Lucy Wainger
Mysterious Skin

after Gregg Araki

Here is the town of lost basements and raped boys
and aliens mistaken for angels. / Here is the way you will learn
to run: / covered in hands / rolling like a dog in the snow
he tells you that there are nosebleeds / he tells you
that you are on your own / alone in this beauty.
You are learning that it is not as simple as wanting to die in a motel
versus wanting to live / to swallow cum in a shower in a motel
that there are other factors / other names / but now you’re soaking
in the bleach-colored headlights and taking off down the road
forgetting how well you know these parts / of town
how well they know your name. There’s nothing left here to use
as kindling / bodies too damp / left outside during the storm.
Here’s where a man clutched you with his fat fingers / like
fish / here’s where the boy told he heard the voice of God
but you didn’t hear it / you were enraptured with the movie
and the sound of his jeans / rustling

Lucy Wainger’s poems have appeared in SOFTBLOW, The James Franco Review, The Blueshift Journal, Black & BLUE, Winter Tangerine Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She has attended summer writing workshops at UVa and the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and will graduate from Stuyvesant High School in 2016. She lives in New York City.

This poem is not previously published.

Collestipher D. Chatto
Armageddon Comes Four Days a Week

Editor’s note: In order to preserve the spatial formatting of this poem, I am posting it as a PDF that will open when you click on the link below.

Collestipher D. Chatto — Armageddon Comes Four Days a Week

Collestipher Dodge Chatto is Diné (Navajo) from Pinehill, a community located on the Ramah Diné Reservation in western New Mexico. His tribal clans are Towering House and Sleeping Rock People. In May of 2015, he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). His poems have been published in Tribal College Journal and Plume as well as in a number of anthologies. His awards include the Truman Capote Scholarship, The Lannan Foundation Scholarship, and the American Indian Graduate Center Fellowship. In 2014 and 2015 he attended the Naropa University Summer Writer’s Program. Besides poetry, he enjoys writing short fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, and painting and drawing. Currently, he is attending IAIA for his Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing focusing on poetry.

JP Howard
What to Say to a Friend Who Wants to Give Up

Say I love you, even when you can’t love yourself.
Say please, please not today,
Say too much life unlived.
Say mirror, say beautiful,
Say this arm, take this arm,
Say grab, say hold, say let tears fall,
Say tears heal, Say forgive your mama,
Say she did the best she could.
Say tomorrow, say sleep,
Say split second, split the seconds,
Say let the seconds turn into days,
Say today, Say tomorrow, Say sun.
Say warm, Say skin,
Say warm skin, say sunlight,
Say new day, Say breathe,
Say inhale, Say exhale.
Say not today baby girl,
Say so much life to live,
Say love, Say I love you.
Say hold on, hold on to love.

JP Howard aka Juliet P. Howard is the author of the poetry collection SAY/MIRROR (The Operating System, 2015) and a chaplet, bury your love poems here (Belladonna Collaborative, 2015). JP curates and nurtures Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon (WWBPS), a NY forum offering women writers a venue to come together in a positive and supportive space. JP is Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, an alum of the VONA/Voices Writers Workshop, and a Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging LGBT Voices Fellow. She was a finalist in The Feminist Wire 2014 1st Poetry Contest.

A version of this poem appears in SAY/MIRROR.

Joy Ladin
Living in the Past

San Francisco 1982-1992

The views were what everyone had:

the hills, parades of paper dragons,
the prison surrounded by sugar water.
Tourists laughed in the crumbling showers.

Climate? Mild. No fear, no regret. Life
stared like a lizard, blinking back
the salt of our climaxes.

Outside, the epidemic spread.
Ten years.
We sipped champagne

from small black bottles, followed manicured paths
between trees that had lost their bark
and smelled like medicine. I wish

I’d kissed you then. You seemed distracted
as we crossed the shell
of the band that only played anthems.

It wasn’t hot but you dripped
hard bright beads of sweat.
The newly infected slumped on benches,

a garden of vanishing plants.
You seemed to be staring at their shoes.
I’m seeing stars, you said.

Joy Ladin is the author of seven books of poetry, including just-published Impersonation (Sheep Meadow, 2015), Lambda Literary Award finalist Transmigration (Sheep Meadow, 2009), and Forward Fives award winner Coming to Life (Sheep Meadow, 2011). Her memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders (University of Wisconsin, 2013), was a 2012 National Jewish Book Award finalist. Joy’s work has appeared in many periodicals, including Lambda Literary Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and North American Review, and has been recognized with a Fulbright Scholarship. She holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University, and has taught in the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, as well as at Princeton University, Reed College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

This poem appeared in New Haven Review (Issue 11, Winter 2012).

Molly Doak
The Butterfly Effect

A butterfly floated in the breeze today.
I thought of you.
We never met,
but I knew it was you.
It was scarlet red.
Like the ribbon I wear today.
You were here.

Elton John came on the radio today.
As we pulled into the drive,
Her eyes misted over
Sharing memories of how
You two used to dance.
The scarlet butterfly
Fluttered to the beat.
You were here.

I sat in a classroom today,
and learned a new term:
“Human Immunodeficiency Virus.”
A spark was ignited within me.
The scarlet butterfly
Rested on the windowsill.
You were here.

I gave a talk today.
I told the truth.
“HIV and AIDS is real,
But it does not have to be your reality.”
The scarlet butterfly
Was waiting on my windshield.
You were here.

I continue our journey tomorrow,
Each step toward a cure.
Unsure of the necessary number,
But the finish line
Is in the distance.
The scarlet butterfly
Floating on the other side.
You are here.

Molly Doak writes: My godfather (who knew me before I knew him) passed from a brain tumor brought on by AIDS. The story goes: my family was in his hospital room and he had been unconscious and unresponsive for quite some time. My family was arguing about which way north was and suddenly he sat up in the bed and pointed to the direction (he was great with directions). A little startled, my family decided to exit the room and let him rest. They went outside and shortly after a whole slew of butterflies flew around them. Right after they dispersed, the nurse came out and said he had passed. Although I did not know him, his life and story has certainly influenced my interest in HIV and AIDS. It has become a sincere passion of mine to educate people about this very real and very serious topic. This poem I dedicate to him, his memory, and his life.

Peter LaBerge

Field Sermon: On Abstinence

The boy doesn’t care
about Portland anymore.
About what Elvis would say
to that. Today is all about
the bees. It hasn’t been this way
since his lips met a bee
in a beer can the summer
before seventh grade. He believes
Jesus made him, hopes
he will be stung in the mirror.

Field Sermon: Walnut Creek

Quiet, the toaster. Quiet, the scalloped
flesh. Saints wander the boy’s head
like men lost in hallways, like children
watching mothers mop mornings
into nightgowns spread wide across
concrete floors. Scarecrows in the shed
long-bleached and convinced they are still
the men they pretended to be. The boy
pieces together remnants of the broken
weathervane, foreclosed farm. His body
white as a fox underbelly, a consolation or prayer.

Peter LaBerge is the author of the chapbook Hook (Sibling Rivalry, 2015). His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Redivider, Sixth Finch, Best New Poets 2014, Hayden’s Ferry Review, DIAGRAM, and Indiana Review, as a finalist for the 2015 Indiana Review Poetry Prize. The recipient of a fellowship from the Bucknell University Stadler Center for Poetry, Peter is the co-editor of Poets on Growth (Math Paper Press, 2015), the Founder & Editor-in-Chief of The Adroit Journal, and an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. Find him online at www.peterlaberge.com.

These poems appear in the forthcoming chapbook, Hook.

Seth Pennington
Health

Health class is a coach missing both legs saying wear a rubber if you remember and reading the paper until we get out of hand and he throws the Gazette and it falls apart in the air. I’m still talking and he takes off a leg too flesh colored for camouflage and kicks me in the head with it and says, Pop Quiz: What STD will you die from? I stare at my desk. Here’s a hint: how do fags die? It looks like the embalming table where Dad works and like my body belongs there with clear tubes taking my blood to the urinal where he will flush it down. Coach’s favorite joke: “What do you call a man with no legs in the water? . . . Bob.” He asks me again how I’ll die but I just hear his joke running in my head and think wrong answer. I say, A man with no legs in the water, he’s dead.

Seth Pennington’s poems have appeared in the journals Assaracus, The Good Men Project, Upstart, and Toad Suck Review, as well as in the anthology Wingbeats II: Exercises and Practice in Poetry (Dos Gatos Press, 2014), edited by Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen. Seth is cover artist, editor, and co-publisher of Sibling Rivalry Press. Raised in the minnow farm capital of the world, he lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with his husband, Bryan Borland.

Francisco Márquez
Kaposi’s Sarcoma

Always test yourself in case of a sign.
     Four scabs on your palm don’t have to come
     from a battle, they can come from a catastrophe,
like love in the shortest summer.
             Trace their shapes on your skin:
two parallel lines: circular, phallic,
        heart-shaped protrusions
beyond the stitching of your skin.

A man’s cock is a gun waiting to be fired
              and you’re the beautiful target.
       Your lesions break purple,
              the beauty of your bleeding wound.
In order to die, we need only to be alive,
         my grandfather used to say
as he cocked his gun in the war, the sliding of the shaft
              announcing his return.

Just watch how the scabs turn brown with the leaves—
       you’re connected to nature
you’re the hand of God.
              I draw string from the eyes
of strangers to this hand and dance around His knife,
        feel how deep this blade goes,
      it’s the American tradition written on your body.

Now everything reminds me of a loud clock,
       something distant and baroque,
     the chime suspended left to no use.
             Hang all the necessary paintings,
leave them to cover the holes.

       Picture a life where time is broken:
an autumn hill, a white church at its tip,
               and all the bodies beneath holding it up.

Francisco Márquez is a Venezuelan poet living in Brooklyn. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Poetry at NYU. He is a recipient of the John McKay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award from Florida State University. His work can be found in Assaracus, HOOT, and elsewhere.

This poem appeared in Assaracus.

Kamilah Aisha Moon
Madear Tests Positive

Logger of long hours inside
& outside of home,
Night-gowned lighthouse,
Owner of used breasts, tear-soaked
shoulders & a well-worn lap,

in whose arms
could you have rested,
succumbed without fear
of breaking boughs, hell
or high water to pay
for pleasure, for remembering
you are a woman?

Love dropped you, hard
from over 30 years high.
Who wouldn’t take the first
warm, veined hand offered?
How could you have known he was
a sharecropper of loneliness,
sower of radioactive
sweet nothings like seeds,
bathing you in bittersweet brine
without apology or gratitude
before diving his dwindled self
back into the earth?

You couldn’t, like none of us could
or can know. Yet, as every other crisis
lived through, you remain royal
in faith-rending circumstances
still, still. & always.

An exhale after waiting
for so long shouldn’t cost
this much. When the worst
befalls the best, injustice
stuns us silent as a dying star
weeping alone in the dark sky
to herself.

Queen mother, burn
until your breath
becomes holy smoke.

Kamilah Aisha Moon is the author of She Has a Name (Four Way, 2013). work has been featured in Harvard Review, jubilat, The Awl, Poem-A-Day for the Academy of American Poets and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize winner, she has been selected as a New American Poet presented by the Poetry Society of America, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde Publishing Triangle Award. Kamila holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has been a recipient of A recipient of fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Prague Summer Writing Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and the Vermont Studio Center. 

This poem is not previously published.

Achat Sha’alti
Traditional Hebrew song from Psalm 27

This song is sung frequently in Jewish services, but never with so much kavanah (spiritual intentionality) as during the Days of Awe, from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, which this year we celebrate today. Many find great comfort in singing these words or hearing them sung. I do. Since I’ve been attending High Holiday and Shabbat services at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the LGBT synagogue in New York City, I have learned from Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum that it is okay to exercise self-determination in my beliefs about God, whether God exists, what kind of God God is. Rabbi Kleinbaum says, “I believe in God, but the God I believe in is not the kind of God who cares whether or not you believe in God.” What I know about God is that God does not want us to be ashamed of our race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, or HIV status.

—Michael Broder

This recording were ripped off shamelessly and without permission from Mechon Hadar, an educational institution that empowers Jews to create and sustain vibrant, practicing, egalitarian communities of Torah learning, prayer, and service. If I can find out who the singer is, I will credit him.