Charlie Bondhus
Bird

Wild birds fly into a man’s home;
the resident will soon depart.
—Jia Yi

The last Sunday in autumn brings snow
which sticks only to the cars, spreading

a cataract-thin scrim across the windshields.
From beneath lumped covers, you claim to hear it

beating the window,
sounding, you say

like hummingbird wings,
slowed to a heartbeat.

Your voice mimics the wind,
emphasizing sibilance and plosive, tripping

over the slight demands
of nasals and fricatives.

The rambling sheets and strewn pillows
conceal you, suggesting an unpersoned bed,

something to haunt me
as I cook breakfast.

Head on paws, Akiba watches
me pouring the orange juice, brewing coffee,

cracking eggs and frying bacon
in the black pan, where the brightly-colored

yolks seem to be stating the glib truism
that there is beauty in death.

When you enter the kitchen,
your cheek is marked

with a small, purple half-moon.
My breath becomes like the tearing of paper.

You stopped taking them, I say.
You sigh, and in so doing, present

an illusion of mastery,
the bruise-colored shape

shrinking, growing, twisting
as if beholden

to the puppetry
of the living body.

I’m sure there’ll be a poem, you deflect,
parceling your bitterness,

but what rhymes with sarcoma?
We sit, angry men sharing a meal,

our eyes circling the dusty
centerpiece, the golden toast,

the condiments gleaming
in their cut-glass bowls, when

suddenly, there’s a bird,
one of the small, brown ones

(a sparrow?) skipping tentatively
across the smooth laminate.

How did it get in?
Akiba does not bark.

More interested than threatened
he approaches, sniffs. The bird flutters

from floor to countertop, seemingly
the least concerned

of the four living beings in the room.
It pecks a crumb, regards us

with one black, convex eye
then coasts from countertop

to kitchen sink. The flue,
I blurt, cold last night.

You stand, give chase, waving
your hands as if casting a spell, and

now Akiba begins to bark.
I watch you, dog, and bird bolt

in a haphazard parade
through the living room

and out to the foyer, where you open
the door, letting in snowflakes,

until our visitor disappears
into the gray-white morning.

The dog sits on the carpet beside you,
in the spot worn thin

by years of booted feet.
Leaving the door open,

you stand, peering
at the moist, dying grass,

the frost-tipped bushes,
the bundled and low-slung sky,

while over your shoulder I spy
in the shadow of the pine,

some four-legged, purple mass,
limping and feral,

sniffing the earth, scavenging
the last scraps of autumn.

Charlie Bondhus is the author of All the Heat We Could Carry (2013), winner the 2013 Main Street Rag Award and the Publishing Triangle’s 2014 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work appears in numerous journals, including Poetry, The Gay & Lesbian Review, CounterPunch, The Alabama Literary Review, and Midwest Quarterly. He is the poetry editor at The Good Men Project.

Jason Schneiderman
Crown

I
God loves an expiration date
and lord knows we’ve got ours —

except that you’re winning — Late
in the game, like those flowers

we thought I’d killed, but came
back with water; one last lame

leaf holding out hope. I want to believe
that you will live because to grieve

is not my lot, but I know
that it has nothing to do with me

and that just as Orpheus lost Eurydice,
God could make me watch you go.

Tell me, love, whom to thank for protease inhibitors.
Nothing rhymes with protease inhibitors.

II
Nothing rhymes with protease inhibitors?
And we thought I’d unlearned self pity,
That the gentle jigsaw contours
of our interlocking bodies,
had smoothed out the wrinkles of my psyche.
No such luck. Old habits are hardy
And your love can’t fix me.
But there I am, back to pity.

Love, I’m not a huge fan of honesty,
because the truth is always
a problem—I’ve believed in a way
and I’ve believed in facts, and nothing.
And here’s a fact, that’s useless and true:
I was fourteen years old when he was fucking you.

III, 1990
I’m fourteen years old and he’s fucking you.
You’re in love enough to take it raw, and I’m
still wearing t-shirts over turtle-necks. It’s true
that the nature of tragedies is to happen at the time
you least expect it. Like Oedipus when he killed
his father, or the way you forget to pay a bill
and you get into debt. The day was good
but the results are bad. The sex was good,
right? He had a big cock, right? Tony
had a big cock and he didn’t love you and he said
he was negative and you believed him, and he’s dead,
and even if I could get back to 1990
and say, wait, please, just wait for me, I’m coming,
it wouldn’t have made a difference. There was nothing
I could do. Nothing.

IV
There was nothing I could do. Nothing.
And so what? Who am I to complain,
I, who missed the worst, who can bring
no greater complaint than that I can
never love you skin to skin. I have never
seen anyone die, only hazily remember
cops covering gay prides parades with
gloves and masks. I was nine and a half
when Ryan White went back to class.
I’ve never lived without this as a fear;
never not known better. Love, it’s over
and it’s not—I will make your past my past,
and my fight. Just you remember this part:
Until the day you die, I get your heart.

V
When you die, I get your heart
Because I need a piece of you
That’s the way it was when you
Were alive—not a memory or a photograph
But a part that I can hold
In a box, that I can keep in the bed
And hold while I sleep.
Love, I love all of you—
The cobblestone of your acne scarred back,
The ring of stomach fat you hate,
There is nothing I can’t embrace,
Nothing I won’t miss or remember.
All things come to those who wait:
God loves an expiration date.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of Sublimation Point (2004), a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books, and Striking Surface (2010), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press. His poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House, among other journals and anthologies. Jason has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2004, and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in 2011. He is poetry editor of the Bellevue Literary Review and associate editor at Painted Bride Quarterly. Jason is an assistant professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York.

This poem appeared in Sublimation Point (Four Way, 2004) and is reprinted with permission of Four Way Books. © 2004. All rights reserved.

Phillis Levin
What the Intern Saw

I
He saw a face swollen beyond ugliness
Of one who just a year ago
Was Adonis
Practicing routines of rapture:

A boy who could appear
To dodge the touch of time,
Immortal or immune—
A patient in a gown,
Almost gone.

II
In the beautiful school of medicine
He read about human suffering,
An unendurable drama
Until the screen of anaesthesia
And penicillin’s manna.

But now, in myriad sheets
Of storefront glass refracting evening’s
Razor blue, in a land of the freely
Estranged from the dead, he meets
That face and fear seizes his body.

III
His feet have carried him to bed.
He thinks he must be getting old
To so revise
His nature and his plan.

He shuts his eyes
And in his sleep he sees a gleaming bar,
The shore of pain.
It isn’t far.
People live there.

Phillis Levin is the author of Temples and Fields (The University of Georgia Press, 1988), The Afterimage (Copper Beech Press, 1995), Mercury (Penguin, 2001), and May Day (Penguin, 2008). She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet (2001). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Grand Street, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Nation, Agni, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Literary Imagination, The Kenyon Review, PN Review, and Poetry London, among other journals and anthologies. Phillis’s poems were included in The Best American Poetry in the 1989, 1998, and 2009 editions. She is professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Hofstra University. Her fifth collection, Mr. Memory & Other Poems, is forthcoming from Penguin in spring 2016.

This poem appeared in Temples and Fields (1988) and is reprinted with the permission of The University of Georgia Press.

Photo: Sheila McKinnon

Patrick Donnelly
Consummatum Est

With the certainty theologians claim
for the salvation worked by Christ—
effects not yet seen,
but the end not in doubt—
some women look back and know
the exact moment they conceived.

He brought me home from the baths
and fed me takeout Chinese. I remember
succulent little bits of egg in rice,
creamy sherbet right out of the carton.
Yes—certainly I felt it—and broke
into a sweat, the exact moment
the charge leapt from him to me.

Was it two years later his best friend called—
could I use his clothes, his shoes, his king-size bed?

Patrick Donnelly is the author of The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press) and Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012). With Stephen D. Miller, Donnelly is co-translator of the 141 Japanese poems in The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013). In 2013, Donnelly received a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program award to fund a 3-month residency in Japan during 2014. Donnelly lives in South Deerfield, Massachusetts with his spouse Stephen D. Miller.

www.patrickdonnellypoems.com

This poem originally appeared in The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003).

Jennifer Michael Hecht
Two At A Time

Remember the first house you can remember,
how the stairway hung from nowhere,
unconnected to the floor from which you were
bounding away and floating free from the landing
to which you were flinging yourself, the torque of your perfect legs
projecting you towards your room or the room
you shared; what if you knew now
what went through your mind, not all the time
of your childhood, but just then,
just a script
of your mind while on those stairs, each time, what thoughts
would therein be recorded beyond a steady refrain of
two-at-a-time, two-at-a-time? What will you wonder
thirty years from now when all of this has the same unconnectedness,
when the office where you work will hang
in the air of memory without hinges,
without crosswalks, what litany of concern, what
delicate structure of related thoughts
will you wish you could recall, could reassemble,
thirty years from now,
when all the cars today on Broadway
are vintage cars, and we, the populace of the present,
glow out our individual and collective ignorance
of some particular future event, the innocence of which
makes us shimmer when photographed as if, if you
could only speak to us, we could grant you some wish,
and whisper what it was to live before.

Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet, intellectual historian, and commentator. She has three books of poetry, including her recent Who Said (Copper Canyon, 2013) and four books of history and philosophy, including the bestseller, Doubt (HarperOne, 2004), a history of unbelief; and most recently Stay (Yale, 2013), a history of suicide and an argument against it. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, Poetry, and The New Yorker.

This poem originally appeared in The Next Ancient World (Tupelo, 2001)

Daniel Nester

Four poems from God Save My Queen II

One Vision

One joy one rock one fight one song one noun one shirt one it one shove one skin one him one breath one beard one cat one purr one goose one step one Concorde one Viking one Hickman one bloodstream one cancer one monkey one German.

One chest steam one hairline one beef stew one buck tooth one mustache one bedside one mansion one front gate one year off one jumpsuit one cokehead one koi pond one dance move one joyride one hand held one rota one gay plague.

One anthem one godsend one gasp one black bag one vision.

Who Wants To Live Forever

July 1986. Before Queen’s concert at Budapest’s Nepstadion, Freddie hosts Roger’s 37th birthday in his presidential suite. A flaming cake with drummer boy figurine on top. Laughs, claps. [VO:] And interview-shy Mercury faces the Hungarian cameras.

Reporter: “So is this zee beginning of your friendship weez Budapest? Weel eet last long—as long as Queen weel last?” Freddie stops smiling, mumbles to Phoebe off-mike, sways his champagne flute. He doesn’t want to talk. He points his cigarette.

“If I’m still alive, I will come back.” Freddie trips over cables, returns to the party.

Forever

In the Live at Wembley Stadium DVD from 1986, Freddie mentions onstage that, contrary to reports, “a certain band called Queen” is not breaking up. “They’re talking outta here,” he says, pointing to his ass. “We’ll be together until we fucking well die.”

In the DVD commentary from 2003, Brian says there was another level to what he was saying that’s all too clear now. This dying bit was going to happen sooner rather than later. How did he keep his secret so long? Five years?

The colors of Freddie’s stage outfit pop onstage, utterly nonsexual for the first time.

Made In Heaven

So many debates over Freddie’s estate. According to David Minns and David Evans, it was £8,649,940, excluding publishing money. That was supposedly less than expected. And then there was Freddie’s house, the people in it.

Jim Hutton, Joe Fanelli, and “Phoebe” Freestone, the working rota of Freddie’s caretakers in his last years, were all evicted from Garden Lodge three months after the funeral to make way for Mary Austin, Freddie’s former girlfriend, as sole occupant.

“Never had one garden seen so much dying.”

Note: The last line comes from a passage in a 1997 biography of Freddie Mercury. “It was a lovely, bright sunny day [in 1979] and the garden shrubs, including the camellia bushes, were in full bloom. Kenny [Everett] … shot mad zany footage of us, acting out a silly take-off of Greta Garbo playing the dying Margaret Gautier in La Dame aux Camellias [actually Camille (George Cukor, 1936)]. Never had one garden seen so much dying. Or, so we might have been forgiven then for thinking. Now, as I write, only half of our number that happy afternoon are still, to my knowledge, alive. We are indeed a shrinking band of witnesses.”—Freddie Mercury: The Real Life (Antaeus, 1997), David Evans and David Minns, p. 176.

Daniel Nester is the author most recently of Shader: 99 Notes on Car Washes, Making Out in Church, Grief, and Other Unlearnable Subjects (99: The Press, 2015). Previous books include How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull, 2010), God Save My Queen I and II (Soft Skull, 2003 and 2004), and The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2014), which he edited. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Morning News, The Rumpus, Best American Poetry, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, and Now Write! Nonfiction. He is an associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York.

These poems originally appeared in God Save My Queen II (Soft Skull, 2004).

Danez Smith
praise, after

in my most recent future, I am young & beautiful & dead, the bones undressing themselves, the body turned to an idea of the body. or let’s say there is a cure & the parades that follow & I live to see my children & the oceans grow bigger, see my mother lowered into & become the earth. I hope I bury my mother. don’t make her deal with the business of dressing me. It’s been so long since the last time & may she never again. but that’s not what this poem is for. I’m want to talk about blunts & boys, how both burn my lips so, how they call the wings to my shoulders. I want to talk about the impossible impossible of God or the smell of good rain or how joy is the black girl who made me soft collards & peppered fish before she took me into the room & showed me my name. I don’t want to talk about the virus, so to hell with the virus. to hell with blood. to hell with yesterday & the settled dust. to hell with shame & loathing & shame & madness & shame & shame & shame & shame. I’m not ashamed of all my mouth has turned into a river of pearls, for my body & all the false gods worshipped here. my body a godless church, holy for no reason beyond itself. let the bloodcurse be the old testament & each day I am still alive be the new. if there is no savior, I’ll do it myself, I’ll forgive myself of my sins. I forgive. I forgive. I forgive. I forgive. I live. I live.

Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the chapbook hands on ya knees (Penmanship books, 2013). He received a 2014 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from Poetry Magazine & The Poetry Foundation as well as fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, Cave Canem, VONA, & elsewhere. Danez won the 2014 Reading Series Contest sponsored by The Paris-American and was featured in The Academy of American Poets’ Emerging Poets Series by Patricia Smith. Danez is a founding member of the multi-genre, multicultural Dark Noise Collective. His work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kinfolks & elsewhere.

This poem originally appeared in Assaracus, Issue 16.

Joseph Osmundson
from Capsid, A Love Song

I. Fusion

Membranes meet, my outside and yours. My cell is an ocean, a wide fluid mosaic; your particle, a weather balloon, round, packed with thorns and spikes. You bounce off me, the two of us still distinct, the two of us still separate. Our membranes aren’t enough, mine and yours; we need to find each other. A receptor. A mate.

Membranes repel, but you know that. It takes work to make two things into one, to dump your contents into my ocean. Your proteins meet mine, charges matching, fitting like a glove. Then everything starts to change. You change. Fusion requires work.

But you do the work, don’t you? Swing yourself open, stick your thorns and spikes into me for good. One spike, gp120, unfurls another, gp41. You pull us close, membranes touching, your outside and my outside closer now and closer now, and finally you are more than bound. We are two halves, almost one. You wait, you wait. Our membranes shimmer into onto another. My ocean, your balloon, and I am open to you, I am open and wider and wider, the work is done, all downhill from here.

And you release it, your ordered capsid, your self-assembled self. You release it into me.

Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer from rural Washington State. His writing has been published on Gawker, Salon, The Rumpus, and The Feminist Wire, where he is an Associate Editor, among other publications. He has taught Biochemistry and Biophysics at Vassar College and The New School, and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Cancer Biology at New York University. Find him on Twitter @reluctantlyjoe or at josephosmundson.com.

This piece originally appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, March 23rd, 2015.

Eileen R. Tabios
My Neighbor
(1996, New York City)

In the narrow elevator we shared
his friend wore a baseball cap with oversized brim
and held a bouquet of orange-spotted lilies
as a shield between us.
I smiled at the waxy blooms, fragrant
and opulent amidst courtiers of gnarled tree limbs and grass
preening like tall models in velvet coats.

Yet,
his friend couldn’t help himself—
like a cabdriver with his first ride
after hours of searching empty streets
he lifted his face to speak.
Tremulously, he offered over their perfume,
“They are lovely, aren’t they?”

I responded with a direct look into his eyes
where irises cracked to illuminate
the luster of emerald veins seeking their way to surface.
Then, not hiding the slide of my gaze
from one dime-shaped, pitted mark to another,
I replied, holding my breath
in prayer against saying the wrong thing,
“Yes … and rare. I’ve never seen such flowers like these.”

His grin pushed away the gloom
of a spent light bulb
hovering in the dimness we shared.
After the doors opened to his destination,
I enjoyed the slight swagger in his steps,
the loss of trepidation there.

I hoped
he would speak of me
to his friend, become a stranger to me
after neighborly greetings in elevator rides long ago.
I hoped he would speak
of the admirer nearby
who understood the importance of a gift
unforgettable because it can never be
replicated.

Eileen R. Tabios has authored collections of poetry, essays, fiction and experimental (auto)biographies. She has also edited or conceptualized ten anthologies of poetry and fiction. Her 2015 books include the biography AGAINST MISANTHROPY: A Life in Poetry and two poetry collections, I FORGOT LIGHT BURNS and INVENT(ST)ORY: Selected List Poems and New. More information is available at eileenrtabios.com.

This poem originally appeared in Golden Apple Press and the chapbook After the Egyptians Determined The Shape of the World is a Circle (Pometaphysics Publishing, Maryland, 1996).

Steven Cordova
Does It Hurt to Have “It”? 

A few days into my last trip home
and my mother steadies her gaze
on whatever it is she has in hand—
a kitchen utensil, a balled-up tissue.

“Does it hurt to have it?” she sniffs,
“it” of course referring to that certain
latter-day deficiency of the immune
system which the rest of us toss off

with an acronym. In the moment,
however, I am foolish and I don’t realize
just how deep the questions cuts,
so I breathe my heaviest sigh

of big-city condescension and say,
“No, mother. Of course not.”
A few days into my last trip home
and if only I could convince my mother

I’m all right, then maybe, just this once,
I’d tell the woman the truth: confess to having
other things, things which hurt more. And maybe,
just this once, we’d get philosophical, my mother

and I, and we’d postulate that having survived survival,
we only get more survival to have to survive.

Steven Cordova is the author of the poetry collection Long Distance (Bilingual University Press, 2010). He won the 2012 International Reginald Shepherd Memorial Poetry Prize and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

This poem originally appeared in Knockout Literary Magazine Issue 5, Fall 2014.