Elaine Sexton
To 1989

If I could forget you completely
I would, year that took
Larry, that took John,

that took Eduardo
and Sean and Tom,
year of ignorance

on a tear,
gouged with fear
and your relentless, brazen

winning streak,
your gamblers
run amok,

stink of death,
stink of void,
wherever did that terror go?

each day of breathing
a beating endured
in the chest, heave

of pneumonia,
cavity of sorrow,
ACT UP and walk outs,

year of joyless Central Park,
the hidden life
of the Ramble,

year of what it means
to be a top, year of
SILENCE = DEATH,

next of kin, being us,
we discover we are
next of kin, kin

being too scared
to visit, too scared
to share a dish.

I remember you,
I remember
what’s left of you,

I remember
who you spared, and who
you swallowed whole.

Elaine Sexton is the author of the poetry collections Causeway (New Issues, 2008) and Sleuth (New Issues, 2003). A third collection, Prospect/Refuge, will be published by Sheep Meadow Press in late 2015. Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals including American Poetry Review, Poetry, Art in America, Oprah Magazine, Pleiades, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry Daily. She teaches poetry and text and image workshops at the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute, in the graduate program at City College (CUNY), and beginning this summer at New York University. She serves on the board of Q Avenue Press and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

This poem is not previously published.

Jennifer Chapis
Two Poems

Houseboat

White-throated swifts mate mid-air—

impossibly connected,
the trust-tumbling couple
loses 500 feet.

The rule against making love
at the family Christmas gathering
is clear.

A downpour’s soundtrack, boat oak creaking,
chirrup of canyon birds:

we cannot renounce feeling—
in love we learn love.

How the Invisible Move

Have you ever had a sex dream
without the sex?—inserting the tab,
closing the cereal box, a mournful turn on.

Born under his father’s bottle,
his arm broke faster than glass.

In San Sebastian, I comb the sand
for glass transformed

through its beating, consider love
an attainable miracle.

When I hear of his brother’s suicide,
I imagine their lookalike souls:

Two stallions step from fog,
silver flashing in forelocks

like a dazzling red thread
woven through an abandoned lark’s nest.

Jennifer Chapis is the author of The Beekeeper’s Departure (Backwards City , 2007). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, American Letters & Commentary, Salt Hill, and other journals, as well as in Best New Poets 2005 and 2006. Jennifer received the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize chosen by Mark Doty and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and other book awards. She taught in the Expository Writing Program at NYU for over a decade and co-founded Nightboat Books with Kazim Ali in 2003. Jennifer is an energy healer and founder of the All Love Healing Center in Wilmington, NC, where she leads workshops in meditation and her signature program Writing for Healing™.

“Houseboat” previously appeared in Spire and “How the Invisible Move” appeared in Thin Air.

Erik Schuckers
September Song

These houses, deadleaf brick, each room
a sealed box of wood and plaster, worm scaled,
gorgeous as a seance, music
in the sigh of every tenured joist.
Mandarin wax clots Oriental carpets slowly
unlooming. This graduate twilight. Padding
the ruptured bricks, past Trader Joe’s
bags tumescent with plastic, I’m no
threat. And you, breathless three miles away.
This is where we meant to land, but let’s not
maudle while these strangers’ tidal
lawns lap iron gates, and I’m another
middle-aged witness crying in the street.

That first night, we sat on my dormitory
floor, precariously wired. What did we say?
Which hall, which room, was mine?
I’ll search the campus maps online
for hours and still not remember. What I do:
your purple polo, collar popped, and how
we moved imperceptible as fractions
through the hours until, hoarse and hollow,
rumor of sunlight in the window, we bridged
that final, irremediable inch. Your unfolded
palm. The fall of hair by your left eye.
My god, we drove how many midnights
out for cigarettes and the joy of sailing

REM’s Out of Time through my junked
Rabbit, ceiling fabric bellowed with cold
air. Wasn’t it cold, even in April, even
when I wrecked the daffodils and a fifth
the first time we split, when Chris and Sarah
drew me to their drafty house, thesis pages
drifting on ash floors, antique dust
and blanched quilts, a battered coffepot?
Would you know their street, or what you said
when you woke me the next morning, so bright
and sad, or what else it was your mother
said when I came to drive us to our first
apartment, and she chased you through rooms

smothered in white wool, Lysol spray and rubber
gloves to decontaminate the faggotry with which
I’d doomed you. I recall a single
line, camp chestnut delivered with the best
grande dame guignol she’d got: “He looks like he’s
gonna give you AIDS.” I wish I’d forgotten
less, since she’s the one who’ll see you
to the gate. I need to zoom in tight, to catch
a carat of sorrow in her eye, a mote of tender
scruple. Later, when pain became the static
through which our voices broke too
infrequently to save each other, when
our glamorous Kodachromes were safely burned,

remember how we slept beneath a press-on sky,
dosed with poppers, cock, and wine,
how tenderly we tried to say nothing
we couldn’t take back? That last apartment
stifling in August, the cheap lino weeping
at our feet. A drought of boxes. Videos
melting into milk crates. If we had
failed one another differently,
we might be home by now.

Erik Schuckers studied literature and writing at Allegheny College and the University of Sheffield. He has worked as a janitor, an apple picker, a medical records clerk, and as a bookseller in the US and UK, and he currently lives in Pittsburgh. His poems have appeared in Assaracus, PANK, The Fourth Wall, The Allegheny Review, and elsewhere.

This poem is not previously published.

Mary Jane Nealon
Body, Body’s Torment, Body’s Reprieve

We met over the trembling of your body, how could it not tremble?
Everyone, every week, succumbing.
But before they succumbed, flowers and presents for the nurses—
fountain pens, Valentino bags, Valentino sweaters,
his House, so decimated.

One night, in a Nor’easter, I took a car service from Jersey City
to find you hovering—vancomycin wracking your body,
rigors and chills, nausea and incontinence, you drenched the sheets in sweat—
the good sheets that we’d gotten at ABC Carpet & Home,
sheets for a bed good enough to die in, you’d said.

No meals for you, your sustenance in a back-pack dripped
into the large chest vein that led straight to your heart.
The fucking people you called friends then
squeezed you out of a Fire Island summer,
the one we all believed was to be your last summer
leaving you in your apartment facing the Chelsea Hotel.

No matter, friend. You did not die.
Miracle, one of a small number pulled back from the abyss.

Leaning over your body, I dug 274 viral balls in one night from your skin,
molluscum contagiosum, I used cuticle removers
to de-core the pearly center, your skin, broken, bled profusely—
we lifted ice to each spot—
nipples, back, belly, eyebrow, eyelids. Almost nothing left for you, Body.

When Gavin came to take you to San Francisco, I taught him the art of it
and you gave me the painting you always wanted me to have.
It is thirty years since then, Body.

It is thirty years since then, Body, old friend.

How you ever came back from that, to spray paint planters that you fill with luscious orchids,
to build in the windows of your house a world of polar bears and snow each Christmas,
to manage all friendships since then, beautifully,
the way a Body should.

Friend, I have never been asked again to sit with someone in such despair.

But I would again, Body. I would again.

Mary Jane Nealon is the author of the the memoir Beautiful Unbroken: One Nurse’s Life (Grey Wolf, 2011) and the poetry collections Immaculate Fuel (Four Way, 2004) and Rogue Apostle (Four Way, 2001). Her poems appear in the anthologies The Poetry of Nursing (Kent State, 2006), edited by Judy Schaefer, and The Art of Bicycling (Breakaway Books, 2005), edited by Justin Daniel Belmont. Her poems have appeared in Forklift, Ohio; Mid American Review; The Paris Review; The Kenyon Review; and Poets Against the War, among other journals. Mary Jane received  fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. She was the 2004-2005 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and won the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Mary Jane lives in Missoula, Montana, where she is a nurse at a community health center.

This poem previously appeared in The International Journal of Servant-Leadership.

Patricia Spears Jones
The Year of Mercy

The news is swift as swifts
Swoops across our minds
Then lulls until the next disaster
The spent storm exhales timber
Cars, cradles, sodden food,
And sad, sobbing people

The Pope has declared a Year of Mercy
One year and then what, a year of
Retribution? Why not a decade,
A century, a millennium of Mercy
Why not a Year of Pacificity
A Year of Deep Committed Loving
A Year of Tongue Scrubbing
Of the men and women who
Grope us with language as nasty
As their tender prodding hands.

The news twitters away silence
And opens hearts to failure
Or the possibility of evolution
In manners, in morals

Even, unto that dream of equality,
The one slaves understood
Could not be a dream,
But, had to be a reality.

Patricia Spears Jones is an African American poet/cultural activist and author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems (White Pine Press, 2015) and seven other collections and chapbooks. She is contributing editor to BOMB Magazine and is a senior fellow at Black Earth Institute, where she has edited Thirty Days Hath September in 2012 and a forthcoming issue of About Place Journal entitled The Future Imagined Differently. Patricia is a recipient of NEA and NYFA grants and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art and the New York Community Trust. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches in the City University of New York.

Bryan Borland
New Drug

The chemistry of ethics I don’t know. I ask
the doctor for the pill. His degree of separation:
our state is a city, our city is a town. His wife
isn’t queer. From his box he talks down.

The monogamy of this physician-patient
relationship strained. The monotony of these
conversations. How my tests
are meant for someone else. How I beg for
blood in vial, not cholesterol, you fuck.
How I beg for an extra layer of cloth.

The ethics of marriage I know. Be good
to yourself. Your body. Our body.
His body.

I say it plain. We fuck some.
We make love more.
These are two different things. We come
from a long line of great vanishing. This
anthology is strong. I tell him the names.
Reginald. Paul. Essex. Leon down
the street. My people. There are no mistakes.

I say it plain. Write my name.
I love. I fuck, or I don’t.
I’m good until I’m not.
There are hollow places in us
that are hungry. We know the risk
of not having them filled.

Bryan Borland is the author of DIG, forthcoming in 2016 from Stillhouse Press, as well as the poetry collections. Less Fortunate Pirates (Sibling Rivalry, 2012) and My Life as Adam (Sibling Rivalry, 2010). His poems have appeared in journals including Ganymede, OCHO, Chiron Review, Chelsea Station, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, and The Good Men Project, among many others, as well as in the anthologies Conversations at a Wartime Cafe (CreateSpace, 2011), edited by Sean Labrador y Manzano, and Divining Divas: 100 Gay Poets on Their Muses ( Lethe Press, 2012), edited by Michael Montlack. He is founding editor of Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry and publisher of Sibling Rivalry Press. Bryan lives and works in Little Rock, Arkansas, with his husband, Seth Pennington. For more info on Bryan and his work, visit bryanborland.com.

This poem is not previously published.

Jeff Walt
When I Think of You Now My Heart

waiting for the storm, darkness in our direction
as we sat at the kitchen table those breezy nights
when I think of you now the wind

smashing photos against the wall, pushing plants off stands,
rickety wood beating against the worn
aching hinge when each quick wind barged in,

when I think of you now my heart, my liver, my blood,
our old house those breezy nights
my heart slamming like the screen door

when I think of you now
as we sat at the kitchen table waiting
for the storm, darkness our direction.

Jeff Walt is the author of Soot (Seven Kitchens, 2010), co-winner of the Keystone Chapbook Prize. His poem “In the Bathroom Mirror This Morning” won the 2015 Red Hen Poetry Prize and will appear in The Los Angeles Review. Jeff’s poems have appeared in journals including Assaracus, Bay Windows, Christopher Street, New York Native, Provincetown Arts, RFD, The Gay and Lesbian Review, and The Good Men Project, among many others. Recent anthologies in which his poems appear include Gay City: Vol. 3 – RePulped (Gay City Anthologies, 2010), TOUCHING: Poems of Love, Longing, and Desire (Fearless Books, 2010) and One for the Road (Split Oak Press, 2010). Past residencies include The MacDowell Colony (1995), The Djerassi Resident Artist Program (2003), Centrum’s Port Townsend Writers’ Conference (2005), and The Kalani Artist-in-Residence Program (2009). Jeff lives in San Diego.

This poem is not previously published.

Joseph O. Legaspi
Dispel the Angel

Lately his loneliness has sprouted wings.
It hovers above his darkened head like a desecrated
angel. It clouds his eyes with the cream of nostalgia.
It is the ghostly geyser of the spouting steam
when the kettle boils for his private tea.
In bed, balled up under the sheets,
an echoing cove of limbs, he thinks
of Orpheus: if only he could’ve contained
his forlorn love for Eurydice
and not turn back.
Such a gulf, sad bereavement.
Recently he’s gotten into the habit
of talking to himself, at first in front
of the foggy mirror while shaving,
the blade scraping off lather to reveal
his translucent face, but now, often, he talks
in movie theaters, public gardens, on the corner
of Houston and Ludlow. At dinner, he discusses
Magritte and Hopper with his duck l’orange.
The salt and pepper shakers can-can for him.
Later, he says to the lamp, I haven’t been touched
in weeks. He senses he’s transcended
the loneliness of the inanimate: of empty
corridors, of solitary light illuminating a house
on a stretch of highway in daytime,
of wet matches, rotting fruits, and dust.
On a summer’s morning, he then dispels
the sullied angel from his shower, makes
an appointment at his neighborhood salon
where the shampoo girl will shi-atsu his erogenous
scalp with her thin fingers. Soon after, on the subway,
sitting next to a man, their arms touch—heat traveling
by the wires of their hair—then rub slowly against one another
like the first friction of the earth.

Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of the poetry collection Imago (CavanKerry Press, 2007) as well as the chapbooks Aviary, Bestiary (Organic Weapon Arts, 2014) and Subways (Thrush Press, 2013). His work has appeared in anthologies including Coming Close (University of Iowa Press, 2013), Collective Brightness (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012), and Encounters (Skinner House Books, 2011), among others. Joseph’s poems have appeared in journals including Callaloo, Gay and Lesbian Review, Gulf Coast, MiPOesias, PEN International, Rattapallax, and many others. He has received a Fulbright Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, Global Filipino Award, David Blair Memorial Chapbook Prize, and Ledig House/Art Omi residency, among other prizes and awards. Joseph co-founded Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a non-profit organization serving Asian American writers and their work.

This poem first appeared in the journal From the Fishouse and also appears in the chapbook Aviary, Bestiary.

Brian Leung
Current Conditions

I.
1999, Partly Cloudy and we’re just not fucking
in New York. Canal street, a strip of white
sunlight and red-painted brick, these sidewalks
lined with stacks of cheap fleece and shiny watches
piled high like the polished vertebrae of rendered
reptiles. I’ve buried a boyfriend nine states away.

II.
52 degrees before a hard night, Cape Cods, heated
salsa in Hell’s Kitchen, monkey capture on the t.v.
Our dead host thinks he’s dating you. Photos of nipples
pressed against male lips. I want you to want to date
me. Chilled, he points out the closed off fireplace.
“Amontillado!” The wrong season for literary humor.

III.
Light rain. Outside the Strand, $1 book carts
unprotected, passive, like terminal patients wheeled
into a garden and forgotten. Stacks—the two of you search
desperately for poetry. There are a dozen ways to say no
to this dead man in his stubbled thirties. I wait, thinking
so many men of the wrong kind are just what we need.

IV.
A rainbow missing orange and violet over the Siberian
Elm of Union Square Park with its frantic squirrels
the color of mottled concrete. You keep we three
busy and away from bed. Younger and in this city
years ago on a subway platform, I first had sex
with a future boyfriend belonging to someone else.

V.
Gusty winds from the North-west. We order drinks, three
men looking for noise. The room is full of candidates
staring at bootleg videos of naked jocks in a locker room,
our faces scorecards. And the two of you arrive
at a drunken resolution one of you cannot mean. I will not
have you tonight, nor the living boy quick with a card.

VI.
The Forecast. This room of men, coats checked, elbows
on the bar, backs against the walls, hands melting
ice in vodka and rum. All this ticking hope
riding on tonight and every night from now on, riding on
the lists we make of each other, the lists we are
crossed off. And Terpsichore hovers, whispering
a tambourin while we nod and dose ourselves numb.

Brian Leung is the author of the novels Take Me Home (Harper Collins, 2010) and Lost Men (Three Rivers, 2007) as well as the short story collection World Famous Love Acts (Sarabande, 2004). Brian was the winner of the 2012 Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation. Other awards include the Asian American Literary Award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (2005), the Mary McCarthy Award for Short Fiction from Sarabande Books (2004), and the WILLA Award for Historical Fiction from Women Writing the West (2011). Brian is a professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at Purdue University.

Photo by Charles Jischke

This poem is not previously published.

Maxton Young-Jones
Update Status

*June 1st 12:15AM*
The_Original_Poster
I’m HIV positive.
I found out five days ago.
On my birthday
133 likes.

Childhood_Friend
Holy shit. I thought I knew you
33 likes.

Old_Coworker
This is too big for me
If you need anyone to talk to let me know.
please don’t
3 likes.

The_New_BDSM_Friend
Hey, I know that it doesn’t feel like it’s okay now
but it will be I’m poz too
and I know for a fact that
I’m poz too
your Leather Bar has plenty of resource pamphlets
I’m poz too
for your area.
We all love you. I think I might love you
Is that weird?
It’s weird
6 likes.

A_Leatherman
I still love you, boy, and I think you’re incredibly brave. I’m not going anywhere.
I fucking mean it
11 likes.

College_Friend
I agree with the leather daddy.
And the guy in the collar.
I thought I knew you
But so what if I didn’t?
You are not mine to know
8 likes.

A_Second_Childhood_Friend
Dude. Shit. How did you get AIDS?
Isn’t that a fag, thing?
Leatherman@Childhood_Friend_2
He has HIV not AIDS. And no it is not a ‘fag’ thing,
I will fuck you up
Besides, how he got it isn’t any of our business.
I fucking mean it
10 likes.
Mom@Leatherman@Childhood_Friend_2
No. I’m his mother. This is my business. This is my son
Childhood_Friend_2@Leatherman@Mom
u just got OWNED, fake ass biker.
You look just like my dad
I caught him
With a man

Mom
how could you do this to me?
I am logged into your sister’s account right now
and what I am reading is appalling.
flesh of my flesh
You embarrass me
I did not raise you to behave like this.
I did not raise you to put yourself in a position
blood of my blood,
you infect me
with ‘friends’ perverts
that could negatively affect your career.
Or mine.
Employers could SEE this.
My son
is with people wearing bondage masks
in the shapes of dogs
And that’s not even getting into your announcement.
Did you think that’s wise?
You will be denied insurance.
My son is…
You will be denied love
My son is…
Delete this and call me now.
Original_Poster@Mom
Mom, I’m scared.
I decided that owning my status is more important
than owning dollars.
And insurance denial
is an ADA violation. I think
They can’t discriminate based off of that.
My friends are here
you refuse to be
I’m scared
please see that
2 likes.
Mom@Original poster
I love you
Do not do this here.
But be a man I can accept

The_Ex_Boyfriend
You need to get on treatment immediately.
You can’t risk infecting someone else.
OHFUCKOHFUCKOHFUCK—
20 likes.
College_Friend@Ex_Boyfriend
I know everyone is liking this, but I mean I’m not gay
isn’t this kind of harsh?
but damn
12 likes.
Ex_Boyfriend_@College_Friend
He got it from irresponsible sex
I rode him, bare
skin to sweat to cum to sky to
I am within my rights to be
harsh. He’s a threat I miss him
as long as he’s sexually active.
I hate him
1 like.
Mom@Ex_Boyfriend@College_Friend
is this true?!
Jesus walks
on tainted blood
I know now
Original_Poster@Mom@Ex_Boyfriend_@College
No hands in the dark
and no. spread me open
Don’t talk about “how I got it” I was…they forced…
please.
I wish I could tell
Maybe you wouldn’t have left me

The_Leatherman
As much as I hate to say it,
and I do, I fucking mean it
That guy has a point.
You need to take care of your health, boy.
I’ll be willing to help however you need me to.
I once saw a wave
Sweep over ’85
14 likes
Original_Poster@Leatherman
Okay. I’ve been to the health clinic
but I may need rides to the doctor.
I’ll PM you. Thank you.
It’s a heavy thing to realize
being loved is being lucky
The responsibility hurts

A_Second_Childhood_Friend
So your a fag now, is that what you’re saying? my blood cries for yours
Original_Poster@Childhood_Friend_2
If that’s what you’re going to take from this then, yes. What were we once
to each other?
3 likes.

Mom
Son I am so disappointed in you right now.
There are pictures of you in chains
with no clothes on.
The civil rights movement did not happen
so you could do this.
You hang around bad company, so
What did you expect?
Everything happens
For a reason.
chained
you look like Jesus
I am afraid to pray

New_BDSM_Friend
Hey I know it’s not really my place,
but fuck your mother.
we were all thinking it
30 likes
New_BDSM_Friend@New_BDSM_Friend
Wait that sounds bad…
I will make you smile
41 likes

Michelle Foucault
I have said many things I regret
And fucked even more
But even at the end
Pleasure was not a lie.
I did not regret my body.
Don’t make your pulse a curse.

Easy-E
People still deny that my words
are a part of history.
They think I lost my mind.
But even at the end,
My mind was more than myth.
Don’t let it break your will.

Rock Hudson
I thought that love was not supposed to hurt
So I ran, darkening my own mirror.
But even at the end.
What else is there but love?
Don’t be me
Let it flagellate your heart. Feel.
What else is there?

Sister
Hey bro. It’s me. Not mom. Sorry about that. I booted her off.

Listen: I think this is the bravest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do and I’m proud to
call you my brother. I love you so much and will support you in whatever you
decide to do. After all you’re still you you know? You’re still the annoying asshole
that breaks my video games. I love you to bits. Thank god we don’t live together
anymore. <3

If you want to talk about it, just know I’m here. I know things are kinda FUBAR
with the mom-ster at the moment and I know it doesn’t excuse anything but you
DID just announce this without calling any of us. Kinda cold. Still: That doesn’t
matter. I forgive you. You were probably scared and you’re right to be: this is
scary! But I can tell you that this isn’t the end of the world. You’ve got so much
life to live and so much to teach. And if peeps can’t see how exceptional you are,
then take it as a challenge. Be exceptional until they notice.
I love you.
55 likes.
Original_Poster@Sister
I love you too.
200 likes

Maxton Young-Jones is a recipient of  The Claeyssens Prize for Playwrighting from the George Washington University and has written several theatrical works, the most recent of which, Raceplay, (co-authored with Nicole Cunninigham), was awarded a grant from Arena Stage and was a part of their creations of new works centered around the Civil War, Healing Wars. He lives in Washington, DC.

This poem is not previously published. In fact, it is Maxton’s first poetry publication and an occasion of great pride for The HIV Here & Now Project.