Melanie YeYo Carter
When I’m Gone

The immortality of my youth has been gone
for a while now
It stepped out on me for a virtuous woman
and for a child who still believes in heroes
The Superman in me has played with kryptonite one too many times
This heart has been the casualty of Russian roulette one to many times
And it makes me wonder where my words will go when I die
Will they have a chance to tell my parents
I never wanted them to bury me?
That I never wanted “GONE TOO SOON” attached to my biography
Me dying prematurely wasn’t a part of my plan,
but this decision was made for me

Someone please, tell me where my words will go when I die
When my hands are no longer able to shape shift them
into shooting stars for a dying wish
When my mouth is forever silent and mics can only cry out for me
When my poems can no longer breathe
or exist on my lips
I’m sorry, but this is a story ending I have no control of

Please tell me
where will my words go when I die?
Will they be able to comfort those brave enough to love me?
All expiration date and time bomb ticking
All memories and shadows
It was so unfair to let them love me
knowing, one day, I’ll have to leave
And I know everybody leaves
And I know everybody dies…
Just not like this
I find it hard to look at myself in the mirror some days
It’s difficult not to see the poison beneath this skin
I feel so trapped
Unable to walk away from a relationship I never wanted to be in
There is no love in this touch
Only death by the pound and it’s so heavy

I remember the first time I told you about my curse
I remember holding my breath, steeling my ego and covering my heart
for the rejection
But you saw something in me beyond what’s in me
So that is the answer to your question
That’s part of why I love you like hip hop and poetry

Sometimes, I feel so awkward when I say
“I will love you forever” or
“I will love you for the rest of my life”
I…I feel like I’m lying
I hope I’m not the last person you fall into
I hope your diving board heart is still available once I’m gone
and you can drown in love again

Please forgive me
I know this is so heavy but I have to get it out
while I still have the chance

Where will my words go when I die?
Will they die with me?
Or find a way to your chest and ribcage
so they can rock you into life on those rough days
How will I show you my life story is your life story if I’m muted?
How will I stand strong in your spine when you need me most
if my heart stops beating?

It’s going on five years, and I’m afraid
I guess that’s the running joke between myself and God
For years, I secretly didn’t want to live
And now, I openly don’t want to die
But I’ve learned we don’t always get what we want
I watch my life change after every needle stick
A white blood cell count the devil has attached himself to
And I hate this skin some days
this blood
this body
for being so mortal
And I know everybody leaves
And I know everybody dies
But not like this love

Not like this

Melanie YeYo Carter is a poet who became a spoken word artist one night in 2006 when, while stationed at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, VA, she stepped onto the stage at a little restaurant called Mary Helen’s. By the time she walked away from the mic, YeYo had been born. By 2010, with the support of revolutionary poet and publisher Tichaona Chinyelu, YeYo published her first poetry collection, When Light Breaks Through (Whirlwind Publishing, 2010). Since then, Melanie YeYo Carter has become known for her raw and dynamic presence sharing the stage with the likes of  Tameka “Georgia Me” Harper, Red Storm, Ed Mabrey, heRO44, ThirdRail, Hope Flows and many others. Melanie is also active as an HIV/AIDS advocate.

CJ Southworth
An Explanation

when I let the guy go down on me
in the darkness behind the bar
while you were inside
talking with your friends
knowing what was going on

when I yelled at you
because I was tired of hearing
how loving a man was a curse
and I told you
that some of us were perfectly happy

when I went home with men some nights
and let them touch me
in the darkness of my studio loft
when I let some of them move in
and tried to build lives with them

when I told you I couldn’t talk to you anymore
that I couldn’t take another round
of you being with someone else
couldn’t stand to see you loving someone
who wasn’t me

all those times, in all those moments,
that was me in love with you
and trying to stop the hurt of loving
someone who didn’t love me back—
to fill the space inside my life
that was shaped like my fantasies of you

CJ Southworth was born Carlton D. Fisher in upstate New York. Under his birth name, he has published poems with Assaracus, Paterson Literary Review, Main Street Rag, Lips, and many other journals. His fiction appears in Glitterwolf magazine. In 2015, he began the process of legally changing his name to honor his mother and maternal grandparents, who raised him. Under his new name, he has won the 2015 Allen Ginsberg Award and published fiction with Jonathan. He is the Owner and Executive Editor of Jane’s Boy Press and teaches as an Assistant Professor in the English Department at SUNY Jefferson.

This poem appeared on the Tupelo 30/30 blog for December 2015.

Elancharan
Acceptance

I’m sorry
You have been
Diagnosed with HIV
These words
Will crush your soul
These exact words
Will force you
To feel fear
Your very existence
Threatened by a virus
A being
Invisible to our
Naked eyes
Infecting our humanity
Killing us off
Little by little
Pushing our organs
Beyond their limits
Pushing our immunity
Into abysmal pits

I’m sorry
For myself
I really am
Those late night parties
Drinking, dancing
Moving to the
Dangerous beats
My world spinning
Spinning out of control
Neon lights
Bubbling into existence
Warping my sight
Laughter
Laughing in my face
Into the arms of strangers
Men, women
Does it even matter?
Feeling my way
Through this sea
Of tender bodies
Into the bed
Of strangers
Making carnal love
Taking things to
A whole new level
Only to wake up
To missing partners
And sore all over
I break into tears
Knowing I could
Never wake up
To a lover
Who would stay
In bed with me

I’m sorry
For myself
When cigarettes
Are not enough
When alcohol
Can never
Get me higher
I’m popping pills
Sniffing powder
Snatching
Bloodstained syringes
From back alley pushers
Tapping veins
Tapping harder
Come out
Come out
Wherever you are
I’m pulling on
The belt
Tightening the leather
There you are!
Sliding in the needle
Breaking pale skin
Spilling some blood
My head is
Against the wall
Eyes trying to keep up
With the light
I feel the plastic
Slip from my hands
Taken from me
I do nothing
I do nothing
To resist

I’m sorry
There is no cure
I have to face reality
I have to accept the facts
I will not sit by, idle
But live life to its fullest

Death
Would come for me
Today, tomorrow, some day
But, until then
I would do all
In my power to
Prevent the spread of my horrors…

Elancharan is an exhibiting artist and poet. He lives in Singapore with his family and his cat, Leo. He has a strange love for all that is poetical and Sci-Fi. He is the author of several poetry collections (see his author page on Amazon). His poems have appeared in various international print and online platforms. To find more of his work visit him on Instagram @elancharan or Twitter @elancharang

This poem appears on Soundcloud.

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