Emily Pérez
Boding

Looking back, we did not know
which sign came first:
The roosters roosting on the roof
refusing to touch ground.
Horses snorting in their stalls
pupils, nostrils widening.
The goat atop the cow’s back.
The hound dog keening on the porch,
scratching at the open door.
The red kites gathering.
The bloody caul that cloaked the foal.
Fragments from the teapot’s shattered spout.
The knife that scarred the sideboard.
The memory box, the cradle cracked.
The letters used for kindling.
The stars lined up like dead men’s eyes.
The dried up well.
The weeping oak.
The moon, low and waning.
The feeling of familiar hands
upon the throat, contracting.

Emily Pérez is the author of the poetry chapbook Backyard Migration Route, (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in journals including Crab Orchard Review, Calyx, Borderlands, and DIAGRAM, and her full length manuscript House of Sugar, House of Stone is forthcoming from the Center for Literary Publishing. While earning her MFA at the University of Houston, she served as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast and taught with Writers in the Schools. A recipient of grants and scholarships from the Artist Trust, Jack Straw Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, Summer Literary Seminars, and Inprint, Houston, she is also a member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Emily teaches English in Denver where she lives with her husband and sons.

Timothy DuWhite
I will hold his hand

After “Change” by Langston Kerman

& the whole park will become a collective gasp
& the pigeons will cease their journey mid-air
& the children will cry
& the parents will hiss, their tongues split and pupils narrow
& all you will hear are the police sirens
& the sky will rain feathered boas
& our hands will become one
& we will become one person, with two mouths, and four feet
& we will walk heavy because we will have so much ground to cover
& the ground will become a map of broken glass
& we will take off our shoes
& our mothers will become our feet
& we will step on so many shards
& my Aunt Rena will be all the blood I leave behind
& she will just continue to laugh from the ground
& compare me being gay to her over-eating
& say how we need to wean ourselves off all of this sugar
& then my hand will get sweaty
& I will insist I need a break
& he will ask if we are breaking up
& I will say just until I get this glass out of my mother’s gut
& I will say where are we walking to anyway
& he will say that we are just at the park
& the swing set will turn me back to ten years old
& my best friend Chauncey will call me a faggot for not wanting to pull down Gabby’s top
& I will say I just don’t like white girls
& he will nod
& I will convince myself I am just racist
& that I don’t really want to just take off Chauncey’s top
& then I will wake up
& I will be twenty-one again
& the park will just be some storm cloud
& we will be the lightening bolt striking the same place too many times to be logical
& he will still be holding my hand
& he will say, “there, that wasn’t too bad, was it?”
& the kids will still be crying
& I will no longer feel guilty because the sun is out, and so am I
And I dare you to tell me what is not perfect about all of this flaming.

Timothy DuWhite is a spoken word poet whose work has been featured at the United Nations, Apollo Theater, San Diego State University, and Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe, among other venues. His poems “Joy Revisited,” “Auntie Pearl,” and “Here’s The Scenario” may be found on YouTube. You can learn more about Timothy on awQward, the first talent agency established to connect trans and queer people of color with venues that want to feature them and their work.

This poem appeared on The Rumblr.

Jay McCoy
Distilling Ganymede

committing no crime but their own
wild cooking pederasty and intoxication
—Allen Ginsberg

You begin with full-bodied wine, cold-pressed
from blond twinks who blew and were blown
in the underground garage, bare-assed against cast iron

and concrete, writhing out of mind, out of sight
of bright Aldebaran tracking Seven Sisters, wandering
the Seven Hills. Savor succulent extract rimmed

from the gym-rat ginger’s faggot obsession for sinewy
musk seeping from carmine-colored Umbros glanced
askew on cedar benches in the basement steam

room of the Central Parkway YMCA. Simmer long
& hot over pyre with the silver-haired daddy discovered
beneath tin ceilings, smoking Reds, who fucked furiously

out of necessity, because of drunken desire being
caught alone outside Kaldi’s at the devil’s hour. Blend in
rough trade, if you dare, juicy from bath houses

by abandoned train tracks near the Olentangy, who left
you with twisted taut nipples and rancid residue of palm
prints stained on your cheeks. Boil them all slowly down

with the rolling bug chaser vociferously plowed
on the rooftop under unflinching gaze of Aquarius
and starry-eyed Aquila pausing pensive above

your Queen City. In the end, render every face blank
and every seraphim mouth mute. Leave bejeweled bodies
disjointed, unrecognizably reduced to purgatoried torsos,

to endless cock and balls, beneath a once-mortal moon
reflected in the glistening heady/sweet remnants.

Jay McCoy is the author of The Occupation (Accents Publishing, 2015). His poems have appeared in Blue Fifth Review, Kentucky Monthly, Kudzu, Naugatuck River Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and Still: The Journal.  Jay holds an MFA in creative writing from the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University. He co-founded the Teen Howl Poetry Series as a venue for young poets to discover their own voice. Jay lives in Lexington, KY, where he is general manager of the Morris Book Shop and a writing instructor/consultant.

This poem appears in The Occupation.

Devi S. Laskar
Not clock chimes but wind chimes

Even the court’s most celebrated clown
wrestles his shadow when the shades are drawn

and the Christmas clocks begin their midnight
dance. Frightened, he throws the soft wool blanket

over this marrow weariness, eyes to
sleep. In the morning, his shadow Is

underfoot, distorting body and quite
possibly the soul. At noon the jester

believes he’s won, his empty reaper long
disappeared; man swaggers like a cowboy

post victory in the Wild West pioneer
town. By five o’clock the shadow reaches

out from shared nightly grave and slaps him
smartly across each side of his coined face.

Devi S. Laskar’s poems have appear in numerous journals including (but not limited to) The Atlanta Review, The Squaw Valley Review, The Hawai’i Pacific Review, The Tule Review, and The North American Review, where her poems were finalists for the James Hearst Prize in 2011 and 2009. She is a Tupelo Press 30/30 Project Poet for December and her work can be found on the Tupelo 30/30 Project blog. Devi is a native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She holds a BA in journalism and English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; an MA in South Asian Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and an MFA in writing from Columbia University. Devi is a photographer, writer, and former crime and government reporter in Florida, Georgia, Hawai’i, Illinois and North Carolina. She now lives in Cupertino, California.

Patricia Kay
Did You Hear Our Song?

In the early 90’s I was one of the members of the medical team for the opening of Bailey Boushay House, the first AIDS hospice in Seattle. As one of the nurses working with an amazing team of assistants, physicians, social workers, massage therapists, volunteers, and religious groups, we walked the final journey with our clients. Today, the same house has transitioned into a place for all chronic illnesses. During those years, writing poems was my only way to salvage my broken heart each day. I preceded each poem with a short paragraph about the special person in our care.

A letter was sent to the Phantom of the Opera cast by his mother. She wrote, “Because of my son’s illness, he has missed two performances of Phantom. Would you consider coming to sing to him?” And they did. Dressed in street clothes, the cast came singing, their voices filled the room, and their eyes never left his. For a brief moment their music brought us all together, humming softly, a mother, father, a partner, and a nurse.

Did You Hear Our Song?

We shared for a moment the healing of a heart;
Through our music world and your medical world we each had a part.
Our song passed gently over a body broken by disease,
Our eyes sympathized and hoped to place him at ease.

Where did our music take you today?
Away from the pain, or did it delay,
A Moment when your muscles cry in pain,
Or helped the breathing of exhausting strain?

Did our music help you remember when
Life was good, or could have been?
You waited, we came—can your journey start?
Did we leave you one last memory to seal in your heart?

(4/94 Patricia)

Patricia Kay is a retired registered nurse whose last clinical experience was at a Seattle AIDS hospice. Though it has been over twenty years, she holds fast the memories of every client who entrusted to her their life journey. To this day, Patricia is still in contact with the friends and families of those who were in her care. After retiring five years ago, Patricia pursued her writing passion. She looks forward to publishing her Gentleman Companion Trilogy, whose main character, Lawrence, honors the memory of Patricia’s AIDS patients while embracing the reality that AIDS/HIV still exists twenty years later.

Sarah Sadie
We Pass the Bechdel Test Every Day

Curtailed, contained, boundaried in a way we did not anticipate,
we find ourselves squeezed into an unmapped region that smells
of pumpkin. Travelers are advised to bring their own cinnamon,
ginger and cloves. Nutmeg is optional. I recommend it.
Half the guidebooks will tell you it’s flyover territory, the other half
say it’s a must-see. No one describes it, not really.
All the rivers run left, or west, towards dream, towards twilit shadows.
There is a common grammar to be learned. It trades mostly in silence.
Once there, you must learn to speak in signs and gestures, eyebrows
and lipstick. I have never mastered the language.

Do we ever come back? How can I tell you, except to say
seven of us, travelers, gather in a coffee shop to share our stories,
searching for ways to explain it, and one of us speaks of
nuns and orphans and AIDS in Haiti. Another describes a forest,
invisible, that’s guarded by shapeshifters. Someone encountered
Civil War amnesiac ghosts and the women they love. My friend
met a young woman from the Sixties who suffers from endometriosis
and Betty Friedan’s dangerous book. Someone I don’t know
befriended a psychic woman and was rescued by helicopters;
another stopped to aid a woman with multiple personalities and angels;
someone found themselves trapped in a post-apocolyptic
fantasy soap opera in three unknown acts and no way home.

Sarah Sadie is the author of the poetry collection Somewhere Piano (Mayapple Press, 2012) as well as the chapbooks Quiver (Red Dragonfly Press, 2009), Given These Magics (Finishing Line Press, 2010), and Do-It-Yourself Paper Airplanes (Five Oaks Press, 2015). The collection We Are Traveling Through Dark at Tremendous Speeds is forthcoming. She teaches at the Loft and the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival and works with poets individually. She participated in Tupelo Press’s 30/30 poetry marathon in December 2015. Find her multimedia blog at sarahsadiesadiesarah.tumblr.com and follow her on Twitter @sarahsadie1313.

This poem appeared on the Tupelo 30/30 blog for December 2015 which, I can say as a fellow Tupelo 30/30 poet for December, does not necessarily constitute prior publication. So this poem is not previously published-ish.

CAConrad

AIDS SNOW FAMILY

—for anyone who loved someone who died of AIDS

“The poem is restorative, rather than fragmenting.”
—Alexandra Grilikhes

In January gather snow; this is intimate, this calling to honor the shock of being alive. I made one tiny snowman named CAConrad, and one tiny snowman named Tommy Schneider. For six months they held hands in the privacy of my freezer while I visited the streets and buildings in the Philadelphia of our Love. Snow crystals travel miles out of clouds into the light of our city. My snowman read to his snowman the letters I brought home to the freezer. It’s 2010, AIDS is different in this century you didn’t live to see. The used bookshop where you worked on South Street is now a clothing store. Our first kiss in the Poetry section is a rack of blue jeans and I resist hooking my thumbs in the belt loops to pull you in—I FEEL you everywhere today.

In March an old friend was visiting and she said, “But you wrote poems for Tommy after he died.” I said, “But it’s sublime retracing our Love in this exercise.” She shook her head, “No, it’s sad, it’s very sad. Can’t you see this beautiful day?” OF COURSE I see the beautiful day, in fact I SEE IT MORE THAN EVER, and I don’t need her choreography to enter it. The point of experiencing Love is to engage the greater openings. It’s important to ignore the directives of others when investigating the way these doors swing on their hinges. Months of spring into summer, my snowman told your snowman the memories. One night you had asked if I was upset at something. I said, “I have no right to complain, all the men are dying in our city and I don’t have AIDS!” You said, “Well I have no right to complain because I have a wonderful boyfriend who loves me and I DO have AIDS!”

Macrobiotics, herbal infusions, massages, sensory deprivation tanks, reflexology, music by Soft Cell, music by Siouxsie and the Banshees, music by Cocteau Twins, music by Patti Smith. Of course we’re all dying, you’ll never kiss someone who isn’t dying, I know that, which is why the fear of this is not allowed to stop me from missing you the way I want. The streets were filled with men in wheelchairs that year. We were kids in love while you vanished in the funnel with them. The day after Summer Solstice I took our snowmen out of the freezer. 90 degrees, we melted quicker than expected, even sooner than I could have imagined. I burned the letters, mixed their ash with our slush. And I read to the puddle a poem that came to me years ago in a dream soon after you died: he wrote “I have AIDS / and kissed this wall” / X marked the spot / I wrote “I’m not afraid” / and kissed him back / wherever he is. I took many notes during the life of our snowmen in the freezer until they vanished. Those notes became a poem.

CAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of eight books of poetry and essays, the latest, ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books), is the winner of the 2015 Believer Magazine Book Award. He is a 2015 Headlands Art Fellow and has also received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Banff, Ucross, RADAR, and the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. He conducts workshops on (Soma)tic Poetry and Ecopoetics. Visit him online at http://CAConrad.blogspot.com

Walidah Imarisha
Three Poems

Broken
I am
Broken
And no one will
Play
With me
For fear
Of cutting themselves
On my sharp
Edges.

Shattered Haiku
He shattered my thighs
I rain down his cheeks and streak
Cum/tears/rainwater

Scars
Don’t ask about my scars
Just don’t cause any new ones

Walidah Imarisha—author, educator, organizer and poet—is the author of the poetry collection Scars/Stars (Drapetomedia, 2013) and the forthcoming Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption (AK Press, 2016). With adrienne maree brown, Walidah co-edited the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (AK Press, 2015). Visit her website, www.walidah.com.

These poems appeared in Scars/Stars.

Dorothy Alexander
Trip to Wyuka

for Paul Brandhorst, 1966-1998

His first night at support group he wore
a western hat low over his eyes, a toothpick
in the side of his mouth, thumbs hooked
in Levi pockets, pretended to be a cowboy.

He said nothing save his name but afterwards
followed me out to ask a question, the kind you
just know is an excuse for conversation. I had seen
enough before this night to know how it would go.

His family had scattered like quail
at the mention of AIDS, were still in hiding.
He was driven by the unfairness, injustice,
bitterness, loneliness. Under the brim
of the Stetson he was desperate to connect.

Near the end he asked to see his mother’s grave
in Nebraska. We walked the streets of Lincoln,
while he pointed out landmarks, his mother’s
grave in Wyuka Cemetery, the pauper’s plot
of infamous Charlie Starkweather.

Our second time in Lincoln, I carried him
in an urn, left him in that place where mothers,
sons and murderers lie down together, all injustice
and bitterness swallowed up in the dirt.

Dorothy Alexander is the author of The Art of Digression (Village Books Press, 2015) and Lessons from an Oklahoma Girlhood (Village Books Press, 2008). Her work has appeared in Women Writing Nature, Malpais Review, Blood & Thunder, and Cooweescoowee Journal, among others, as well as in the anthologies Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse Press, 2015) and Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the 60s & 70s (SheWrites Press, 2013). Dorothy lives in Oklahoma City, where The Oklahoma Center for the Book selected her as recipient of the Glenda Carlile Distinguished Service Award for her services to the Oklahoma literary community in 2013.

This poem was awarded the 2013 Christopher Hewitt Poetry Prize and appeared in Art & Understanding Magazine.

Khafre Kujichagulia Abif
Who Can I Tell?

Who can I tell, “I think I like boys”
Who can I tell?
Who can I tell, “A man from my neighborhood raped me”
Who can I tell?
Who can I tell, “My uncle made me take nude pictures of him”
Who can I tell?
Who can I tell, “That I walked to the bridge to jump”
Who can I tell?
Who can I tell, “That I longed for a big brother’s protection”
Who can I tell?
Who can I tell, “The Preachers said, God doesn’t love me”
Who can I tell?
Who can I tell, “I had sex with a man”
Who can I tell?
Who can I tell, “I want to take this mask off”
Who can I tell?
Who can I tell that I tested positive for HIV?
Who can I tell?
Who will take the news in stride?
Who will begin to micromanage my life?
Who will ask me, “Are you eating and taking your meds?”
Who will not be able to move past my status?
Who can I tell, “All I ever wanted was to be myself”
Who can I tell, “See Me, Not HIV”

Khafre Kujichagulia Abif is the author of Cornbread, Fish & Collard Greens: Prayers, Poems and Affirmations for People Living with HIV/AIDS (AuthorHouse, 2013). Khafre is the Founder/Executive Director of the HIV/AIDS awareness project Cycle for Freedom. Khafre is one of five men in the inaugural class of The HEALTH (Health Executive Approaches to Leadership and Training in HIV) Seminar Program developed by My Brother’s Keeper, Inc. He has also served as the Community Co-Chair for the New Jersey HIV Prevention Community Planning Group. As a librarian in his first career, Khafre was the first recipient of the Dr. John C. Tyson Emerging Leader Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

This poems appeared in Cornbread, Fish and Collard Greens: Prayers, Poems & Affirmations for People Living with HIV/AIDS.