Risa Denenberg
Three Poems for Jon Marshall Greenberg (1956-1993)

Rummaging the Sacristy

So many candles — white fat columns,
red 7-day burners in tall glass jars
illuminating Christian martyrs, ornate
miniature picture frames sheathing
holy men; a rosary garden; a statue

of Laughing Buddha.

And here is Shiva — god of death
with four arms, moon hair, a third eye—
who drank a draught of poison from the sea
to save the world from harm.

The mirthful Buddha left no writings.
Shiva could not swallow
all the body fluids you drowned in.

I should never have read your journals.

Last Rites

Unconscious, he had a large following.
Three days he lay in the state called coma,
as dog-tired mourners passed in and out
of the room. He gestured towards heaven

and grabbed at his catheter while friends
came and went, eating Thai takeout
and chattering carelessly.

The woman who was soon to become
my ex-lover was solemnly watching our life
shatter around that hospital bed.

When his parents entered the room,
we had already finished the first
of several bottles of scotch, as he lay
in the state of the just-dead.

Angels and Pigeons

At first he heard angels
in the mornings when pigeons stirred,
purling and flapping in the air shaft.

Later there were two crypts.
He had a foot in each.

Cryptosporidium—
a waterborne protozoon
spread by rimming, a stolen pleasure,
and then, years of diarrhea.
A phrase that deserves repeating,
to sink in entirely—he suffered
profuse diarrhea for years.

The only salve
was soothing the voracious appetite
left in its wake.
Eating became a sacrament.

Cryptococcus—
a fungus that breeds on offal
tossed 
on the street. Swallowed by pigeons,
released in droppings, mingled with dirt
that settles in air shafts, risen as fairy-dust
when wings flutter.

Inhaled fungus entered his lungs, surged
through bloodstream, settled in brain.
I’m losing this battle to pigeons, he said.

When the headaches came, the sign
was two fingers tapping aside his temple.
The symptom was projectile vomiting,
and later, seizures.

The remedy was dreadful. For months,
there were spinal taps every week.
Then one morning he said,
I haven’t heard angels all week.

Risa Denenberg is the author of Whirlwind @ Lesbos (Headmistress Press, 2016), In My Exam Room (The Lives You Touch Publications, 2014) and blinded by clouds (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014) She is a nurse practitioner working in HIV/AIDS care and end-of-life care. Risa is a moderator at The Gazebo, an online poetry board; reviews poetry for the American Journal of Nursing; and is an editor at Headmistress Press, a publisher of lesbian poetry. She lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington State.

These poems originally appeared in Mudlark Flash No. 11 (2001).

Joan Larkin
In Your Side-Railed Bed, Faces

brushed late nights on paper,
mouth-knots, dark inkwash eyes

staring into the abyss.
World taped to the wall

of your next-to-last room.
After they moved you, no

more making. Your face swollen
and no sign you saw me

wearing the fright mask.
Grief, or my face under it.

Joan Larkin’s most recent collection is Blue Hanuman (Hanging Loose Press, 2014). Her book My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2007) received the Publishing Triangle’s 2008 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Larkin is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer in Residence at Smith College. Recent honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship.

This poem originally appeared in the collection Blue Hanuman (Hanging Loose Press, 2014).

L. Lamar Wilson
Family Reunion, 1993

When I am asked whose tears these are, I always blame the moon.—Lucille Clifton

I give my cousin my hand & think
of the year before, how he’d held me aloft,

his bicep pulsing against the weight
of my bones & adoration. Can I get it

by touching him? I wonder but don’t speak,
don’t let go until his slick flesh kisses

the commode, then trace curlicues & stars
into my stucco canvas amid his grunts & sighs,

stare at the moon I’ve made there as full of itself
as the one that had shone on us at the reunion,

our mothers in orbit around us in their own groove
with Frankie Beverly. I’m flying! I had beamed

at myself, gilded in his tooth: the only
shimmering thing in this dark, damp silence.

L. Lamar Wilson is author of Sacrilegion (2013), winner of the Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series and finalist for the Thom Gunn Poetry Award, and co-author of Prime: Poetry and Conversation (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014), with the Phantastique Five. His poems and scholarly essays have appeared in African American Review, Black Gay Genius (2014), Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, jubilat, Muzzle, Obsidian, The 100 Best African American Poems (2010), Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (2015), Rattle, Vinyl and elsewhere. Lamar, a visiting assistant professor at Davidson College, holds a BS in newspaper journalism from Florida A&M University and an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Tech and is completing a doctorate in African American and multiethnic American poetics at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

This poem appeared in Sacrilegion.

Sarah Sarai
Practical

Let me tell you about my friend
Sanderson. Well he’s dead,
but what’re you gonna do – the first ones died
in that Rapture of malfunctioned immunity.
My early dead read histories of women
his last six months.

You know how it is when you stand still in
Spring because a breeze is
teasing the green of light from trees?
Sarah. Sanderson said to me.
I admit I get real emotional. Sarah.
Let the weather support you.

What is it about white people?
A chunk missing here and there.
Don’t run your panties through
a hand-crank wringer.
Delicates need a special cycle and
color is just a metaphor.

In the great Pacific Northwest, sky
is every type of blanket shaken over you
every two hours. Sanderson,
in the way of the dead, goes on retreats
there in the still early stage of whatever-
itisthatcomesnextwhichoughtnottobesuch-
afocusofmine as that here and now, this this,
their perfumed spring, those bills, gunshots,
a certificate of appreciation gotten kinda dusty
in its dime store frame – all enough diverting.

Oh yeah, did I mention?
He also said I don’t understand

why all the women don’t kill all the men.

So it took years for me to figure it out.
Of course I’m damaged and needing more from
my icon of grace on what to allow to support me.

Sarah Sarai

Sarah Sarai lives in New York. Her poems have been published in Ascent, Yew, Thrush, Boston Review, Posit, PANK, and others. Her collection, The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX), is available from Small Press Distribution.

This poem appeared in Main Street Rag in Spring 2008.

Merrill Cole
How the Nightingales Lost Their Hands

I was going to tell you the story of a friend who died, but he was not my friend. He
wanted to write it in such a way that the grief was your own, your hand wiping his
forehead with the soiled handkerchief, your tears the real ones.

He was terrified the lost message was not truly lost, a nightmare refusing to fade at the
moment of waking. It was as if he had become human.

You were telling him a story about how the nightingales lost their hands. You said, peace
is only the silence between statues. I said, no, peace is the flag of surrender, the place
where they buried their dead.

It’s not fair to say he found them. You always knew what they were hiding, but you had
to let someone else say it. Quite dirty, but you could see through.

The open windows, bright as oblivion. There was nothing more to cry about. He was
going to tell you the story of the day I lost my voice. I felt no grief, because the
nightmare ended.

It was as if you had died, your humanity the real one. There was nothing more to write
about. I wanted to hold him, but I found I had no hands.

Merrill Cole teaches literature, queer studies, and creative writing at Western Illinois University.

The poem appeared in Poetic Diversity, vol. 10, no. 1 (April 2013).

Julene T. Weaver
Sexual Revolution

In the mirror
it is the body she remembers
sexy as S and I and N
it is the fucking she remembers
full fledged
hot and bothered
screaming orgasms
S and I and N
that will never
come again

In the mirror
the body is constrained
now   scared
there is no more
free love no more
S and I and N
free as the ‘60s
love revolution and
this is s and a and d
that reflects back
in her mirror

This body of love
that remembers
twisting hips
Amazon breasts
easy as S and I and N
into stray palms

The price paid
twofold in this new
world after the free
reign fledged orgasms
we remember   changed
world   condoms
AIDS all a sign of
the future that came

Julene Tripp Weaver is the author of No Father Can Save Her (Plain View Press) and the chapbook An AIDS Case Manager Wails Her Blues (Finishing Line Press). A former New Yorker, Julene now lives in Seattle where she is a psychotherapist. 
@trippweavepoet | www.julenetrippweaver.com

This poem was previously published in Gertrude 14 and in Ghost Town Poetry Anthology, Volume 2, 2004 – 2014.

Michael Broder
My First Ten Plague Years: 1990

What is ever truly without a breath of foreshadow?
What do we not seek even as we flee?
Get this—
No innocent victims here.
No ignorance.
I know the consequences.
Here’s my head on the chopping block—
I come buckets over that axe head, executioner’s blade.

I want this virus, taint, stain, mark,
scarlet letter, pink triangle.
I want my membership card, the waiting to be over,
proof to show the world—Yes I am.

To wear that badge of honor like a radioactive tag in my blood,
invitation, proposal, corsage.
To bleed my membership in the tribe,
marked, branded, identified, accepted,
a known associate, believed.

This is not a phase, not about shy, awkward, a late bloomer.
This is down on my knees, I pray to the god of sodomites.

This infection is triumphant,
like dying for my country, the shema on my lips—
Hear, Oh Israel, I suck dick, I get fucked!

Michael Broder is the author of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Assaracus, BLOOM, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, Painted Bride Quarterly, and other journals. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and a backyard colony of feral cats.

This poem originally appeared in This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians 2 (Windstorm Creative, 2004), edited by Rudy Kikel.