Scott Chalupa
Intercession

The day before his hearse drove through the moon,
you said everyone wished they could be us, then asked
who wouldn’t want to be a 6’2 glamazon
trouncing the world in studded McQueen brogues.
If fashion were cocks we’d be kings, quipped your young trick,
and you scoffed left in perfect pivot, snapping the whole way,
ordered him shake you another jellybean-tini, began
another of your histrionic histories.

In the days before the beige invasion
crept across our Magic Queendom, queers ruled
the vast Arts & Crafts bungalow dreamscape
stretching from Upper Kirby to Downtown,
glitzing the then-vacant homes of Montrose,
making peace with dealers, gang-bangers, pimps,
and honeys-by-the-hour—a tramp-stamped
better-than-fabled era of no less than
30 queer bars oozing like spent money
shots between Shepherd and Brazos, up and
down lower Westheimer—each one rising
from columns of fire christened pink lightning…

Dancing a half-conscious apocalypso
on the scuzzed-out dancefloor of what was once
Pacific Street, now a shadow dubbed Blur, soon to be
blight on the beige yuppie stucco palazzos
plaquing up the arteries of our homo heartland,
you prophesied we’d rule again with glittered fist.

When your lover came home for hospice,
no longer able to survive the seventh floor
AIDS ward at Park Plaza hospital, you collapsed,
clawed yourself almost upright with jellybean-tinis,
brogues stained with bitters, spikes of cooked coke
jabbed into your hands and feet,
a soured nightlife aperitif.

We pray your hearse will not lag long behind,
that you may know how timely death can be
such graceful sublimation.

Scott Chalupa writes in an attic near the margins of Columbia, SC, where he is pursuing an MFA at the University of South Carolina. A Houston, TX native, his work has appeared in Houston & Nomadic Voices Magazine, Dark Matter, Two Hawks Quarterly, and other venues. He has led workshops for Houston Poetry Fest, the Alzheimer’s Association, and the Houston Public Libraries’ SpeakOUT! Series for LGBT writers.

This poem is not previously published.

Raymond Berry
equilibrium

cd4 normalizes, cells quit attacking own
weight returns, cheeks become full
no night sweats or brown-stained sheets
every scar fades
limbs less numb
strength comes back full
meals eaten without releasing, coffee without gas
all because of one injection
magic liquid needled under flesh
and
scarecrows return to human
touch once more without the prayer
leave toothbrush and razor next to sink
no separate china for family visits
because we are who we were
before death erased us

Raymond Berry is the author of Diagnosis (Wasteland Pres, 2010). His poems have appeared in WarpLand, Reverie, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies To Be Left with the Body,(AIDS Project Los Angeles, 2008), edited by Cheryl Clarke and Steven G. Fullwood, and Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose and Art on HIV/AIDS (Third World Press, 2010), edited by Kelly Norman Ellis and ML Hunter. He is a recipient of the 2012 James Richardson Jr. writing scholarship. A native Chicagoan, Berry teaches English at the City Colleges of Chicago.

This poem appears in Diagnosis.

Scott Wiggerman
Surrender, Dorothy

When you told me you were positive,
I smirked and vamped, *You slut!*
How I hated needles and hospitals!
What else but love could compel
me to accompany you each time?
But I believe it was then I began
to think of your dick as a syringe.

Being sexy when you got hard
was a tribute to my acting skills,
your cum a shot of poisons
that could kill me. I flinched
every time you came—even with a condom—
like anticipating the prick
of the needle in pinched but accepting flesh.

I continued to swallow, too.
Spitting seemed futile,
dental dams ridiculous.
Your spunk tasted ever more acrid.
My imagination, or your meds?

I positively loved you, I joked.
Would it be so bad if we shared
the virus like a pair of banished lovers
melting in the bond of blood?
Would it take surrender to have your dick
be just a dick again?

Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets (purple flag, 2015), Presence (Pecan Grove, 2011), and Vegetables and Other Relationships (Plain View, 2000); and the editor of several volumes, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry (Dos Gatos, 2011), Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga (Dos Gatos, 2013), and Wingbeats II (Dos Gatos, 2014). He is an editor for Dos Gatos Press in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

This poem is not previously published.

Michael Tyrell
Birthday, Anniversary, Sympathy, Blank

She thought of zoos in parks, how when cities were under siege, during world wars, people ate the animals.
—Lorrie Moore, “You’re Ugly, Too”

I go to market to buy every card I can think of
but they are out. The racks are empty & I can’t help
picturing a vacant zoo because the animals are eaten
because there’s a war on, & why people say
abattoir when they really mean slaughterhouse.
The clerk informs me, “We are not making cards anymore.
From now on it will be only singing microchips
and hologram cakes, a sexy dream downloaded
into the brain the evening before a big day.”
My order would be too late, anyway. It is your birthday
and they have you in Intensive Care, in the unit
a semiprivate. You think that sounds military & erotic.
Are you sure there are no cards left? “I’ll check,” the clerk says,
pickle-faced, slithering down his corridor of monitors.
A woman on one console goes on & on about satellites,
how every satellite has a pulse, & itinerants from other planets,
if they have hearts, will know what we are, what substance
is beating or brooking or conspiring against us.
Birthday, Anniversary, Sympathy, Blank.
I can’t ever pretend to browse but I somehow like the wall murals,
the idealized George Eliot & her self-possessed smirk,
I can’t remember a word from her novels,
have I finished any of them, here I am somewhere
between Adam Bede & Daniel Deronda,
and it’s your birthday & Intensive Care has you,
you are expiring & by now you are expired, I’ll have to
redirect the subscription & collect the insurance,
delete you from my database, laser out the tattoo,
scribble the obit, hock the potboilers with your name in them,
white-out the embarrassing marginalia,
suck dry the account, dishonor the ticket, unearth the certificate,
permanently pull the phone like a bad tooth,
chip down the initialed box elder, edit all anecdotes
to the first tense, chuck the leftover tangelos,
let the koi back into the pond, dump your cacti,
scissor your documents because the shredder’s broken,
let your memoirs fall into the bathwater so no one can read them,
think up replies to insults I could never answer,
donate your gabardines, find significance in our ultimate
exchanges, appease your creditors, & saw the futon in half.
There’s always the risk of an invitation finding its way to you,
not unlike the poor dead coffee heiress who got one decades later.
The naked guy sprints around the store,
a rabid mongrel loose in a Vatican.
Those who make us secure will arrive before my clerk.
If someone naked were arrested now would you laugh,
I’m not sure you would stick around for it to happen,
you never cared for surprises, & it’s
true, surprise parties were never a surprise to you,
you preferred saying I was invited instead of alive

Michael Tyrell is the author of the poetry collection The Wanted (The National Poetry Review Press, 2012) and co-editor, with Julia Spicher Kasdorf, of the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2007). His poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Agni, The Best American Poetry 2015, Fogged Clarity, Iowa Review, New England Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. Michael lives in New York and teaches writing at NYU.

This poem originally appeared in Gulf Coast.

D.C. Wiltshire
uncle David/poz

I have spent so much time
trying to transmute you into words,
the insistent off-balance whir of the washing machine,
the white pulse of youth,
a searing singing opera of

name, place, time.

you were so terrible with children. but soft
with the adult unraveling
like a Cirque dancer from the sky
on twisted ribbon briefly
whose art dies when tiptoes touch ground.

name, place, time.

soon I’ll be seen
older than you were
when you washed away gently on red seas
a reed-thin rowboat for one:

shit,
that I should be held
to the same key of brilliance
as you a phantom leaping

D.C. Wiltshire, who shares both his first and middle names with his uncle David, is a sometime preacher, chaplain, and poet living in Durham, NC.

This poem is not previously published. This is D.C. Wiltshire’s first poetry publication.

Nicole Sealey
Virginia Is for Lovers

At LaToya’s Pride picnic,
Leonard tells me he and his longtime
love, Pete, broke up.
He says Pete gave him the house
in Virginia. “Great,” I say,
“that’s the least his ass could do.”
I daydream my friend and me
into his new house, sit us in the kitchen
of his three bedroom, two bath
brick colonial outside Hungry Mother Park,
where, legend has it, the Shawnee raided
settlements with the wherewithal
of wild children catching pigeons.
A woman and her androgynous child
escaped, wandering the wilderness,
stuffing their mouths with the bark
of chokecherry root.
Such was the circumstance
under which the woman collapsed.
The child, who could say nothing
except hungry mother, led help
to the mountain where the woman lay,
swelling as wood swells in humid air.
Leonard’s mouth is moving.
Two boys hit a shuttlecock back and forth
across an invisible net.
A toddler struggles to pull her wagon
from a sandbox. “No,” Leonard says,
“It’s not a place where you live.
I got the H In V. H I—”
Before my friend could finish,
and as if he’d been newly ordained,
I took his hands and kissed them.

Nicole Sealey is the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole is a Cave Canem graduate fellow as well as the recipient of a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. Her other honors include the 2014 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a 2013 Daniel Varoujan Award and the 2012 Poetry International Prize. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2011, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Third Coast, and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the Programs Director at Cave Canem Foundation.

This poem previously appeared in The American Poetry Review.

Robert Carr
Before You

there was a youth
before death
he jerked off
his joy
in the mirror
he jerked off
brushing teeth
under pilled robe
in the spine
of open books
on the fantasy
Jonny Quest
on Hadji in
the cowboy hat
of the Rifleman
he didn’t know
he didn’t know
that you
would show up
take the toothbrush
take the robe
the books
the poetry
rip off the story
crack the screen
he didn’t know
that you were out
there waiting.

Robert Carr is a new poetic voice emerging in the Boston area. Robert’s poems draw on his own gay coming of age in the first years of the AIDS epidemic, thirty years of service to people with HIV and other infectious diseases, his long term partnership with his husband Stephen and lessons learned from their son Noah. He lives in Malden, Massachusetts.

This poem is previously unpublished. In fact, The HIV Here & Now Project is proud to say that this is Robert Carr’s first publication.

Jenna Cardinale
Current Events

The assembly guest-speaker went off-
script.

He wasn’t asked to speak
to the other grades.
He wasn’t invited back.

A man introduced as Butch.
In acid-wash denim. In a Jheri curl.
In a very white town.

I don’t know a lot about narrative.
Those elements.
Who owns a story.
Who is telling what’s
news. Even now.

His story about drugs and sex and
something we’d heard before
because this was the 90s.

He was full of gestures.

“Had I known then.
Had I known then.
Listen, had I known.

I woulda cut the bitch off.
Man, cut this bitch off.” 

It’s a hard living, informing
the present. It’s a living.

Jenna Cardinale’s poems have appeared in Court Green, Horse Less Review, Verse Daily, 6×6, and Word For/ Word, among other journal. With Christine Scanlon, she curates Readings in Color, a mostly-monthly poetry series in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn. She lives in Brooklyn.

Julian Gewirtz
Psyche in Bed

To the god. Tonight
there are no visitors.

Stormclouds rise
over the near mountains, beyond

the finch-dense forest.
For nine and ninefold nights

I have waited
in darkness, lulled

only by wind-whine—
unmoving, bedded, mind-whir

muddles and buzzes
into body. From between

teeth seeps forth
a strange issue,

dries linen-white, paler
than graying face.

Untouchable.
Sores collapse open

skin-strata, shallow
basins, suppurated

sediment. Nerve-sensed
I survey the subsidence—

does blood slow
and flow around the wound?

Silt crumbles, heats,
as tubers sprout through

the eschar, onion-stalks
of bone, pungent. The blighted

tendons. Each night
hands return to rub

limbs with damp cloths
of camphor, but I know

my stench persists. Grows
the sullens like slow-flowing

moonwater. Brackish,
blackening, the unrushing

slough, breeding
like rancid trout roe, dug

into gravel redds. Eels
draw close, dazed. Residue

of river, place where streaming
stops. Tawny trace. Place

where water slows, and flow
is fallow. Have I fallen?

My shocked knees molder
and fold. My legs

lapse. I will not leave.

•

At times I vision
a shaded window.
The voice-veil

with greened gaze
avers: no grove
can grow on this hillock,

and if below it
somewhere flow
sap-slinks

they are locked
in a rock-drum,
deep and unrising.

And what fate,
spun from a frayed
thread uncut

by the rust-knife,
will sphere me to stay
if Eros does not—?

•

Bright: a begonia blooms. Yolky calyx whorls
below the twisted stigmas. Petalless yellow: the sepals.

•

Disorder
of grain-sand and light.
The love-wind, careless,

carrying a little
of chaff and seed, lifting
what is too
heavy. It came

to pass. Day
plunged into the far massif,
shatter-glass
into the deepening

where by my hands
you were and were,

hand-flail’s whining
unsettles the scale-shells,
then fan to the thresh-pile
vans of air-holding

the color of your hair
husk-grey. I was given
no tools. Raised my hands
to let your name rise . . .

From height-
over-the-mountain shadows,
the winds, thinned-warm,

startle cool eddies into
dry-spooled air,
unweaving the grain,

the half-crazed scatter of field-fray,

hazed. Rainclouds
follow the crossing
currents. Streaming
from the sky’s raised face.

Were you there, resting
on the low hay-bed,
looking toward me as I left

as a last breeze lazed
the wooden hold in
the granary.
What remains is only

cold and golden.

Julian Gewirtz was born in New Haven, CT. He was a Harvard undergraduate and is currently pursing a doctorate in history at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The New Republic, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Yale Review, among other publications. His critical writing has been published by The Economist, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal.

This poem was previously published in The Harvard Advocate.

Celeste Gainey
To a Dunhill Lighter

after Judith Vollmer
for Eugene

Luxe vessel of tiny fire
no thief will pick you from my pocket

no suave offer of a light by the gate
of Gramercy Park will hint Forget me

no HIV-bearing lover want you back
when it’s over Move on, I’ll be dead soon

I prize your smooth snap of ignition
the butane-blue flame

ricocheting from his world to mine
outlining long & manicured fingers

O, little cube of elegance
conjured from a gay boy’s make-believe

in the dry hills of Modesto
He places you in my palm

your 24-karat heft surprises
and weighs me down

He says goodbye turns away
Casablanca-style

my fingers fold & press against
your black lacquered case

When I see him again
it will be in the hush & glitter of dreams

Celeste Gainey is the author of the full-length poetry collection, the GAFFER (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2015), and the chapbook In the land of speculation & seismography (Seven Kitchens Press, 2011), runner-up for the 2010 Robin Becker Prize. The first woman to be admitted to the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees as a gaffer, she has spent many years working with light in film and architecture.

This poem is not previously published.