceration. They received an MFA in poetry from NYU, where they studied with Eileen Myles, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marie Howe, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Major Jackson. Originally from the Los Angeles area; they now live in Brooklyn.

This poem is not previously published.

Eduardo Martinez-Leyva
Mute

These creatures come for me,
asking that I sing.

Each one strange: bareheaded, pierced flesh,
a tongue cleaved for someone else’s pleasure.

Hungry for flowers, they populate my dreams,
even when I mouthed a dead language

into the clean, celebrated air.
For them, I’d think of doing

the unspeakable, bring my face closer
to their appetite. No prayer in my throat

could make me sweeter. I’ve been told
the easiest animals are the first to bare their necks

for an audience. If true, grant me the will to not be
blood-shy. Give me a flock to feel celestial.

Just this once, I’ll drape myself in malice,
surrender to the season’s error, to the noise

I’ll have a lifetime to revisit.
Give me a lifetime.

Eduardo Martinez-Leyva’s poems have appeared in Assaracus, Apogee Journal, Nepantla: A Journal for Queer Poets of Color and Best New Poets 2015 (selected by Tracy K. Smith). He received his MFA from Columbia University, where he was a teaching fellow. He grew up in El Paso, Texas and currently lives in New York City. He is a CantoMundo fellow.

This poem is not previously published.

Sam Sax
Risk

how harrowing the paradox of latex. on one hand the paragon of intimacy, on the other a
glove like a father loved more in his absence. my paramour, my minotaur, my matador
flashing his red sword. dear condemnation, i have read all the commentaries of raw,
how the forbidden fruit grows less sweet the more you gorge on it. i’ve seen the formal
debates where two gaping wounds stand behind podiums + reach into each other’s
mouths. discourse, its own form of pleasure. pleasure at its most broken down,
a series of shapes. ethnographies bleed from the ivory tower, the tower made of animal
teeth. the distance between theory + practice is a slick laceration. it’s right there
in the name, unprotected, to be laid out before the animal in him, to be defenseless
+ deforested. perhaps this works out better in myth:

he pilots my body across a waterbed
full of drowned fish. in the distance, women
sing us toward shore.

or perhaps, it’s best to end in images:

a handful of gravel, the open ground,
a groveling mouth, a grave half full of water
with my body not in it yet.

Sam Sax is the author of the poetry collections A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters (Button Poetry, 2014), sad boy / detective (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and the forthcoming All The Rage (Sibling Rivalry, 2016). His poems appear or are forthcoming in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Boston Review, Indiana Review, Pleiades, New England Review, Poetry Magazine, Prelude, and other journals. Sam was a 2015 NEA Fellow and a finalist for The Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. A two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion, Sam is currently a Poetry Fellow at The Michener Center for Writers where he serves as the Editor-in-chief of Bat City Review.

This poem appeared in Apogee.

Jeannie E. Roberts
HIV Positive, circa 1990

―for Doug Wyland

That day you stepped into the gallery,
sun at your back,

walking elegantly in chiaroscuro silhouette,
the glass wall gleamed

and so did you. Like Michelangelo’s David,
you appeared as the chiseled

Goliath of health, and I held joy
in the luminosity of your presence.

With a smile you asked, “Lunch soon?”

It’s been decades since that visit,
and I had no idea

that rendered within the light and shadow
of that afternoon,

where the shape, colors, and aesthetics
of life shone before me,

our exchange was more than an invitation
to lunch, it was an exquisite,

artistically delivered, parting-gift.

I recall the voice on the phone explaining,
“Suicide by car exhaust

was far better
than what was coming.”

Jeannie E. Roberts is the author of the poetry collections Beyond Bulrush (Lit Fest Press, 2015), Nature of it All (Finishing Line Press, 2013), and the author and illustrator of the children’s book Let’s Make Faces! (Rhyme the Roost Books, 2009). Jeannie lives in an inspiring rural setting near Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin where she draws, paints, and often photographs her natural surroundings. Learn more about Jeannie at www.jrcreative.biz.