Aaron DeLee
SELFIE: TWINK

(twingk) n. 1. a glittering flake that’s thin, pointed, and shades the eye; capable of drifting, falling into the wrong spot and cutting a cornea on the laser-lit dancefloor; a speck in the spectrum ready to be swept up with a thousand others. 2. a terse period in one’s life when briefs barely tense at the waistband, often slipping off; when one repeatedly listens to, sings, relates to Popular and Part of Your World. 3. young enough to believe in fairy tales, the things daddies tell their boys before going to bed– ex.: Poz here, but on meds, very healthy, undetectable viral load — non-contagious. Actually makes a safer fuck than others. Just can’t do condoms any more, can’t feel anything through them. 4. Slang: the pejorative for one who’s easily slung; a lightweight accustomed to the vulgar, an obscene scene, characterized by a lack of good breeding like public schooled Hoosiers whose Health classes skipped this subject. Also see: Brent Corrigan; Peter Pan.

Aaron DeLee’s poems have appeared in Court Green, Assaracus, The Goodmen Project, and other publications. He received his BA from Loyola University Chicago and his MFA from Northwestern University.

This poem is not previously published.

Day Merrill
Before the Bridge

Before the bridge, the river flowed down into the lake.
Turning its face to the sun, it poured itself into the waiting.
No roads then, no paved walkways, no paths.
Just the river, the banks, the sun.
Deep pools and twirling eddies. Cool spots where trees
bent down to kiss the river as it danced its way home.
Any dark places forged by nature in her wisdom, not by man.
Tumult from storms—thunder and lightning, not gunshots.
Sharp rocks and smooth stones, not spent needles and empty vials.
Ecstasy from the simple act of creation celebrating itself.

You sit before the bridge and seek solace, or is it redemption?
No matter, it is affirmation both sought and given by you and the river.

If I could, I would unroll the bandages of your life,
Uncover the source of hurts done to you, and
those done to yourself.
Winding back the years, exposing
the bare flesh of your life to sun and light
until you were like that baby in the manger,
Tiny, new and perfect.
Then I would swaddle you in something strong enough
to last your whole life through.

I am no miracle worker. I do not know how to keep you safe.
So I knit you poems with prayers stitched into every line,
Asking only that God hold you
in the love you have always deserved.

Day Merrill’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin Roof Press, Halcyon, The Binnacle, Contemporary Rural Social Work, and Quick Brown Fox. After a career as an English teacher and a university administrator, she became a career coach. Day lives in Collingwood, Ontario on the shores of Georgian Bay/Lake Huron where with her husband and a rescued dog and cat.

This poem is not previously published.

C. Russell Price
Mr. Doomsday

Your blue jeans are ripped at the crotch
and tonight I’m getting that t-shirt wet.

You make me your handsomest pig as I puff
through your pit patch: your workday armor.

If you are wearing red underwear,
you will want to fuck me while looking at my sister.

You say with a straight-edge chagrin,
“You can ask only one question. Put on that wig.”

I save pleasantries and want only untamable baggage,
I kiss the Needle’s party gift,

I lick the Razor’s bracelet defeat.
I take you in me to plant a cherry bomb.

Tonight’s sex soundtrack is another pretty dead thing.
When the loop begins, it’s time to pay up,

shower, get gone. Returning, you smell like me
and I give you one on the house

because I know the sad boy scent.
You pull out with the breaking news.

Tom Brokaw still looks amazing.
The time to unmute the TV and stop jackhammering has arrived.

The latest great flood starts with an unstickable American faucet,
a whole Floridian town with its hands on its hips,

bubble gum smacking: each pop a “so this is it?”
With you limp beside me, I imagine: first the tub, then Tampa,

then the whole South is underwater. This John will rule
with an iron cock ring and super hero calves.

We will start with the Stars and Bars;
we burn the flag and name the dead.

Your family stops using the N-word,
your parents rainbow bumper sticker the whole state of VA.

This Wet Earth has no dry land for your bullshit.
The big mouths have been busted and the bullies’re buried.

My sex education consisted of touch → kiss → AIDS,
Brandon Blankenship: you were wrong and I don’t fucking forgive you.

My John and I fuck every day because we’re the last left in Chicago.
We pretend the market’s still standing and closing at 10.

No other world but this one now.
When my John is gone too long,

I think he’s found a third
breathing thing in our fish tank home.

I wonder if he pays them after, if he says my name
like a foreclosed amusement park.

If rather than questioning, he simply says “I’m sorry for bombing
those islands that you loved.”

C. Russell Price is a genderqueer poet originally from Virginia but lives in Chicago. Previous publications include: Assaracus, Court Green, Glitterwolf, MiPOesias, Weave, and elsewhere. They are a 2015 Lambda Fellow in Poetry. They currently work with TriQuarterly and Story Club Magazine. Their chapbook Tonight We Fuck The Trailer Park Out of Each Other is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in Summer 2016.

The HIV Here & Now Project
Atomic Numbers (Some Viruses Are Manmade): Found Poem

Thursday marked the 70th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. A second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later.

350,000: Population of Hiroshima before the bombing,
of which 40,000 were military personnel.

140,000: Estimated death toll, including those who died
from radiation-related injuries and illness through Dec. 31, 1945.

300,000: Total death toll to date, including those who have died
from radiation-related cancers.

1.2 million: Population of Hiroshima today.

31,500: Height in feet (9,600 meters) from which the B-29
Enola Gay dropped the “Little Boy” bomb.

2,000: Height in feet (600 meters) at which the bomb
exploded 43 seconds after it was dropped.

3,000-4,000: The estimated temperature in Celsius (5,400-7,200 Fahrenheit)
at ground zero seconds after the detonation.

8,900: Approximate weight of the “Little Boy” bomb
in pounds (about 4 metric tons).

1,600: Radius in feet (500 meters) from ground zero
in which the entire population died that day.

90: Percent of Hiroshima that was destroyed.

45: Minutes after the 8:15 a.m. blast that a “black rain”
of highly radioactive particles started falling.

3-6: Weeks after the bombing during which most of the victims
with severe radiation symptoms died.

10 million: Folded paper (“origami”) cranes
that decorate the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima each year.

This poem appears as an article by the Associated Press in The New York Times today.

Sources: Hiroshima city government; Japan Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare; Japan Foreign Ministry.

Ron Mohring
Now That You Know

How would you like it, he said, if I stuck
my cock in your pocket
and pissed in your boot? —Sure, why not, I said (it was a leather bar),
but he turned and fled,
unable to cope with specifics. This happened last night, but lately
it’s been the story
of my life. I think I’ll take out a personal ad: GWM, healthy & poz,
seeks partner in crime . . .
Make no mistake, I’m needy and willing to pay. I’m having
that dream again:
my daddy makes me blow him behind the tool shed. I swear
I can’t say if that’s
a memory or not; there are places even I refuse to go.
At the Now That You Know
workshop, our humpy leader asks for a list of body fluids
(he’s writing on the whiteboard)
but everyone’s afraid to say shit, so I riff off cum, jizz, cream, spunk,
spooge—he writes one word,
semen, and I laugh, a contestant on the wrong
game show. I’m only here
because they’ll do my blood work free; there’s not a thing
I don’t know (now that it’s
too late) about HIV, but some of these poor boobs look really scared,
so I decide to shut up
and dumb down. It’s two more hours of How to Wear a Condom,
How to Tell Your Partner,
a slide show tucked in somewhere, with optimistic pies and graphs.
I refuse to kid
myself: I figure on ten good years if I’m lucky and the Republicans
don’t round us up
and stick us on some island (or worse). Humpy Leader tries
to peek at my yellow
pad where I’m doodling a mesomorph—flashy teeth, killer pecs,
Tom-of-Finland
salami halfway to his knees—We’re losing you, he says. What’s that?
and what can I do
but grin and say This? Hey, this is for you.

Ron Mohring is the author of Survivable World (Word Works, 2004), winner of the 2003 Washington Prize, as well as the chapbooks Touch Me Not (Two Rivers, 2005), Beneficence (Pecan Grove, 2003), The David Museum (2002, New Michigan Press), and Amateur Grief (Thorngate Road, 1998), which won the Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award. His poems are included in the anthologies Common Wealth (Penn State, 2005), Poetic Voices Without Borders (Gival Press, 2005), How to Be This Man (Swan Scythe, 2003), Sweet Jesus: Poems about the Ultimate Icon (Anthology Press, 2002), and Things Shaped in Passing (Persea, 1997). His poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Artful Dodge, Bay Windows, DIAGRAM, Gettysburg Review, Hanging Loose and many other journals. After 35 years away, Ron Mohring has returned to his home town and recommends you read George Hodgman’s Bettyville for an inkling of what that feels like. He is the founding editor of Seven Kitchens Press.

This poem is previously unpublished.

Ryan Black
On the Cooling Board

Your logic can be overtaken by your sense as a parent.
Michele James
New York Newsday, Sept. 2, 1985

Cardboard cut to mean a grave; pall
and procession, the boy holds his breath

like a seal. Keep still, she says—his mother—
a prompt. He throws his leg over the makeshift

box, shuts his eyes. Greasepaint, talc. Rubberneck,
and their doubt’s laid bare: Save Our Kids,

Keep AIDS Out. South Ozone Park, P. S. 63.
Not the faith-stung or poor, but a disheartened

class. Placards spy the walkways. Lucky one,
keep still. Your likeness is enough

to fool this world.

Ryan Black’s poems appear or are forthcoming in AGNI, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He was a Norma Millay Ellis Foundation Fellow at The Millay Colony for the Arts. He is the Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing at Queens College/CUNY.

This poem is previously unpublished.

Michael Klein
District 9

It was a metaphor
for AIDS, for Apartheid, for the other
living on the margin—to think
they only just want to get into the place
everybody else already lives in.

There was a time
when all revolts began
where we lived on the margin
to state, and then to bend. To make the margin wider.

Michael Klein’s fourth book of poems (and some prose), When I Was a Twin, will appear in September 2015 from Sibling Rivalry Press. His first book, 1990, tied with James Schuyler to win a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He is also the author of two books of prose, The End of Being Known and Track Conditions, both published by the University of Wisconsin Press. He teaches writing in the MFA Program at Goddard College and at Hunter College in New York and lives with his husband, Andrew Hood, in New York and Provincetown.

This poem appears in The Talking Day (Sibling Rivalry, 2013) and is reprinted with kind permission of Sibling Rivalry Press.

Jameson Fitzpatrick
If You Go Back to San Francisco

you could sun some days on deck
but you couldn’t skip time like stones
over water. Deep in the Mission
none of the boys would be you
back in your leather jacket and jean shorts
back in the thick of youth, none of them
hearing the music you’re remembering.
Play it again: which friends you fucked
at which party, whose heart you broke,
who died. Somebody was an artist,
everyone was a writer, or else
the other way, back to San Francisco
I’ll follow faithful as a shadow
changing shape. Look, the club
where you used to dance with Miguel,
gone now—and the men who watched,
what happened to them? No filter
can compete with the fog like it spread
the nights that repeat yourself
young and naked in your mind
in the crowd’s warm center, never darker
your hair. Blond thing I am, younger
than you were then: do I hold you there?
Or, like a matte around a portrait,
sharpen your edge.

Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of the chapbook Morrisroe: Erasures (89plus/LUMA Publications, 2014), which collects 24 takes on a single undated, untitled text work by the artist Mark Morrisroe, who died of AIDS-related illness in 1989. Jameson’s poems have appeared in The American Reader, The Awl, The Literary Review, The Offing, Poetry, Prelude, and the Tin House online feature Broadside Thirty (poems in thirty lines or less by poets thirty or younger), among others. He is the editor of the Lambda Literary Review Poetry Spotlight, teaches in the NYU Expository Writing Program, and lives in New York City.

Photograph by Marcelo Yáñez

This poem first appeared in Lumina.

Madelyn Garner

My Son Confesses

for Omar

Each night you lower
the bed rail behind the white wings

of curtains and crawl in beside him, defiant
of sheets that are blood-smudged,

spongy with sweat, sour with fluids.

Brushing away tendrils of tubes,
trace the labyrinths of his body—

first with your fingertips and then
lips over tissue-thin skin.

He knows it is love that defies
as you, monitoring the vital signs—

offered groin, rising heat, race horse pulse—
ride his white-knuckled shudders

over the edge to a place beyond pain.

The Love of My Son’s Life

for Omar

He says some days you come home from work
with asado and guava empanadas.

Some days miraculous toys,
some days an armful of sweet-blooming Stargazer lilies.

Some days you wear Mickey Mouse ears;
another, a tuxedo with swish and tango. You are

whatever Brad wants you to be: his garden,
pool of healing waters, Chippendale stud.

Your love conquers even the vultures
perched on the dresser in the corner of the room.

Every day when you come home and find fever
a crown in his hair, latitudes awry, you serenade him

with Argentinean lullabies and the sweetest of lisps,
sugar his forehead with your fieriest kisses.

AIDS Ward. City of Angels, 1995

for Omar

Even as Brad’s thrush-full,
pith-white throat
numbs to water—you

sit on the sweat-stained bed,
cotton swabs in ungloved hands,
pulling viscous strings into a tissue

as if this were no more a chore
than mopping figure-eights
along endless corridors.

You brush his teeth and rinse until
the mouth is infant
and ready for your sleight-of-hand trick:

sweet orange removed from
your pocket, peeled and pin-wheeled
over the tray table,

each pulpy wafer placed
on his tongue—
you husband him.

Madelyn Garner’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2015, The Florida Review, Slant, Roanoke Review, PMS poemmemoirstory, Nimrod International Journal, and Water-Stone Review, among others. A retired public school administrator and English teacher, Madelyn is the recipient of the Colorado Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities for encouraging incorporation of the arts into school programs. She was a Leo Love Merit Scholar at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference and winner of an Aspen Writers’ Foundation’s Annual Writing Retreat scholarship. In 2010, she won the Jackson Hole Writers Conference Poetry Prize. With co-editor Andrea L. Watson, she published the anthology Collecting Life: Poets on Objects Known and Imagined (3: A Taos Press, 2011), which was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

“AIDS Ward. City of Angels, 1995” appeared in Water-Stone Review, Fall, 2011. The other poems in this sequence are not previously published.

Randy Evan Barlow
Necessary Pirates

I call them my pirates: this handful of pills I swallow each night.
All eight of them together, down the hatch they go.

They have a purpose in mind, a goal—to find and destroy
intruders that have found their way into my vessel—

but as all careless pirates do, they pillage and plunder,
forgetting that the ship they set upon to save, they may also sink.

You say that you love me. I know that you do.
But a thousand leagues separate word from deed, thought from action.

As you pursue every passing distraction, I feel your glance
checking if I’m still here, the same. That I haven’t followed

an unseen path without being noticed after all these years
is a wonder to me—and perhaps sometimes to you—but it is love.

Love has kept me from vanishing, and keeps you from seeing
this ship ripping apart from the inside out. The wind fades. I’m slowing,

preoccupied with these intruders, wishing you would quicken
your step, catch me before I fall—

Randy Evan Barlow was the partner of poet Ron Mohring. Ron is the author of the poetry collection Survivable World (Word Works, 2004), winner of the 2003 Washington Prize and finalist for the Thom Gunn Award in Poetry from the Publishing Triangle. Ron is also the founding editor of Sevens Kitchen Press. Ron provided the following statement about Randy and the provenance of this poem: “Randy was a sign language interpreter for many years until a progressive tremor ended his career. He lived with HIV and it’s complications through our entire 19 years together. I found this poem, the only one he ever wrote, among his papers after his sudden death in December 2014.”

This poem was written in November 2005 and submitted by Ron Mohring in care of the estate of Randy Barlow. It is not previously published.