EDITOR’S NOTE: This poem is posted in preformatted mode to preserve the lineation and spacing. You may need to use the horizontal scroll to read the ends of lines. It’s worth it.

Michael J. Wilson
+

You have AIDS

			have AIDS

			What if you	
				could be purified 		in fire
set from the feather of a phoenix
						#beautiful #epic #YOLO

	Aider, why aider why –


The ad on Craigslist has the face of a famous actor superimposed on the naked torso
of Colby Keller
					the ad says 6’1”blk/bl175lb8.5thickuc	the ad
says	piss	blood	PnP 420 poppers must travel you host no fats no fems	white 
only –	
						Have + need –

	The ad says no bs				the ad says pic or no response

					whow stop touch –
		

					Hand under shirt – to the piercing – in my nipple

			There is that moment when the world seems to spin out of 
control – when you could back out pant up + go out – into the cold –
	the moment before fucking
					before too late to think about –
		

have AIDS have
	whow stop touch,	aider whow –

						All our sexual life we have been afraid
of getting having gotten had had having
		because	that is what happens
			ask anyone –

						At the door to the building you pause
	take in the button you are about to press		imagine – the scent –
afterwards –
		on your fingers –

Michael J. Wilson‘s first collection of poetry, A Child of Storm, is out now from Stalking Horse Press. He is an adjunct in the Creative Writing & Literature department at Santa Fe University of Art & Design in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Logan February
No Homo

We do not exist until they are bored. You can sit in the shadows, maybe eat an apple, maybe read a book, maybe not – you are in the shadows, after all. But when they need entertainment, your throne is carved from the same wood as the cutting board. You bare your teeth and they teach you that there are hyena packs big enough to make a lion swallow its roar.

They say if you fuck a boy, you will die of AIDS, probably while serving prison time. They laugh and their unison sounds like fourteen fourteen fourteen years in prison. You can hear the blood rushing in their veins, feel their youth, feel their hate, and it is almost as thick as your silence.

Hate is not about logic. It has never been about logic, so you let them talk, and you say nothing, but you know what you know. You know that condoms exist, that medicine exists. That boys who fuck girls get AIDS too, in exactly the same way, and this is Africa anyway, we have so much AIDS it’s probably on the walls, so maybe we are all faggots. Just maybe. In this paradox where it is a strange madness for two boys to kiss, maybe we’re all a little bit gay. They can deny until the sun sighs and falls asleep, but they cannot say no homo to the gay porn statistics, because, if we’re being honest, it looks a lot like yes homo. But hate is not about honesty either.

Even though you do not speak, you cry out to them with your eyes. You tell the hyenas it is alright to wipe the bigotry off their fangs, it’s alright to put it all down, this deception of self, enough hiding to last them fourteen years, it is okay for a boy-hyena to want another boy-hyena. Love is not the problem in a world with wars and disappearance, a world with global warming, a world with AIDS.
AIDS is not about sexuality and hate is not about logic and I promise you: condoms will not stop existing.

Logan February is Nigerian and a teenager. He likes words and pizza.

Julene Tripp Weaver
Green Witch with AIDS

I walk with my toes afire
I am not safe within my walls
I shoulder many dark secrets
I am not a cavity
I am as deep as the ocean
I am not female song
I am an ethereal being
I am not just partner to a man
I am full unto myself
I am not a female
I’m a planet
I am not a slut
I’m a sacred virgin goddess whore
I am not a stupid girl
I’m a wise witch
I am not a diamond in the rough
I’m a rainbow over the sky
I am not a crazy loon
I am Cassandra singing

Julene Tripp Weaver is a psychotherapist in Seattle, Washington. Her third poetry book, Truth Be Bold—Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS, is in presales now at Finishing Line Press. Two prior books are No Father Can Save Her and Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manager Wails Her Blues. Her poems can be found online at Anti-Heroin Chic, Riverbabble, River & South Review, The Seattle Review of Books, The Unprecedented Review, and a creative nonfiction piece is published by Yellow Chair Press, In The Words of Womyn International: 2016 Anthology. Find more of her work at julenetrippweaver.com.

This poem appeared in The Unprecedented Review.

Stephen J. Williams
Fentham

What can the dancer say,
moving with his arms that way,
And with those legs and hips, that we,
In our dumb bodies, say with tongue and lips?

He says that in the movement of my being,
this breath, this life, “I am.” —And no one,
even he who soon might take me,
may be the dance I am.

Bruce Fentham died of AIDS in 1993. He was a dancer in Melbourne. Near death and unable to walk, his last performance was as the hood ornament of the car that led the 1993 Fringe Festival parade. See The Age 25 October 1992 (page 7), and 8 September 1993 (page 15).

Portrait of Stephen J. Williams (detail) by Margaret Gold

Stephen J. Williams lives in St Kilda (Victoria, Australia) and has published writing and images in many literary magazines and newspapers. He has been the recipient of the University of Melbourne’s John Masefield Prize, the Fellowship of Australian Writers’ Anne Elder Prize and John Shaw Neilson Prize, and the Association for Australian Literature’s Mary Gilmore Award.

Aidan Forster
Wood/Water Body

One night I slipped from the house.
I could not see my own body

but I felt like more than a body.
I was reflective. I called

every creature to me
and bade them drink my waters.

I scattered with the creatures
and took shelter in a man’s truck.

The man had a beard. The truck
smelled like vanilla and sweat.

He bade me consider the night,
the distance. He placed two wooden

discs over my eyes. From my body
he made a church, a worship to fill it.

He moved through me
like an eidolon. The man lived

inside his parents’ garage. He was
a carpenter. His floor was littered

with wooden figures. He took me
to his bedroom and left

to carve a chair, came back
and revealed to me its sleek figure

which he offered to my body.
And I named the chair Bearded Man.

I sat on Bearded Man and received
its maker. And what have I learned?

How man makes from wood
what he desires and gives his creations

to whom he desires. How to divide
the beasts and the sheets in search

of their cool centers. How to receive
a man like a clump of earth

thrown over me. He has named
my body Wooden Artifice, Water Body.

Aidan Forster is a junior in the creative writing program at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities. He is the blog editor of The Adroit Journal and the co-founder/editor-in-chief of Fissure, an online magazine for LGBT+ and allied writers and artists. He is the 2016 recipient of the Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, and has received national recognition from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. He work appears in The Adroit Journal, Assaracus, DIALOGIST, Tinderbox, Two Peach, and Verse, among others.