Debora Lidov
Rounds

Baby Boy with necrotizing enterocolitis three inches viable gut. Baby of maternal diabetes, maternal fever, maternal utox, maternal HIV. Baby of domestic violence. Baby Boy they were trying for a girl this time. Baby Girl they were hoping for a boy. Baby the father’s Indo-Caribbean side will not accept your blackness. Baby intubated, brain dead on arrival, mother seized and expired prior to induction. Baby born with one arm one leg external bladder but two perfect lungs and excellent heart breathing easy. Triplet A, born at 1,200 grams, home in 12 weeks; Triplet B born at 1,400 grams home in 12 weeks; Triplet C born at 800 grams never leaves never off the vent, on and off the oscillator high-frequency vent. Baby X of ambiguous genitalia. Baby, she whispers in recovery-room trance, of revenge rape, baby, she says to the aide in Creole, of gang rape, baby of incest, one nurse notes to another in the hall about the baby. Baby with fused lids get ready to see, baby on new baby trache get ready to breathe, failed kidney baby recover your function, baby, filter and excrete, arrhythmia baby steady whenever you’re ready your baby baby baby baby beat.

Debora Lidov is the author of Trance, forthcoming this month from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Ars Medica, Cut Throat, Five Points, Salamander, upstreet, and The Threepenny Review. Debora is a medical social worker and lives in Brooklyn.

This poem originally appeared in Tarpaulin Sky.

Tom Capelonga
In Disco Credemus

“Go out dancing tonight, my dear, and go home with someone, and if the love doesn’t last beyond the morning, then know I love you.”
—Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

You and I will never dance
at the Saint or Studio 54

but we’re at our best laughing
in our private discotheque.

Dim all the lights sweet honey
‘cause tonight it’s you and me—

chairpersons of the committee against
poor dance floor etiquette

assembled to surrender limbs and hips
to Dionysius and chant from

the canon of Donna and Abba
passed down to us from

Christopher Street and our
Bronx-or-Brooklyn mothers.

We dance beneath burdens
lighter than theirs—

our mothers have seen to it
and the ghosts of clones and pier-queens

teach us liberation’s limits
with a virus at the margins.

(Is there not a share of grief in us
for those who disappeared too soon?

What friends we could have made
among the angels at the Everard.)

Still heaven knows the city takes its tithe
in spilled drinks and lines at the door

in biting words from boys born elsewhere
and tears and rust and bullshit pouring

forth onto hot sidewalks.
Our cackling is a cool rinse

on dirty hands and faces
as we soar above our grievances

on melodies like hymns,
burning herbs to please the gods

and to mark a thousandth lifetime
together — a pair of queens dancing,

unafraid to show the soft parts
underneath their steel, bound by vows

to guard this temple where
disco never died.

Tom Capelonga is a 27 year-old native of New York City. His poems have appeared in FourTwoNine Magazine and Podium. He lives in Manhattan.

This poem is not previously published.

David Groff
Fire Island Song

It would be nice if you weren’t dead,
you with your hair and skin flame-red
and your way of getting me in bed.
It would be nice if you weren’t dead.

It’s not time’s fault or even fate’s,
though this second claim demands debate:
Too many dead to live, you nearly said.
You savored dread.
You liked where it led.

You let death happen with your
drinks and drugs, your tour
of all the high points of despair.
You were a living cigarette.
You blistered and burned down. You let
me down. This grates.
This isn’t fair,

I say, walking your beach beside myself,
your windy wispy ghost a stealth
seagull full of shit and caw.
You’re also wind. You fuck me raw.

You like where I’m led.
You wanted me to die, you almost said.
The sunset is a scraped-skin red.
I would be nice if you weren’t dead.

David Groff is the author of Clay (Trio House, 2013) and Theory of Devolution (Illinois, 2002), selected by Mark Doty for the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle. With Jim Elledge he coedited Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (University of Wisconsin, 2012). With Philip Clark he coedited Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson, 2010). With Richard Berman he coedited Whitman’s Men: Walt Whitman’s Calamus Poems Celebrated by Contemporary Photographers (Universe, 1996). He completed the book The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood for its author, the late Robin Hardy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999; Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2002). David’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He teaches in the MFA creative writing program of the City College of New York.

For more information, visit www.davidgroff.com

This poem appeared in Clay and is reprinted by kind permission of Trio House Press. It originally appeared on The Awl on March 14, 2013.

Elizabeth Alexander
When

In the early nineteen-eighties, the black men
were divine, spoke French, had read everything,
made filet mignon with green peppercorn sauce,
listened artfully to boyfriend troubles,
operatically declaimed boyfriend troubles,
had been to Bamako and Bahia,
knew how to clear bad humours from a house,
had been to Baldwin’s villa in St. Paul,
drank espresso with Soyinka and Senghor,
kissed hello on both cheeks, quoted Baraka’s
“Black Art”: “Fuck poems / and they are useful,”
tore up the disco dance floor, were gold-lit,
photographed well, did not smoke, said “Ciao,”

then all the men’s faces were spotted.

Elizabeth Alexander is the author of the memoir Light of the World (Grand Central Publishing, 2015) Her five books of poems include: The Venus Hottentot (University Press of Virginia, 1990; reissued by Graywolf, 2004), Body of Life (Tia Chucha, 1996), Antebellum Dream Book (Graywolf, 2001), American Sublime (Graywolf, 2005), which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and was one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year; and her first young adult collection (co-authored with Marilyn Nelson), Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color (Front Street, 2007), winner of the Connecticut Book Award. Her essay collections include The Black Interior (Graywolf, 2004) and Power and Possibility (University of Michigan, 2007). Her play, “Diva Studies,” was produced at the Yale School of Drama. In 2009, she composed and delivered “Praise Song for the Day” for the inauguration of President Barack Obama. Dr. Alexander has been awarded numerous prizes, fellowships, and other honors. She is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the inaugural Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale.

For more information, visit elizabethalexander.net

This poem originally appeared in American Sublime and is reprinted with the kind permission of Graywolf Press.

Photo: Solomon Ghebreyesus

Jericho Brown
Heartland

This is the book of three
Diseases. Close it, and you’re caught
Running from my life, nearer its end now
That you’ve come so far for a man
Sick in his blood, left lung, and mind.
I think of him mornings
I wake panting like a runner after
His best time. He sweats. He stops
Facing what burned. The house
That graced this open lot was
A red brick. Children played there—
Two boys, their father actually
Came home. Mama cooked
As if she had a right to
The fire in her hands, to the bread I ate
Before I saw doctors who help me
Fool you into believing
I do anything other than the human thing.
We breathe until we don’t.
Every last word is contagious.

Jericho Brown is the author of The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle (and a finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry). His first collection, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Jericho has received the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland. He is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Emory University and lives in Atlanta.

This poem originally appeared in The New Testament and is reprinted with the kind permission of Copper Canyon Press.

www.jerichobrown.com

Robert Siek
Haunted Homo

Gold Bond powder all over the bathroom,
dusting cologne bottles and the Q-tips container
in typical cut-outs from haunted-house furnishings,
dropped cocaine spread airborne on a triple sneeze.
This is late night and early morning, treating rashes,
a red raw groin area; it’s time to fuck the dermatologist,
allow him fifteen minutes past the surface. He’s one of us,
cocksucker and proud of it, in his white medical drag,
all clean-cut and effeminate wearing glasses and penny loafers.
He’s seen the goods when I opened my robe—wine-colored
and out of a plastic bag, the tie fell off; I held it closed.
These things on paper, wrinkled beneath naked.
Legs folded, a secretary in a miniskirt, no drunk
celebrity exiting a front seat. Wishing upon
the brightest lamp, fastened to the wall,
attached to a crane. Please not bites,
bed bugs in the mattress, this city
under attack, these villains hidden
in clothing, couches, even computers.
Let Roscoe the Beagle sniff them out for you.
My fourth HIV test since March, tomorrow afternoon,
that load jerked out over my face, a phlegm-ball-sized
gob on my fresh chapped lip; ghost droppings drip clear,
ectoplasm licked quick or the second time that rough trade
tried to fuck bare, first messing, then entering, slid inside,
a wet centipede shot through a crack in wood paneling.
By candlelight I told him, “Just don’t come in my ass.”
A prescription for a cream with a steroid in it,
and something else to eliminate jock itch,
a wicked case; he’s suggesting powder
for hot days dampening underwear,
half-hour runs on treadmills, multiple squirts
of lube mixing with sweat, friction, loose muscles,
pubic stubble rug-burning my inner thighs, low hangers
smothering my spread crack, séances in the bedroom,
imagined invaders digesting life beneath clean sheets.
Gold Bond clouds when slapped in special places,
fog-forms fall like spirits crossing over, circles
of white on a black dirty towel, hard-to-see
swirls caught by the fan take off
past the window screen, the no’s,
the yes’s, the aging all over me.
Footprints in it,
just another faggot.

Robert Siek is the author of Purpose and Devil Piss (Sibling Rivalry, 2013) and the chapbook Clubbed Kid (New School, 2002). His poems have appeared in journals including Assaracus, Chelsea Station, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, The Good Men Project, The Nervous Breakdown, Mary, Painted Bride Quarterly, and VACZINE, as well as the anthology Between: New Gay Poetry. He lives in Brooklyn and works as a production editor at a large publishing house in Manhattan.

This poem originally appeared in Purpose and Devil Piss and is reprinted with kind permission of Sibling Rivalry Press.

Michael Carosone
This Is How You Teach AIDS Literature

This is how you teach AIDS literature
to a freshman seminar class
at New Jersey City University

You cry on the train
as you choose which AIDS poems to teach
the commute from Manhattan to Jersey City is a long one
so you cry a lot

You cry in the classroom
as you screen AIDS documentaries and films
it’s a three-hour class
so you cry a lot

You cry on your ride back home
as you read your students’ response papers and essays
you assign something each week
so you cry a lot

Even before the semester begins
as you prepare what to teach
you cry for days

And after the semester ends
as you read the thank-you emails from your students
you cry for hours

And throughout the semester
while you sleep and dream
you cry each night
as you think about what the world would be like
if Paul and Vito were still alive

So this is how you teach AIDS literature
you cry
and you cry
and you cry

Michael Carosone is the editor, with Joseph LoGiudice, of the anthology Our Naked Lives: Essays from Gay Italian American Men (Bordighera Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in Gay City Volume 1, Gay City Volume 2, Gay City Volume 3, Avanti Popolo: Italian-American Writers Sail Beyond Columbus, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Out of Sequence: The Sonnets Remixed, The Good Men Project, Positive Lite, and New Verse News. His essays have appeared in in White Crane, Strangers to These Shores, and various anthologies. His articles have appeared in Gay City News and The Huffington Post. He was awarded the Editors’ Poetry Prize for his work in Gay City Volume 2. He lives in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan with his partner, Joseph LoGiudice. For more information on Michael, please visit michaelcarosone.net.

This poem originally appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Vol. 21, Issue 4 (July/August 2014).

Sophie Cabot Black
Among the Divided Lilies

(ICU Waiting Room, New York 1984)

I
Too late, I saw the body;
I compared. Either unlucky
Or clumsy with desire it lies
Wheeled along the wall, ready
To be sent for. An arrow
Elaborates the way out. Some angel
Stayed only as long as the life
Was solvable. Not so much
Waiting as listening, not so much
Witness as spy, I sit on blue
Upholstery and read the pamphlet
Again. Key points have been marked with
Stars: honesty, night sweats, patches that look
Like bruises. Such is the new precision.

II
One by one the houses
Close their doors: too risky.
I hold nothing against this holiness
But the snake of an old wound.
Whatever sickness exists
Is now in the hands of others:
Confirmed and public. There is the noise
Of people who hear nothing
But the latest results as they walk
Back into their life. And what is
Leftover survives the long reproach
Of new blood laddering through veins—
It becomes a wise wound, a chalk circle,
Bulls-eye. Oasis, a place where gathering begins.

III
How simply the cathedral turns
Inside out: here’s the steeple
But no door through which
The body comfortably fits.
Those left behind are busy
Guarding immunity
In a locked chest. They believe this
As their lifework. Be careful what you do
Unto others, gloves and masks upon
Entering. Cover the head, kneel
In the aisle, never with a short skirt
Or shoulders bared. Remove jewelry
And watch for blood, any sign of blood.
It is a river that refuses to be easy.

IV
The face of the doctor
Learns to turn into a field
Of gray rock. It has seen too much:
No more shame in hesitating
Against what disappears. Yet his hands
Of repair continue their science
And he will send the white
Messenger with a tricky blur
Of either paradise or grief
To the bone. Stiff plastic curtains
Groan back into place and weary
Promises drip toward random dread. Do not
Move fast. Do not let yourself grow angry.
If you stay still long enough someone will find you.

V
A day will happen
When I can no longer visit;
From nowhere I will wake up
Finished with vigilance
And go through each room
To make sure each face
Does not look like mine.
Against these blank walls,
Among the divided lilies,
Beside the high-fidelity
Television, I will stop asking
The question and head down
The illuminated stairs, making a way back
To Arrivals and the suddenness of traffic.

Sophie Cabot Black is the author of three poetry collections. The Misunderstanding of Nature (Graywolf, 1994) received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. The Descent (Graywolf, 2004) received the 2005 Connecticut Book Award and was subsequently chosen as a hot pick on MSNBC’s program Topic A With Tina Brown. The Exchange (Graywolf, 2013) was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Sophie has received the Grolier Poetry Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s John Masefield Memorial Award as well as fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. She lives in New York City and Wilton, Connecticut, and teaches at Columbia University.

This poem originally appeared in The Misunderstanding of Nature and is reprinted with the kind permission of Graywolf Press.

Guillermo Filice Castro
Little Door

“…In praise of the anus because it’s the one truly universal sexual organ.”
—Paul B. Preciado

“Just the tip” he cooed

*
Ass is funny but not for play

Oh please what did I know?

*
Boy of twenty-five on top
of me aged thirteen

doctor to my patient in need of “vaccine”

*
(In the beginning
the clothes stayed on)

*
My experience on the matter? Mother inserting
the first of what seemed
a string of suppositories

as she held me
spread-eagled across her knees

You might say I took a bullet for her

*
It’s not macho to touch another man

Men wait outside the door
till the womanly cry is gone

Oh please

*
(In the beginning
was fire
nothing but fire
nothing but)

*
Hairiness peeked through a vertical
rip in his boxers
my hand swatted at the waistband
(a fetching shade of chartreuse)

We both let out a whimper

*
The boy idled for a beat and pushed

*
I had circled him on my bike
and blurted

“Would you allow me
to see your thing?”

He stopped so did my heart

*
At the park a sign warned
“The grass is recovering
after a major event”

*
(Here lies the hole
he force-fed a bit
without the benefit of saliva)

*
After fetching butter
from the fridge
he began to chant

Door needs grease!
Door needs grease!

*
Henceforth I’d be known
as “Little Door”

*
Later on the bus
the misheard announcement
Exit through the weird door

*
(The beginning
was the hinge)

*
How to exit anyone’s bed?
As you would enter them:

Tipping on grace

Guillermo Filice Castro is the author of Agua, Fuego (Finishing Line, 2015). His poems have appeared in Assaracus, Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, Court Green, The Bellevue Literary Review, Ducts, LaFovea, Quarterly West, and more, as well as in the anthologies Rabbit Ears (New York Quarterly Press, 2015), Flicker and Spark (Lowbrow, 2013), Divining Divas (Lethe, 2012), My Diva (University of Wisconsin, 2009), Saints of Hysteria (Soft Skull, 2007), and others. His translations of poems by Olga Orozco, in collaboration with Ron Drummond, appear in Guernica, Terra Incognita, U.S. Latino Review, and Visions. His manuscript was a finalist for the 2012 Andrés Montoya Prize. He received the 2013 Emerge-Surface-Be fellowship from the Poetry Project. Guillermo lives in New York City.

This poem originally appeared in Court Green #10 (2013).

Michael Montlack
Black Book

At the end of the 80s,
he threw away his phone book;
everyone in it was dead.

Now strolling Christopher Street
to brunch and therapy,
he gazes into familiar doorwells,
remembering leaning figures, handlebar mustaches
curling, like fingers through denim belt loops:
those five o’clock shadows in the shadows.

He’s 66, paunchy and gray
but they still wink at him from the grave:
cool invitations
to the piers, the truckyard,
back to their place.

Crossing the cobblestones,
he’s still too stunned to be amazed
by all those faded one-nighters
lined up and waiting
for him to come.

Michael Montlack is the author of Cool Limbo (NYQ Books, 2011) and the editor of My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), a finalist for the 2010 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Anthology. His work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Barrow Street, Mudfish, The Cortland Review and Assaracus, among other journals and anthologies. He lives and teaches in New York City and has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ucross, Lambda Literary Foundation, and Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus in Germany.

This poem appeared previously in the journal A&U: Art & Understanding and the anthology Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 (Gival Press, 2009), edited by Robert L. Giron.