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.

Dante Micheaux
The Blue Pill

Things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted
to repeat, I repeat
—though I am mortal: it was. From the beginning
of what is known as time, it was.
Then the laws of the One God came usurping, surpassing.
His prophets true, love declaring | His
prophets false, wall erecting. But before, when the felled
timber sheltered all, divided none,
it was. Garden or forest, near water where the Sweet Flag
showed itself, was the way.
One man lingered too long, until another did the same:
two together clinging
remembering the words of prophets true, love declaring.
Of which, a poet told
and playwright pled and painter painted, people paraded
and then we were free
again, for a short time. The glorious darkness of it,
sublime shadows
among the trees, we knew the anonymity of freedom,
fearless unadulterated
primal freedom won’t make you feed it or clothe it
naked nurturing height
of our pleasure it was. We demanded daylight also,
pressing into discourse,
so free we were—it made envious death more envious 
of us. So place
the speck of sky in our opened hands. It was paradise.
We want it back.

Dante Micheaux is the author of Amorous Shepherd (Sheep Meadow Press, 2010). His poems and translations have appeared in PN Review, The American Poetry Review, Callaloo and Rattapallax, among other journals and anthologies. He has been shortlisted for the Benjamin Zephaniah Poetry Prize and the Bridport Prize. Micheaux’s honors include a prize in poetry from the Vera List Center for Art & Politics, the Oscar Wilde Award and fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation and The New York Times Foundation. He resides in London, and is completing a study on literary influence and sexuality.

Sister Glo Euro N’Wei
Leaving Stones

This is not a history lesson.

Inscribed on the walls of the temple in Prague are the names of families erased. I cannot fill my pockets with enough stones to leave on the graves of lost generations.

Second generation holocaust memories haunt me. I wasn’t there, have only stories and absence of stories. Second generation holocaust blood memories.

Driving down the highway outside of Prague on the way to Theresien, or on the bus outside of Berlin on the way to Sachsenhausen, I could not breathe from the weight of the spirits of family who took this same route to their death, could only cry and gasp and touch the wooden bedframes, the rough wood of tables in barracks, feel my great-grandfather’s hand touch mine across the years. Bruno. Second generation holocaust body memories.

Yad Vashem outside Jerusalem, the calling of names. The temple in Prague, the calling of names. The museum in DC, the calling of names. They call my name, my people, my family, my dead.

Stitched into panels of fabric of the Quilt are the names of people erased. I cannot fill my pockets with enough stones to leave on the graves of lost generations.

Second generation genocide memories haunt me. As I was discovering my queer identity, my brethren were dying, leaving their stories, their absence of stories. Second generation genocide spirit memories.

Walking around the panels, I could not breathe from the weight of the spirits. Eric was the first of my friends to escape to the promised land of San Francisco, the first to fall to the virus. I grew up with Ryan White, with Rock Hudson, with Magic Johnson and Greg Louganis, grew up watching the generation of men above me lose the generation above them. Second generation genocide soul memories.

The memorial grove in San Francisco, the calling of names. The Quilt, the calling of names. The candlelight vigils, the calling of names. They call my name, my people, my family, my dead.

How did these become my horrors? There are too many dead for me to comprehend the weight of spirits, the chorus of stories.

I was born with generations of ancestors lost to holocaust and genocide. I was born with fear in my blood, with diasporas and pograms and disease. I was born with the fever of burning synagogues, the fever of burning viral nightsweats. I was born with my blood flowing with the tears of grief of lost generations.

No wonder there are days when all I can say is, I’m tired, days when I can’t breathe, can’t see the ripples of acts of kindness, can’t feel the love, can’t hear the stories through the deafening sound of absent generations, can’t see past the fear of being swept up, targeted and slaughtered.

I cannot fill my pockets with enough stones to leave on the graves of lost generations. There are too many dead. I carry in my pocket one stone. One stone for survival. One stone to remember lost generations. One stone to mark my body as a memorial to them and their stories. One stone for hope that we will no longer have to be afraid.

This is not a history lesson. This is a survival lesson.

Sister Glo Euro N’Wei is a Seattle-based queer health advocate, femme faerie, poet and nun. She believes that the most radical and revolutionary act is learning to love our queer selves. She is drawn to sparkly objects and seeks to embody the transformative power of glitter and love in action.  As a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, The Abbey of St. Joan, Sister Glo has been nunning her way through Seattle’s queer nonprofit scene for way more than a decade, raising thousands of dollars for charities, and spreading love, joy and smiles.

As a poet, she was a student at Bent, Seattle’s queer writing school, for the better part of a decade, and served for four years on Bent’s Board of Directors. She performed on the stage of Bent’s Annual Mentor Showcase five  years in a row, in TumbleMe’s October 2009 production And God Said Come Inside, and in Gay City Arts’ May 2015 Spoken Word Poetry Festival Word Play. The Femme Family NYC published her piece, “Gender Wishes” in their Femme Family Zine #1: Coming Out in Fall 2009. In 2011, she self-published her first chapbook, God’s Chin and in 2012 her second, Leaving Stones. She is a graduate of Artist Trust’s Edge for Writers program.

Jeffery Berg
Anthony,

from your fingers keys
dangling out to me
on the VHS box of Psycho III
on the metal shelf

in the back of Bobby’s
gas station. I am barefoot
though I am not
supposed to be. I can’t

rent Rated R movies
so I study your cryptic
eyes, concrete steps,
Gothic house, blue evening sky

in your shirt’s shade. Mother’s
off her rocker again,
the tag line says. My Mom pays
for gas where wavy haired Bobby stands

in his cream T shirt, smoking away.
Once he asked her in his scarred voice
if my Dad was out of town. For the
redhead boy who lost

his parents and sister in a fire:
a jar of money on Bobby’s counter. You wanted
Psycho III to be in the vein of Blood
Simple. While filming, you got

your diagnosis. Bobby winks
in the convex. His store smells
like minnows
in a lake. Little stars.
Big stars. Always a realm we are
unaware of. The odds of ending
up at Bates Motel. The odds
of you dying on September 12^th. Years later

your wife on Flight
11 on 9/11. Before the fire,
I watched my friend Hank
shove the redhead

at the Boy Scout cookout.
Called him a fat fag. The redhead’s mom—
heavy and redheaded too—
with big eyeglasses and a brown blouse

and blue jeans took her son in
her arms and walked him
to their light blue Taurus. I am not

sure what you trigger
in me. What will you mean
to me when I am off my rocker
years later watching you in Psycho III

too many times in a row, craving
to be a shut-in or in a lonesome
desertwalk with a suitcase
towards your motel. You, a legacy

in a black sweater under
owl’s wings. I forgo a PET
ice cream with its little wooden spoon
for change for the redhead.

Jeffery Berg grew up in Six Mile, South Carolina and Lynchburg, Virginia. He received an MFA from NYU. His poems have appeared in glitterMOB, the Leveler, Court Green, the Gay & Lesbian Review, Map Literary, Assaracus, Harpur Palate, and No, Dear. He has written reviews for The Poetry Project Newsletter and Lambda Literary. A Virginia Center of the Creative Arts fellow, Jeffery lives in the East Village and blogs at jdbrecords.

This poem is not previously published.

Alfred Corn
To a Lover Who Is HIV-Positive

You ask what I feel.
Grief; and a hope
that springs from your intention
to forward projects as assertive
or lasting as flesh ever upholds.

Love; and a fear
that the so far implacable
cunning of a virus will smuggle away
substantial warmth, the face, the response
telling us who we are and might be.

Guilt; and bewilderment
that, through no special virtue of mine
or fault of yours, a shadowed affliction
overlooked me and settled on you. As if
all, always, got what was theirs.

Anger; and knowledge
that our venture won’t be joined
in perfect safety. Still, it’s better odds
than the risk of not feeling much at all.
Until you see yourself well in them,
love, keep looking in my eyes.

Alfred Corn is the author of numerous poetry collections including Stake: Selected Poems, 1972-1992 (Counterpoint, 1999) and, most recently, Unions (Barrow Street, 2014). He is also the author of two novels, Miranda’s Book (Eyewear Publishing, 2014) and Part of His Story (Mid List Press, 1997). He has written a study of prosody, The Poem’s Heartbeat (Copper Canyon, 2008), and two collections of critical essays, The Metamorphoses of Metaphor (Viking Adult, 1987) and Atlas: Selected Essays, 1989-2007 (University of Michigan Press (October 24, 2008). Corn lives in Rhode Island and spends part of the year in the UK.

This poem appeared in Contradictions (Copper Canyon, 2002) and is posted by permission of the author.

Marion Winik
Three Lost Boys
d. late 1980s, early 1990s

One was the snappish waiter at the Morning Call in the French Quarter, the guy who looked like a sailor: wavy gold hair, Aegean eyes, weathered, ruddy skin. Another was his boyfriend, a dignified sort with perfect posture and a trim moustache who cut my hair on a velvet barstool in their little slave-quarter apartment. Some of The Skater’s friends dropped him after I appeared on the scene, but these two didn’t mind.

Our first whisper of the nightmare ahead of all of us came after we’d moved to Austin and they came to visit, pulling up in our driveway in a clattering jalopy, purportedly stopping to refuel on their way out west. Neither was working anymore, they said, or feeling very well. Both were drinking heavily and stealing pills from the waiter’s mother, a frail person they had carted along with them from her home in Lake Charles. With their circumstances and charms so reduced, they quickly outstayed their welcome. Then stayed another month. At least it was the kind of thing that makes a good story. I told it for several years without understanding the bad part wasn’t the long distance phone bill, or the coffee cups full of port and Coca-Cola.

Their deaths were old news by the time we heard about them, but by then things had started to make their senseless sense. By then you might be handed an informational pamphlet with charts of mortality rates: rows labeled “Men who have sex with men,” “Injection drug users” and “Recipients of blood transfusion.” By then bravado was becoming very important.

A few years later, I watched my husband rollerblade through Jackson Square with a third boy from that crowd, a young protégée of a dress designer with a studio on Decatur Street. He had learned from the designer how to hand-paint silk and he made beautiful scarves. So adorable in his cut-off shorts, he was a bit of a liar, a wily Southern climber with a well-defined jaw and thick shiny hair, right out of Tennessee Williams.

Both he and my husband knew who was dead and who was alive, and they both knew whose side they were on.

Marion Winik is the author of First Comes Love (Random House, 1996) and The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2008.) Her other books are Telling (Random House, 1994); The Lunch-Box Chronicles (Random House, 1998); Rules for the Unruly (Simon and Schuster, 2001); Above Us Only Sky (Seal Press, 2005) and Highs in the Low Fifties: How I Stumbled Through the Joys of Single Living (Globe Pequot Press, 2013). She has also published two books of poetry, Nonstop (Cedar Rock Press, 1981) and Boycrazy (Slough Press, 1986).

Marion’s Bohemian Rhapsody column appears monthly at BaltimoreFishbowl.com, and her essays and articles have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, The Utne Reader, O, Salon, and Real Simple, among others. Her commentaries for All Things Considered are collected on the npr.org website, and she regularly reviews books for Newsday and Kirkus Review. A professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore, Marion was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction and has been inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. She has appeared on the Today Show, Politically Incorrectand Oprah.

To learn more, visit marionwinik.com.

This piece appears in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.

Marion Winik
The Skater
d. 1994

The third time I lost a lover I was 36: it was my first husband, the father of my children, the heart of my heart, a gay ex-figure skater I met at Mardi Gras in 1983, which had started out looking a lot like 1982 but was transformed into something else entirely. He was a beautiful young man, and beautiful things formed effortlessly in his wake: double axels, rosebushes, pale yellow-green cocktails made from Pernod. When I saw him tending bar in the French Quarter, I fell in love with him immediately, as did everyone.

Improbable as it seemed and seems, he loved me back. And so began his remarkable transformation from tank-topped Disco Thing to ponytailed stay-at-home dad. It helped that he was a person who felt no need to make sense of things, that despite his cool affect he was driven purely by emotion. Skater, hairdresser, gardener, lover of wall treatments, Virgin of Guadalupe icons and synth-pop compilations on cassette tape: yet when you saw him with his little sons, who slept in their baby seats on the floor of the hair salon, there was no doubt as to his true calling.

By the time we got married, we knew he was positive and I wasn’t. His old friends were already dying. I wholeheartedly believed we would be spared, but perhaps he did not.

There were six good years and two nightmarish ones, during which we took a fair shot at outdoing the virus in wrecking our own lives. Then there was the day he checked out of the hospice and came home to die. He had lived too long in the valley of the shadow, where time bloats up as if having an allergic reaction to your presence, where a week has a million days.

It made me sick when just four months after he gave up, better drugs were announced, but I don’t know if he would have waited even if he knew. Our brother-in-law, The Carpenter, had sent him postcards from a road he never wanted to see.

Many years later, when they were almost men, I gave his boys the tape he made them before he died, a tape I had listened to once and slipped into a drawer. They sat side by side on the bed, unbearably tall and handsome, one with the recorder on his knees, the other pretending to do something on his laptop. What sports do you play? asks their father, his voice high and soft from the morphine drip. He thinks he’s talking to the little guys who just visited him at the hospice. Are you taking good care of Mama? Do you remember the day at Grandmom’s when the boat floated away and Daddy had to jump in and save it so we could get home?

Marion Winik is the author of First Comes Love (Random House, 1996) and The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2008.) Her other books are Telling (Random House, 1994); The Lunch-Box Chronicles (Random House, 1998); Rules for the Unruly (Simon and Schuster, 2001); Above Us Only Sky (Seal Press, 2005) and Highs in the Low Fifties: How I Stumbled Through the Joys of Single Living (Globe Pequot Press, 2013). She has also published two books of poetry, Nonstop (Cedar Rock Press, 1981) and Boycrazy (Slough Press, 1986).

Marion’s Bohemian Rhapsody column appears monthly at BaltimoreFishbowl.com, and her essays and articles have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, The Utne Reader, O, Salon, and Real Simple, among others. Her commentaries for All Things Considered are collected on the npr.org website, and she regularly reviews books for Newsday and Kirkus Review. A professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore, Marion was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction and has been inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. She has appeared on the Today Show, Politically Incorrectand Oprah.

To learn more, visit marionwinik.com.

This piece appears in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.

Marion Winik
The Carpenter
d. 1993

One summer, at a swimming hole in Austin where we were playing backgammon and eating bagels, a couple of cute boys from our home state came up to introduce themselves. One of them, an immigrant Italian barber’s son, would become my brother, and not only because he married my sister seven years later.

He was our Dean Moriarty, irresistible, legendary, bossy and full of ideas. He could build anything, fix anything, and he could talk to dogs. He was the first white person I knew to appreciate hip-hop. He had a union card. He talked like Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. He had scholarships to art schools in Kansas City and New York, and he loved Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In Texas he spray-painted the name of my first book on a railroad bridge, and when we moved to New York, zoomed around at night printing the shapes of T-shirts on the walls. He and my sister hopped yachts in Florida, sent postcards from his relatives’ town in Italy, shipped home little packages of heroin from Thailand. He was not afraid of needles.

Next to one another, our lives were an object lesson in the class structure of the late twentieth-century East Coast suburb, the Italians versus the Jews. For example, the vast difference in the amount of money and attention devoted to our flat feet, lazy eyes and crooked teeth, our little talents and our educations, largely with the same results. He mocked me for how carefully I divided the phone bill in our communal apartment, which, I had to point out, was furnished entirely through his trash-picking. We used to laugh ourselves sick with our version of Sonny and Cher’s theme song: Well I don’t know if all that’s true, but you got me and baby, I got you. Babe. Doo doo doo doo. Fuck you, babe.

Do you remember when it seemed impossible that people as young and strong as this would lie with their heads shaved and their bones sticking out wearing diapers in St. Vincent’s Hospital? 1993, the year he died, was near the peak of the dying, and by the end of the century about a half million American boys, and a few girls, would die of AIDS. Twenty-five million worldwide now. It-was-his-time-he-is-at-peace-he-is-free-from-pain-at-last. Who wants to hear these things? I’d rather take the whole last few years of his life, the addiction, the sickness, the breakup, crumple them up and hide them like a paper full of mistakes you don’t want anyone to see. I miss him more, not less, as time goes by.

Marion Winik is the author of First Comes Love (Random House, 1996) and The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2008.) Her other books are Telling (Random House, 1994); The Lunch-Box Chronicles (Random House, 1998); Rules for the Unruly (Simon and Schuster, 2001); Above Us Only Sky (Seal Press, 2005) and Highs in the Low Fifties: How I Stumbled Through the Joys of Single Living (Globe Pequot Press, 2013). She has also published two books of poetry, Nonstop (Cedar Rock Press, 1981) and Boycrazy (Slough Press, 1986).

Marion’s Bohemian Rhapsody column appears monthly at BaltimoreFishbowl.com, and her essays and articles have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, The Utne Reader, O, Salon, and Real Simple, among others. Her commentaries for All Things Considered are collected on the npr.org website, and she regularly reviews books for Newsday and Kirkus Review. A professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore, Marion was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction and has been inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. She has appeared on the Today Show, Politically Incorrectand Oprah.

To learn more, visit marionwinik.com.

This piece appears in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.

Marion Winik
The Art Star
d. 1990

I must have taken the same acid he did at a Grateful Dead concert when we were fifteen, because his drawings look just like what I saw: the writhing, intertwined dancers, the fat black line between good and evil, the undulating burstingness of everything. His whole adorable symbology—the crawling baby, the barking dog, the blowjobs and dolphins, TV sets and serpents, flying saucers, dollar signs and ticking clocks—made perfect sense to me the moment I saw it. Out the dirty window of an A train stopped at West Fourth Street in 1981. It was like when I read “Howl” for the first time: I felt I’d been waiting to see it, or that I had seen it already, that I just wanted to keep seeing it again. Well, I was in luck about that. Soon he was everywhere.

Fifteen years later, my mother and I saw a retrospective of his work at a museum in Toronto. There were glass cases of his diaries and comic strips and drawings from when he was a kid. I was already in tears when I saw his birthdate, May 4, 1958, three days before mine. Also that year came Prince and Madonna and Grandmaster Flash, as well as poor crazy Darby Crash, poor crazy Michael Jackson and poor crazy Nancy Spungen. Also my second husband, the anarchist philosopher-king. It was a Chinese Year of the Dog, and the best minds of our generation were the dog-minds, marking, always marking, always wagging our tails, thinking about sex, doing it, no sense of public or private, always wolfing the treats, never ashamed to slice the air with our proud egomaniac bark. Where would pop culture be without us? The simplest things he wrote, like The only time I am happy is when I am working, gave me chills. So angry about AIDS but calmly accepting of his death at 31.

Marion Winik is the author of First Comes Love (Random House, 1996) and The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2008.) Her other books are Telling (Random House, 1994); The Lunch-Box Chronicles (Random House, 1998); Rules for the Unruly (Simon and Schuster, 2001); Above Us Only Sky (Seal Press, 2005) and Highs in the Low Fifties: How I Stumbled Through the Joys of Single Living (Globe Pequot Press, 2013). She has also published two books of poetry, Nonstop (Cedar Rock Press, 1981) and Boycrazy (Slough Press, 1986).

Marion’s Bohemian Rhapsody column appears monthly at BaltimoreFishbowl.com, and her essays and articles have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, The Utne Reader, O, Salon, and Real Simple, among others. Her commentaries for All Things Considered are collected on the npr.org website, and she regularly reviews books for Newsday and Kirkus Review. A professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore, Marion was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction and has been inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. She has appeared on the Today Show, Politically Incorrectand Oprah.

To learn more, visit marionwinik.com.

This piece appears in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.

Marion Winik
The Junkie
d. 1991

In my youth I was often told, usually by men, that I talked too much, so it was a relief to finally meet a guy who talked more. He was the son of a Chicano boxer from Texas retired to Pinebrook, New Jersey, the hometown of my future brother-in-law, The Carpenter. Growing up, they called him Bean—because he was Mexican, I reminded my sister the other day. Oh, boys will be boys: first tree houses and mischief, then girls and cigarettes, next roofing jobs and heroin. When we lived in the fifth-floor walkup on West Sixteenth Street, he’d show up at the door with his terrible complexion and boundless enthusiasm, sometimes with dope, sometimes sick, sometimes with his huge, silent friend Chris, sometimes with a matchbook on which he had written a phone number to buy a car, or drawn a diagram of how to grow opium poppies on the windowsill.

Remember how we all loved him despite his being somewhat unloveable? my sister said. I do. Having met him at what was probably the low point of my life, the infamous 1982, I was eager for nonjudgmental companionship, and was particularly transfixed by the way he concentrated on retracting the syringe when helping me shoot up. Together we watched my blood unfurl like fireworks in the clear liquid. I followed him around for a month or so, until he shrugged me off by shacking up with an old high school girlfriend. I was living far away by the time they all started dying. My sister remembers that on the way to his funeral she and her husband stopped at the SPCA. They adopted a blond lab and named it Bean. This was how we were back then, she sighs, meaning drugs flattened everything. On the other hand, when my son was 16 he named the puppy I gave him for Christmas after his dead father, so maybe they were just young.

Marion Winik is the author of First Comes Love (Random House, 1996) and The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2008.) Her other books are Telling (Random House, 1994); The Lunch-Box Chronicles (Random House, 1998); Rules for the Unruly (Simon and Schuster, 2001); Above Us Only Sky (Seal Press, 2005) and Highs in the Low Fifties: How I Stumbled Through the Joys of Single Living (Globe Pequot Press, 2013). She has also published two books of poetry, Nonstop (Cedar Rock Press, 1981) and Boycrazy (Slough Press, 1986).

Marion’s Bohemian Rhapsody column appears monthly at BaltimoreFishbowl.com, and her essays and articles have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, The Utne Reader, O, Salon, and Real Simple, among others. Her commentaries for All Things Considered are collected on the npr.org website, and she regularly reviews books for Newsday and Kirkus Review. A professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore, Marion was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction and has been inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. She has appeared on the Today Show, Politically Incorrectand Oprah.

To learn more, visit marionwinik.com.

This piece appears in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.