Alison Stone
Not Cure, Not Denial

…Murderers are easy
to understand. But this: that one can contain
death, the whole of death…
can hold it to one’s heart
gently, and not refuse to go on living,
is inexpressible.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Fourth Duino Elegy

Eleven years you held death in your body,
lulled to sleep with songs where
clouds support a castle’s weight
and princes feed a kingdom with a dragon’s blood.
Now it wakes and nibbles. You
suffer fevers, thrush, your doctor’s cold

insistence that the virus is a cold
and patient god who will wait
years to reap a body.
Once I was the broken one. You
did my laundry, rubbed my neck, drove me where
the sea was endless and its jeweled waves calmed my blood.

Tonight the moon spills silver. Blood-
flecked insects glow in the cold
light. We walk in woods where
years ago you
carved my name into the body
of an oak. A dark bird circles, waits.

Voice flat, you say, “My life is a wait
between funerals.” Those who shared your blood
are dead. “Why love anybody?”
Branches drop their shadows as you
dig up flowers. Morning opens its cold
eye. I shiver, drift off into memory where

you made the world a place where
each ripe hour waited to be picked. You
had pulled me out of heroin’s cold
hug, its house of promises and blood,
kissed me bold and weight-
less. Your tongue gave me back my body.

Sun lifts its gold. Weak rays lack the warmth my body
craves. Vines bend beneath dark berries’ weight.
You crush them, smear the pulp and blood,
brush away my arm and stand where
I can’t touch you. Eyes cold,
fingers clenched, you

practice death’s cold No. Love, I beg you
risk a now where passion stirs your blood.
Fill your body. Make the darkness wait.

Alison Stone is the author of Dangerous Enough (Presa Press, 2014), Borrowed Logic (Dancing Girl Press, 2014), From the Fool to the World: Poems in the Voices of the Major Arcana of the Tarot (Parallel Press, 2012) and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award and was published by Many Mountains Moving Press. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, and a variety of other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded Poetry magazine’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin award. She is also a painter and the creator of The Stone Tarot, a tarot deck reproduced from original oil paintings by Alison. A licensed psychotherapist, Alison has private practices in New York City and Nyack. She is currently editing an anthology of poems on the Persephone/Demeter myth.

This poem appeared in the journal Poetry and in the collection They Sing at Midnight.

Abigail George
Johannesburg

Desire, grief and loneliness were rivals—
I think of the memoirs that I have written
Of excursions, of executions, of experiments.
How I mourned.

I mourned the nothing loss of him—
Like spies. Smoke. Fat of the land. Mirrors.
In my moonlight house. The forests
Are armed.

It was difficult. I saw him in things—
Exits. Then not at all. It took me a long time
To triumph over all things. In the end I saw
Heaven.

All lightning is a lake of silver—
Tonight there is only a portal to Hades.
I needed sunlight. It was a golden ticket.
Like any prayer.

I endure summer nights. I endure sorrow—
Endure her invited guests at the banquet.
The uninvited well I imagine their deaths.
Like childhood.

It is dark here. I am trying too hard –
There is a great fire within me like a sea.
No flowers grow here. No grassiness.
No books.

Burial lies behind the closed door—
Closure. The villagers are waiting in the barn.
I am not giving up my psyche’s souvenirs.
Gretel dances.

I tasted the syrup of the perfect ending—
Cold, malignant fish I do not accept you.
The assignment is a game of win and lose.
Lectures are given.

Give me the contents of romanticism—
The white rabbits are ruling the wonderland.
Memory is clouded. Images paralyse me.
The lamp is bright.

Abigail George is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has appeared or is forthcoming from Africanwriters.com, Birds Piled Loosely, Every Day Poems, Hackwriters.com, ITCH The Creative Journal, Literary Orphans, Modern Diplomacy, Ovi Magazine: Finland’s English Online Magazine, Peaches Lit Mag, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Spontaneity, The Artist Unleashed, The Copperfield Review, The Voices Project, Three and a Half Point Nine, and Toad Suck Review, as well as in a number of anthologies. Abigail has received two National Arts Council Writing Grants, one from the Centre for the Book and another from the Eastern Cape Provincial Arts and Culture Council in South Africa.

This poem is not previously published.

Gregg Shapiro
Extraordinary Measures

What’s the difference between running in place
or in circles? You still get there at the same time.
Too late, out of breath, empty-handed. I call out
the names of the dead. Awake, asleep, mid-air.
Moving my lips with or without my voice, waving
my hands to no avail. This is the age of responsibility.
Every breath an accusation, a finger stabbing the air.

Whispers, murmurs of education and prevention.
Advice given from behind a hand. Ask yourself
what you would do, what distance you would travel
to save a friend, a family member, a stranger. No
length too great, no act too ordinary. I pinch myself
awake from the same drowning dream. Starless, airless,
endless. Water black as rock, warm as a motor. Swimming

is out of the question, arms heavy as corpses. The drowned
float past, under the surface. Bottleless messages to
the living on the shore. Give rage a face, a mouth twisted
into goodbye. Two moist eyes that see everything,
unblinking. A nose for trouble and ears to listen for
the sound of nurses shuffling silently on schedule to
monitor a fever, a pulse, to preserve and protect what is left.

Gregg Shapiro is the author of Lincoln Avenue (Squares and Rebels Press, 2014), GREGG SHAPIRO: 77 (Souvenir Spoon Press, 2012), Protection (Gival Press, 2008) and the forthcoming short story collection, How to Whistle (Lethe Press, 2016). An entertainment journalist whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBT and mainstream publications and websites, Gregg lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with his husband Rick Karlin and their dog k.d.

This poem appeared in the anthology Among The Leaves: Queer Male Poets on the Midwestern Experience (Squares & Rebels, 2012), edited by Raymond Luczak.

William Shakespeare
Sonnet 94

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

William Shakespeare was the author of 38 plays and 154 sonnets as well as the poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). The Sonnets of Shakespeare was published in 1609. A complete collection of his plays, known as the First Folio, was published in 1623.

Winston Plowes
In My Dreams You Stay Alive

In fifteen years of hugging flint,
too often I fled from the table.
From Dad’s double breasted Sunday best.
To the front room set in aspic.

Spoon-fed by the Bakelite dial
you’re tightening your Bible belts by
lapping up hymns and polishing souls

I screamed for skin-to-shining skin
and shivered as you inched away
till now it’s come to miles from home.
Will no one stay forever?

When gift wrapped boxes die on me
my broken angels cannot spin
the words of silk to spare me now.
Then you unpack my second head
and throw me rings of flowers green.

Re-lace my wings and clip my hair
and walk away through fields of god.
Mummy—Show me how the softest
Parts of my body talk.

Return my rusty pre-packed heart.
Bury me with people my own size
with whom I will share more in common.

I am left with mutant genes
dripping through two childish hands
so crudely cupped.
But in my dreams, you stay alive—
Somehow.

For as long as he can remember, Winston Plowes has been disproportionately excited about covering blank pages with words, either with a pencil, fountain pen, typewriter or on his laptop. On one day these words might be serenely launched into the world like a majestic ocean liner. On another they might refuse to start like a rusty old motorbike. Experimental or conventional they are all welcome
and have been regularly published in print and on line worldwide. You can read more on his website: www.winstonplowes.co.uk.

This poem is not previously published.

Gregory Woods
My Lover Loves

My lover loves me with kid gloves.
That is, no matter who’s above
And who beneath
We use a sheath—
We never screw without a Condom.

He holds me in such high regard
He shields me like a bodyguard.
Although love’s dart
Has hit my heart,
He fired it safely in a Condom.

Security is what we crave
To save us from an early grave,
Our greatest wealth
Each other’s health,
Safely invested in a Condom.

Whenever he comes home from work
He brings me bribes, inducements, perks;
But of his gifts
The one that lifts
My spirit most’s a pack of Condoms.

Although his clothes are always fine
(Comme des Garçons and Calvin Klein)
He looks his best
When he’s undressed—
Yet even better in a Condom.

Among the catalogue of skills
Which generate our thrills and spills,
His special knack
Is to unpack,
Unroll, and lubricate a Condom.

Without the taste for being chaste,
We use a lube that’s water-based
And take great care
Never to tear
The tender membrane of our Condom.

As long as he takes care of me
I am not scared of HIV.
My lover loves
Me with kid gloves
But loves me most of all with Condoms.

Gregory Woods is the author of We Have the Melon (Carcanet Press, 1992), May I Say Nothing (Carcanet Press, 1998), The District Commissioner’s Dreams (Carcanet Press, 2002), Quidnunc (Carcanet Press, 2007), An Ordinary Dog (Carcanet Press, 2011), and Very Soon I Shall Know (Shoestring Press, 2012). Gregory was born in Cairo in 1953 and spent his early years in Ghana. He came to Britain in 1962 and studied at the University of East Anglia. He has taught in Italy, London, and Nottingham.

This poem appeared in May I Say Nothing.

Regina Jamison
Billy

Watched him go to bone
Thin as angel hair
Eyes wide we worried
Didn’t know what to do
AIDS was new
But so was our friendship
Our shared love for
Prince
We sang loud on the train
Blasted bass through the
Pain wishing compliments could
Save you.

Regina Jamison’s poetry has appeared in Me, as a Child (Silver Birch Press Poetry Series), Promethean eZine, and in Off the Rocks (Newtown Writers LGBT writers anthology series) volumes 14 and 15. Her erotic short stories have appeared in Girls Who Bite: Vampire Lesbian Anthology (Cleis Press, 2011), edited by Delilah Devlin, and Purple Panties: An Eroticanoir.com Anthology (Strebor Books, 2008), edited by Zane. An excerpt from her forthcoming novel, Lurleen, appears in Gaslight (Lambda Literary, 2015), an e-book anthology of writing by Lambda Literary Fellows.

Kristin Chang
Guanyin

my mother says there is only one way out of china and
that is through god. god opens her mouth & rivers patter out

like children in the night. children in the night spotting the street
like a skin. children in the night & our veins neon & opened

longways, our hands shuttered over our chests. a scent in the air
like incense or blood, isn’t that what they tried first, horseblood,

AiNing, hibiscus, ginger, horsefat, xiaomi, my mother tongued
every leaf til she grew a tree from her mouth & it stabbed the sky red

& the wound was the sound of a wingbeat. every night heat rose off
her body like birds, she carried her tongue like a blade & dreamt

every night of the baby she never fed. every window
a soft mouth & flickering tongue, pink as a fish,

hunger hard and glittered as a pebble understream. Wasn’t that
what came next, swimming & ginseng, silt swallowed off the river,

prayer: the future tense of our bones
still dust. my mother sits in a lap

of water, says women ruin the world. says
this is what he told me. says every day she

dreamed of the sun rousing in the night, that light,
so light I bobbed in her arms.

Kristin Chang is 17, lives in California, and spends her summers in China. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in BOAAT, Powder Keg, Winter Tangerine Review, Word Riot, and elsewhere.

This poem is not previously published.

Aidan Forster
Revelation

It was July. With my clothing
on, I went to a park bench
with a boy and the moon
was split down the middle
like the palmetto bug
I found in my bedsheets.
I removed my shirt as the moon
removed its pale shell.
The boy pressed his face
to one side of my neck
and it fit with the exactitude
of bone and socket,
root and earth,
glacier and ocean. It is true
we tried to make one body
from two—
the Reedy River pressed its mouth
to the waterfall
and watched us do the same.
All I felt was gratitude.
What I have to show from that night
are two spider bites on my inner arm.

Aidan Forster’s work appears or is forthcoming in Verse, Polyphony H.S., Assaracus, Alexandria Quarterly, The Best Teen Writing of 2015, and The Adroit Journal. He studies creative writing at the Fine Arts Center in Greenville, South Carolina, where he is the managing editor of Crashtest. He is the assistant blog editor of The Adroit Journal. Aidan’s work has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and will appear in the 2015 ART.WRITE.NOW.DC exhibit. He is the recipient of the 2015 Anthony Quinn Foundation Scholarship, and the winner of the 2015 Say What Open Mic: Fresh Out the Oven Poetry Slam. Aidan is a sophomore in high school.

Stephen Ira
Vultures

“They haunted us like vultures.”
—Berry Berenson (wife of Tony Perkins), The New York Times, 1992

From the hospital where I was born
Tony’s positivity leaked. A lack
of context can make evil
acts beautiful, like: an enquiring mole
rooting among the cedars by the mountain
does sound nice. Sinai. Cedars Sinai, where I
was born. I know the National Enquirer
too, too well—they outed me at eighteen.
Clear signs of my transsexuality:
my parents lie professionally. Stars!
Under which I was born, under
the false name “Blanche” (O harbinger!
O root!) in 1992, when Tony died. Two
years before, Cedars tested his blood
for something unrelated and a mole leaked it,
someone who still sleeps at night. I know,
I feel his sleep, like my schoolmates’ sleep
who sold me out to the Enquirer.
We smuggled me out to another state—
I lay down in the back of the car—
photographers outside our house,
claiming each friend who left was me.
They all looked gay. No one to sue.
Tony read it, got tested. Every word
about both of us—true.

Stephen Ira’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in Spot Literary Magazine, the St. Sebastian Review, and Specter Magazine, among other journals, and in the anthology The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard (Topside Press, 2012), edited by Tom Léger and Riley MacLeod. With Kay Gabriel, RL, and Liam O’Brien, Stephen co-edits Vetch: A Journal of Trans Poetry and Poetics. In 2013, he was selected as one of Lambda Literary’s summer fellows in poetry. In 2014, he was featured as a guest star in La Mama’s SQUIRTS: New Voices in Queer Performance. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2014.

This poem is not previously published.