Chip Livingston
Dad Jokes Around Before Defining AIDS

He was a mountain gorilla and I was an old lady at the zoo.

There was blood on his clown suit; I was a 15-year-old boy.

He was a light bulb. I was seven angry lesbians.

Him: the difference between a venereal disease and a sly midget.

Talent scout; Aristocrat.

He: my father. I: another idiot dick sucker.

Chip Livingston is the author of the short story and essay collection, Naming Ceremony (Lethe Press, 2014); two poetry collections, Crow-Blue, Crow-Black (NYQ Books, 2012) and Museum of False Starts (Gival Press, 2010). Recent poems, essays, and stories appear in Court Green, Potomac Review, Cimarron Review, The Florida Review, Ploughshares, Hinchas de Poesia, and on the Poetry Foundation web site. Chip is nonfiction faculty in the low-res MFA program at Institute of American Indian Arts and is poetry faculty at the low-res Mile High MFA at Regis University. For more about Chip, visit chiplivingston.com.

This poem previously appeared in Naming Ceremony (Lethe Press, 2014)

Photo by Gabriel Padilha

Marie Howe
Rochester, New York, July 1989

Early summer evenings, the city kids would ride their bikes down his street
no-handed, leaning back in their seats, and bump over the curb

of the empty Red Cross parking lot next door where Joe’s car was parked, and
John’s white Honda, broken and unregistered…everything blooming,

that darkening in the trees before the sky goes dark: the sweetness of the lilacs
and the grass smell…

And the sound on the front porch steps was wooden and hollow,
and up the narrow stairway stuffy and dim, and the upper door maybe a little

open—and in the hall and left into his room: someone might be sitting there
reading, or sometimes only him, sleeping,

or lying awake, his face turned toward the door,
and he would raise a hand….

And the woman who lived below them played the piano. She was a teacher, and
sometimes we’d hear that stumbling repetition people make when they’re

learning a new song, and sometimes she’d play alone—she’d left a note
in his mailbox saying she would play softly for him. And those evenings,

when the sky was sunless but not yet dark, and the birdsong grew loud in the trees,
just after supper, when the kids wheeled by silently

or quietly talking from their bikes, when the daylilies closed up
alongside the house,

music would sometimes drift up through the floorboards,

and he might doze or wake a little or sleep,
and whoever was with him might lean back in the chair beside the bed

and not know it was Chopin,
but something soft and pretty—maybe not even hear it,

not really, until it stopped
—the way you know a scent from a flowering tree once you’ve passed it.

Marie Howe is the author of The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W.W. Norton, 2008), What the Living Do (W.W. Norton, 1997), and The Good Thief (Persea, 1988), selected by Margaret Atwood as winner of the National Poetry Series. With Michael Klein, she co-edited a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, 1994). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, AGNI, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. Stanley Kunitz selected Marie for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. Marie teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and New York University. She was the 2012-2014 Poet Laureate of New York State.

This poem appeared in What the Living Do (W.W. Norton, 1997).

John Whittier Treat
Nearly

Nearly twenty-five years, still one day, since then
the time when we stood across cold hewn rooms and looked
past what I had wanted (still want) just to see,
I mean steal, that journey of limb and halved-moon curves of

buttock. Now, stacked high above some place far from there,
a room with hot Saint Peter’s light cast through shutters onto a chair
where lay the quick discard of cotton, perfumed damp torn yours,
limbs yes, buttocks yes, youth no: the force of memories

manufactured if not maintained. Was the motion of a body
ever so sure and feeble? The hurling object knows Newton’s Law.
Don’t talk, be quiet. Cupping your hand across my mouth,
some things have to close in order to make more room

for others. My body now: a quarter-century of a place where
I had stopped in wait for all that was coming my way, and it has.
Old things made useful again, so go further and be sure to stay
This is that slap of pain and promise of proof for what was not love, but nearly;
We’ve learned in time that what our blood shares makes us special:
then, now, forever

John Whittier Treat is the author of the novel The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House (Booktrope Editions), forthcoming in fall 2015. His short stories have appeared in Jonathan and are forthcoming in QDA: Queer Disability Anthology (Squares and Rebels), edited by Raymond Luczak. John is currently working on First Consonants, a novel about a stutterer who saves the world. He lives in Seattle. For more information visit johntreat.com

This poem is previously unpublished.

Allen F. Clark
Tosca

For Larry Negri

Our first New Year’s Eve together,
we skipped a night on the town in favor
of a small dinner at home. Pasta with pesto,
a simple dessert. You made fresh linguine
while I assembled a pear tart. We had put up
the pesto the previous August. Your fingers
were green from tearing basil, mine red
from peeling twenty heads of garlic.
As we worked, we ate focaccia still warm
from the corner bakery, washed it down
with French roast.

For music we agreed upon Puccini, flipped
a coin to decide between Tosca and Boheme.
Tosca won. We never made it past the first act,
or to midnight. After all, Cavaradossi would always
die by treachery, Scarpia would force himself
onto Tosca’s blade, and she would always find
her parapet. After dinner we made love—
good, vigorous mansex—with a double climax
during the Te Deum.

But what of us? We did not survive our failures,
large and small. We both left the City, moved
to other towns, drifted out of touch. I came to wish
for a way to slow time, at least to mute its roar.
That we could have stopped our lives that perfect
evening. I could have lived forever without walking
among the panels of the Quilt when it came
to my new home town last week, and found
at my feet your name and dates on a field of indigo,
surrounded by silver stars.

Allen F. Clark’s poems have appeared in Assaracus, The Far East, and The Good Men Project. Following his service as a Navy corpsman in Vietnam, he had a career in the health sciences in San Francisco and Seattle. His Vietnam memoir piece was selected for inclusion in a special program by the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, where he now lives.

This poem is previously unpublished.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
I was never just, like you*

Whether fire, loneliness or love hurts more than death I don’t know, but I’m reminded of driving 14 hours to Key West. I grew up like a weed. The field became a swimming pool. They kicked me in the ribs. I remember pulling the elastic band of my underwear down behind my balls: now I can relax.

I remember sex on too much grass and the total separation of my head from what’s going on down there. Wait for news of one kind or another. There are sometimes trees. Once the ground beneath seemed a window we’d learn to fall through. I want to tell you that I’m dying. All over town, the buildings rise the way we learn to sleep.

What if, all of a sudden, out in the middle of public somewhere, you get a hard-on? You can look at your body naked in a mirror, with the furniture of the infusion clinic. His stainless steel ribs, thin as the blades of pocket knives. I confess to the hornet’s nest of police whistles. The whole hive courted me. I remember Liberace. His face gives nothing away but the job at hand. He wanted to protect me from the things out there.

Your face was new, as if it had never been used, a sweatshirt in Florida. You select colors: a streak of primary yellow. Karen brings plums from her garden, the thin skin of the tomato. We are grateful for the slenderness of needles. The nurse is called Bud, too: a gay man, but grumpy. Or sex: a white t-shirt, a kite flapping skyward, dreaming only of the ground. I want to be mentioned more. The hole in my chest a lip-smudge, life-like. Joe is going back to Arkansas.

Notes on the articulation of time: no longer gemlike, disinterested. They are not going to get me to think I am that important. I remember one cold and bleak night on the beach with Frank O’Hara. He walked through rain like it wasn’t raining, tomorrow morning he’ll take the Greyhound to Fayetteville. My shrink told me it was unnatural to be obsessed with the Nazi extermination of homosexuals. He knew that here in America we hide things. Hotels we stay in have no flowers left by management, we manage without. We steal. Various skin diseases and the paintings of Jackson Pollock. I remember when I tried out to be a cheerleader and didn’t make it.

When I was 15 he wanted to see me with my pants down. I admired his tongue. His own body giving way, with him caught inside. I remember how untheatrical the act of getting undressed can sometimes be: the purity of my body, a Buck knife twisted into a washboard stomach, distant neighbors stamping out the cinders, a yellow that uncurls. Black out. White rooms.

It’s spring and there’s another crop of kids with haircuts from my childhood. And the lesions joining them. Flying is graceful because it’s so hard to believe how fast you are really going. She reaches for him, holds nothing. I’d like to have a showdown, too. Room set at infrared, mind at ultraviolet. You walk at night, alone, the moon as brittle as a tooth. The dark swallows it, and sighs like we sigh, when we rise from our knees.

I remember catching myself with an expression on my face that doesn’t relate to what’s going on anymore. All around me are people unpacking anything of value to declare. Even our dinner parties gain a topic: the mystery of tap water, the way I cringe from flowers, and the blue sky. Feed it my hair, strand by strand.

The sex over and done, we were, more or less, our audience of aunts. A really fine thing, smashed to pieces. The door sees more than ever: yellow jackets, blue-bellied hornets, furry bumbles, two-inch wasps. Refuse to blink, we hoist our lives over this thin white cane of outrage. I dreamed the snow was you, when there was snow.

There’s no age when one doesn’t feel awkward, headlights open to the empty street. I remember trying to get a guy’s turtleneck sweater off, but it turned out not to be a turtleneck sweater. Boxes without front yards, built on old front yards. It still goes on—wherever hands can find response of hands; hold, in the hollow silence, a tangible warmth. First we have the radio on, for the music, and then we have it off, for the diplomatic corps. Rushing into someone’s colorless morning, we want a history. Even the idea makes me nauseous.

*This poem was created using phrases from the work of the 45 poets included in Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson Books, 2010), edited by Philip Clark and David Groff.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of the memoir The End of San Francisco (City Lights, 2013), winner of a 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction, and the novels So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights, 2008) and Pulling Taffy (Suspect Thoughts, 2003). She is the editor of Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (AK Press, 2012), an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, as well as four other nonfiction anthologies. Mattilda’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Time Out New York, Utne Reader, AlterNet, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Bitch, Bookslut, and The Stranger, among others. She is a columnist and the reviews editor at the feminist magazine Make/shift. Mattilda lives in Seattle, Washington.

Nancy Bevilaqua
Seward Park

For David Parent, 1947-1990

Longer than I thought, the walk
Across Houston, through Seward Park
To a part of Chinatown I’d never seen.
It was September. Blue milk spilled from sky
To street, and lights were sparking on.
I don’t remember where
We meant to go, or who was leading whom.

Tarnished sea bass gasped in window tanks,
Slid their bellies in nervous shimmies up
The glass, losing scales, mouthing
Breathless O’s, then flipped
Back into the crowded dark,
To let the others have a go.

I watched you eat
And paid for it
In a restaurant where in the windows
Ducks hung by their necks on hooks, plucked,
All flesh, eyeless heads bent sideways
In attitudes of shame.
By the time you finished, it was dark.
Leaves under streetlamps fanned from branches
Over shadows splayed and swaying, cards
Held in a nervous hand. I meant to leave you then,
But you were talking
And I had no one at home.

Nancy Bevilaqua is the author of Gospel of the Throwaway Daughter (CreateSpace, 2014), A Rough Deliverance: Collected Poems 1983-2013 (CreateSpace, 2013) and Holding Breath: A Memoir of AIDS’ Wildfire Days (CreateSpace, 2012). Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Tupelo Quarterly, Juked, MadHat Lit, Apogee, Menacing Hedge, here/there, Construction, Atticus Review, Kentucky Review, Iodine, and other journals. Nancy worked as a caseworker and counselor for people with AIDS in New York City in the late 1980s/early 1990s. She now lives in Saint Augustine, Florida with her son Alessandro.

This poem originally appeared in Holding Breath.

Sarah Russell
March 20, 1994

The day Fred died
he asked us to sing “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.”
Fred couldn’t sing anymore. Pneumocystis
and radiation had scarred his throat and lungs.
“I’m waiting for the swallows to come back,”
he croaked. “You know, like Capistrano.”

If you go out in the woods today
you’d better go in disguise….

We reminisced about growing up
in the ’50s with Saturday morning’s treat
after chores—the “Big John and Sparky”
radio show, its teddy bear theme song,
and Sparky’s impossible adventures.
Sparky the elf, like Fred, wanted
(more than anything) to be a real boy.

At six o’clock their mommies and daddies
will take them home to bed

we sang as he drifted into a final morphine sleep—
the man who raised enviable tomatoes,
wore cowboy boots, gave huge, enthusiastic hugs,
loved ribald jokes and trimming the tree at Christmas

because they’re tired little teddy bears.

Sarah Russell’s poems have appeared in Red River Review, Misfit Magazine, The Houseboat, Shot Glass Journal, Bijou Poetry Review, Silver Birch Press and Black Poppy Review, among others. For more information visit SarahRussellPoetry.com.

This poem originally appeared under the title “The Day Fred Died” in VerseWrights (March 2014).

Austin Alexis
Dry Earth

Sexual abstinence: the landscape where he lives.
A desert, of sorts:
parched red soil,
ants like dots in an iris,
crooked-shaped cacti.
He feels safe from AIDS, here
where a horse carcass decays,
burning in sun-cooked air.
Miles without water beckon,
stretch before him,
yet he sees himself as protected
from all harm, all viruses,
all disease, all bacteria.

This desert will kill anything.
This desert will kill everything.
He treks across it
though he will not survive it.

Austin Alexis is the author of Privacy Issues (Broadside-Lotus Press, 2014), winner of the 2014 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, and the chapbooks Lovers and Drag Queens (CreateSpace, 2014) and Lincoln & Other Poems (Poets Wear Prada, 2010). His work has appeared in the anthologies And We the Creatures (Dream Horse, 2003) and Off the Cuffs (Soft Skull Press, 2003). His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Candelabrum, Connecticut River Review, Dana Literary Society On-line Journal, James White Review, Obsidian, Pedestal Magazine, Pieran Springs, and others. He teaches literature and creative writing at New York City College of Technology and lives in New York City.

This poem is previously unpublished.

Jim Elledge
A Young Man of Chicago

Walking beneath the Armitage el,
headed for Oak Street
Beach, I saw him on the other
side, shambling in the opposite direction.
A year earlier, he’d disappeared,
but now, he was back, dressed
in someone else’s body:
skin and bones, not buff, ashy flesh
that blotches punctuated. He grinned
and waved, the same grin that took
my breath away when we met
in line at Body Works on N. Halsted:
“If you spot me, I’ll spot you.”

He wanted me. He told me with glances
and words and caresses in the sauna,
the shower, before mirrors lit
to highlight chiseled flesh. I wanted
him, too, but needed something
like monogamy even more than another
lover, needed to watch his eyes
scurry across my body when, after curls,
crunches, squats, I showered.

And there we were, stalled in our steps, our
eyes locked, my Polish Adonis
and I, while a Howard train screeched
overhead. “Hi,” he mouthed as Mr.
Death slung his cloak around that blue-eyed
boy. I froze. I waved—sort of.
I hurried away. I never looked back.

Should I be ashamed for my half-assed wave,
for not yelling over the traffic-tangled street,
“Hey! How’s it hanging?” half-jest, half-
tease, for not crossing the street and
throwing my arms around him, saying

What?

Sure I should. And am. And have been nearly
four decades, since that summer afternoon
so full of sunshine and blue skies and
promise, when hurrying off,
I thought, Jesus Christ, I’m glad it’s not me.

Jim Elledge is the author of the poetry collection Tapping My Arm for a Vein (Lethe Press, 2015), and the biography Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy: The Tragic Life of an Outsider Artist (Overlook Press, 2013). His book-length poem A History of My Tattoo (BrickHouse Books, 2006) won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. With David Groff, he co-edited Who’s Yer Daddy? Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Anthology. He lives in Atlanta and San Juan, PR.

Steve Turtell
In the Garden
for Sydney Chandler Faulkner

This bench was once a tree.
The curved, sap-filled trunk
planed to ruler-straight lumber,
measured, cut, hammered.

Bruised clover and grass,
pebbles and brick dust underfoot,
two white birches sway
over and around me.

In twenty years of constant death
I’ve only seen one man die.

Sydney

looked eighty, was forty-six when
he gasped for his last taste of air.

One clawed hand raked the sweaty sheet.
I held the other.

Unseeing eyes flitted.
Young and stupid, I was eager

for large experiences, I waited
to hear “the death rattle.”

I knew I would write about you.
And for twenty years I couldn’t.

Today, older than you were then,
I still can’t describe

the Sydney-shaped hole
you punched in the world.

Steve Turtell is the author of Heroes and Householders (Orchard House, 2009), reissued in 2012 in an expanded second edition. His 2001 chapbook, Letter to Frank O’Hara, won the Rebound Chapbook Prize given by Seven Kitchens Press and was reissued with an introduction by Joan Larkin in 2011. He is currently at work on Fifty Jobs in Fifty Years, and Peter Hujar: Invisible Master. Steve lives in New  York City. You can follow him on Twitter as @rdturtle and friend him on facebook.

This poem appeared in Heroes and Householders and Letter to Frank O’Hara.

Photo by John Masterson.