Chris Bullard
Incurable Romantic

For John Kelly (1959-1992)

You loved the intrigue and the dangers
in your flings with handsome strangers,
so planned for this, one last affair,
a visit to a pied-a-terre
with him of the perpetual grin,
black-clad, imperious, and thin,
that most significant other,
who would put you back together
by granting you a happy ending.
With him, it’s always “the real thing.”

Now, at Holy Sepulchre Park,
in summary of your short arc,
we praise you in the present tense
as though by speech we might make sense
of senselessness. As you, we’re forced
to admit our own intercourse
with death whose clever seduction
is not negation, or destruction,
but acceptance. Some may desire
to give to darkness all their fire
and lose themselves in that embrace;
you sought there a state of grace.

Left behind, we shall conjure up
some place for you in our gossip
about those gone, imagining
a heaven, for the time being,
in which you shall stay beautiful,
if part of a different circle.

Chris Bullard is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Grand Canyon (WordTech Editions, 2015) and the chapbook Dear Leatherface (Kattywompus Press, 2014).  His work has appeared in the journals Rattle, River Styx, Pleiades, and Green Mountains Review, among others. He received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. from Wilkes University. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Chris now lives in Collingswood, New Jersey.

This poem appears in the collection Back (WordTech Communications, 2013) and is posted by permission of the author.

Smriti Verma
Mother

It goes like this: the first fist, finger grab, opening of eye,
babbling. The skin, soft as feathers. And gravity, reaching
from under, pulling down our skins, one from each finger.
I swore to keep you safe, swatting away the flies, as delicate
as you were. And you, child, goddess, infant of dying woman,
infant of my dreams of near-coming. A tiny hand, an ant,
or a maggot, maybe a bird. If a bird, then a dove. Perhaps,
a pigeon. Or maybe the quiet cocoon, but not the whale.
The whale—only when the water reaches deep and you,
you don’t let its salt hurt your wounds.

Smriti Verma’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Word Riot, Open Road Review, DoveTales Literary Journal, Canvas, Textploit and Yellow Chair Review, and is forthcoming in Alexandria Quarterly, Inklette and Cleaver Magazine. She is the recipient of the Save The Earth Poetry Prize 2015, offered annually by John Felstiner, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and Charles Weeden of The Weeden Foundation (read her award-winning poem). A high school student in Delhi, India, Smriti is a poetry reader for Inklette and an editorial intern for The Blueshift Journal.

This poem is not previously published.

Rickey Laurentiis
Little Song

Given what I am,if
not cannibal for, animal for: he
who let go a door in me, be-
cracked my sternum to a hundred flashing moths, oh handsome, oh—Truth
be told:I hungered this, needled it out, I
stretched for this. Always a field stirs, would
stir, for want of being filled. Dwell
of me, my Eden, my Hook. In
pleasure weren’t we founded? At the
start didn’t we blend and blur?I would be his bravery,
illusion
of his fearlessness and fear. Given what I amonly, of
meat: cut fire: the inconsolable: of these, Him.

Rickey Laurentiis is the author of the debut collection Boy With Thorn (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize chosen by Terrance Hayes, and a selection for the Pitt Poetry Series. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, Rickey is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Washington University in St. Louis. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Fence, Kenyon Review, New England Review, New Republic, Poetry, and elsewhere. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Rickey currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

“Little Song” appears in Boy with Thorn, by Rickey Laurentiis © 2015. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Ocean Vuong
Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong

After Frank O’Hara / After Roger Reeves

Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Here’s the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red tripwire.
Don’t worry. Just call it horizon
& you’ll never reach it.
Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not
a lifeboat. Here’s the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty into.
Don’t be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean,
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here’s
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here’s a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here’s a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake—
& mistake these walls
for skin.

Ocean Vuong’s first full-length collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press (2016). He is also the author of two chapbooks: No (YesYes Books, 2013) and Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010), which was an American Library Association’s Over The Rainbow selection. A 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, Ocean has received honors and awards from Poets House, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and a 2014 Pushcart Prize. His poems have been featured in Best New Poets, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, and the American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. His work has also been translated into Arabic, French, Italian, Hindi, and Spanish. Born in Saigon, Ocean currently resides in New York City.

This poem appeared in The New Yorker.

Thomas Goins
Losing Race

Born in the South I avoided the traps: liquor
nicotine, cocaine, deferred dreams. “You smart,”
I’d hear them say. “What you got now, a doctor’s
degree. Haha. You done us proud. I knew’nt since
you was a little boy you’d teach. Or preach. The way
you’d stand ‘fore us and read, Little Dr. King.

Now say. . . Here it comes. “Still too good fo’ girls?
People talkin’ bout that white boy you came
back roomin’ with is mighty close, but I tell ’em you
ain’t got no sugar in your tank. No, Lord! Not you!”

So I went North, my “white boy” in tow, and we lived
fine until he caught the long-flu. We knew.
The 90s warned our time was soon, but the test
marked me clean. Clean? Clean—the word I wore
readily shaming him.

But I didn’t leave. He left me. When I held him
the 29th of June, his belly was full of sleeping pills;
I kept him as the paramedic announced the end. “Sorry
for the loss,” came first, and my test a year later brought
“Lucky to be negative.”

“Lucky” and “loss” to reference one life stayed with me
as an oxymoron, and things like surviving
the South and living up North didn’t matter without my
white boy.

Thomas Goins is a native of Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he is an English Language & Literature major at Fayetteville State University (UNC-FSU). Thomas is an intern at Conjure, a new UNC-FSU digital literary journal that will feature writing and visual art of students and alumni of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) across the country. The  name of the journal comes from the short story collection The Conjure Woman (1899) by African American novelist Charles W. Chesnutt, one of the founders of the college that eventually became Fayetteville State University. The journal, a project of the Department of English at UNC-FSU, is projected to debut in 2016 under co-editors Carole Boston Weatherford and Dr. Maria Orban, a Chesnutt scholar. Thomas has a book review forthcoming in GLINT, the UNC-FSU literary journal.

This poem is not previously published.

Francine Witte
Give me back

my childhood. I’d know how to use
it now. This time, I’d savor the sun
thumping down each night like a pink
Spauldeen. And give me back seventh
grade, Mitchell Gorstein, all those silly
minutes I wasted, waiting for you to
notice me. Turns out, you were thinking
of Judy in the third row. Give me back
those achy nights in high school when
I cried for hours over Bobby Traub. How
he dumped me cause I wouldn’t sneak
out. Give me back how I screamed it
all on my mother. Better yet, give
me back my mother. And give me back
the night I told my husband, the one
man who finally loved me, that he
wasn’t enough, and that I found
someone who was. Give me back
his broken face, his broken heart.
No better yet, don’t. But most of all,
give me back one morning, any morning,
glittering like Christmas, my future
wrapped in boxes waiting to be opened,
tissue paper and possibility waiting
to rise up like the just-woken sun.

Francine Witte is the author of the poetry chapbooks Only, Not Only (Finishing Line Press, 2012) and First Rain (Pecan Grove Press, 2009), winner of the Pecan Grove Press competition, and the flash fiction chapbooks Cold June (Ropewalk Press), selected by Robert Olen Butler as the winner of the 2010 Thomas A. Wilhelmus Award, and The Wind Twirls Everything (MuscleHead Press). A retired English teacher, Francine lives in New York.

This poem previously appeared in Willow Review.

Jee Leong Koh
Eve’s Fault

Eve, whose fault was only too much love
—Aemilia Lanyer, “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum: Eve’s Apology”

God won her when he whipped out from his planetary sleeve
a bouquet of light. They watched the parade of animals pass.
He told her the joke about the Archaeopteryx, and she noted
the feathers and the lethal claws, a poem, the first of its kind.
On a beach raised from the ocean with a shout, he entered her
and she realized, in rolling waves, that love joins and separates.

The snake was a quieter fellow. He came in the fall evenings
through the long grass, his steps barely parting the blades.
Each time he showed her a different path. As they wandered,
they talked about the beauty of the light striking the birch,
the odd behavior of the ants, the fairest way to split an apple.
When Adam appeared, the serpent gave her up to happiness.

For happy was she when she met Adam under the tree of life,
still is, and Adam is still Adam, inarticulate, a terrible speller,
his body precariously balanced on his feet, his mind made up
that she is the first woman and he the first man. He needed
her and so scratched down and believed the story of the rib.
She needed Adam’s need, so different from God and the snake,

and that was when she discovered herself outside the garden.

Jee Leong Koh is the author of the poetry collections Steep Tea (Carcanet Press, 2015), Payday Loans (Poets Wear Prada, 2007), Equal to the Earth (Bench Press, 2013), and Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (Bench Press, 2011), and a collection of poetic essays, The Pillow Book (Math Paper Press, 2012). Shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize, his work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. Hailing from Singapore, Jee currently lives in New York.

Photo ©2010 by Cathryn Lynne

This poem appears in Steep Tea and is posted here with the kind permission of Carcanet Press.

Drew Attana
That Street with all the Food Carts

Thick pollen in the air, mixing
with the Clorox scent of those cum
trees. Walking downtown, put upon
by the few days of city sun,
our ankles were even thicker, jutting
up from our low top Cons.
Camo shorts and Hatebreed
shirts cut to the shoulders.

We were bad.
We were hardcore.
Thinking we owned the city.

A Jeep, red or black—
the color doesn’t matter.
Stopped at the nearest light, the driver
laid on the horn and called us faggots.
Andy asked if I wanted to fight.
We tossed up our arms like villagers
with torches and a group of muscles and
old money slithered across the street.

Head against the base of the closest tree,
the driver pleaded for us to stop,
until the door of Greek Cusina
opened, the chef wedging between us.
Andy and I limped away, hobbling to
the train, knuckles, lips split, and our
skin was stained, red or black—
the color doesn’t matter.

Nor did it matter that Andy was the
only gay friend I had, or that he had
just received a positive result, or that
I wasn’t sure if I had fought for him, or
for myself. What did matter, was that
I couldn’t know for sure whose blood
was whose, or how someone gets HIV.

Or how to see myself after I shied away
from him once we cleaned up. The
mixture of fear and cowardice and
shame, like bloodstains and paint jobs,
kept him at arms length—
as far as the distance between
those unexplored crevices of sexuality.

And my ignorance of it all.

Originally from Los Angeles, Drew Attana spent over a decade getting into trouble from Tijuana to Portland, before heading South. His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry has appeared in Eunoia Review, Drunk Monkeys Magazine, Yellow Chair Review, Pathos Literary Journal and is forthcoming in Common Ground, Cargo Literary, and Apeiron Review. He is currently living and writing in Lafayette, Louisiana.

This poem previously appeared in Eunoia Review.

Prudence Chamberlain
Retroviral

In 2015, *** inadvertently ingested HIV blood on an emergency call-out. After 31 days of antiretroviral treatment, there is a three-month waiting process for the all clear.

62.

The eye is the organ of vision & on you it is like a blue/green heartbeat looking with the quiet sight of diagnoses. I imagine the imperfect spheres of your movement, that certainty undoes a sweeping circumference as you purposeful & porous blink once or twice.

In 2013 an eye-­licking fetish swept through the adolescent population of Japan & pink-­eye spread amongst students in urban areas. The bacteria in the mouth is dissimilar to bacteria in the eyeball; it can lead to blindness. Oculolinctus and tongue to membrane porous and spit and almost red.

Plasma water glucose mineral ions hormones carbon dioxide red blood cells albumin leukocytes platelets haemoglobin self-­diagnoses on the Internet new ophthalmologist of the Wikipedia page.

You get blood in your eye in a professional and consummate way while my hypochondria is both inherited and cultured and we are different in that way.

HIV is found in the bodily fluids of an infected person which includes semen vaginal and anal fluids blood and breast milk. 95% of those diagnosed in the UK in 2013 acquired HIV as a result of sexual contact & you get it in the eye; it is its own pun & your chances of infection are somewhere under 1%.

I am shit at my office job you can start hearts with your hands it is a training process with a system we sit outside of and for now we can touch one another medically and hold hands in public in the right places if we’re ready for it.

Prudence Chamberlain is the author of the debut poetry collection I sit on your face in Parliament Square, forthcoming with Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. Her work has appeared in 3:AM, Poems in Which, Luna Poetry, HYSTERIA and Jungftak. Prudence recently finished her PhD in the poetics of flippancy and feminism at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she lectures in Creative Writing.

Octavio R. González
Violin Sex

gold medal around his neck
the flecks of his eyes

shards of goldenrod
Crayola smile

mirrored thing so lovely
you tell me

lines of cocaine as white
as your eyes

envisioning

the ecstasy of me, this room, this
meeting of bone muscle skin

a performance you want to attend
the sex so damn good you want it all

over again, and when it’s done
the perfect cupid’s bow of your lips

gives me that expensive kiss
a gift so dazzling, but this

time it’s free: I would love to

stay in bed with you all day, but
I have places to go, people to see

—and the laugh track surrounding
us, whoever that is, when the fantasy

is done, the body lies down and plays dead
with a noose around its head—

trips on the carpet as he asks you to
dance the tango in a blindfold:

this love, like Plato’s triangle,
never to behold the crueler

measures of reality,
inexact and slightly

hypocritical—small lies of yesterday
morning, perhaps after coffee,

when repeating the scene you realize

how he said, your hands touching me
like a master handles his violin.

Octavio R. González is the author of the poetry collection The Book of Ours (Momotombo Press, 2009), a selection of the Letras Latinas/Institute for Latino Letters series at the University of Notre Dame. His work appears in numerous journals, including Puerto del Sol, miPoesías, The Richmond Review, and OCHO. He is currently working on a series of love poems, among other projects. Octavio teaches English literature at Wellesley College.