Julene Tripp Weaver
My Skin That Holds Me

My skin is not a bubble gum pop
it does not blow out with my breath
round and big and pink
to the size of a planet
then pop, and we all die.
No, my skin does not explode—
it is not Bazooka-sweet—more
a mild smoked-salt.

The itch is worst when I try to sleep,
activated it jump-starts, this spot
then that, she means well—a voice,
find stable skin
a calf, or a thigh free from eczema,
rest your attention there—any
spot with no neuralgia, no dermatitis.
But this skin

wants my nails, my trusty wood back-
scratcher (cheap from Chinatown),
before she’ll eventually calm down
let me rest.
A constant crier, like a newborn wanting
more, not a calm sea, rather a restless
neonate calling me back to these parts
I barely know—

bringing me home to my agitated
insides—I try to appease; I bring her
creams, thank her for holding me,
for not exploding.
She accepts my offers, the best lotions
money can buy, eventually she lets me
sleep—these miles of skin
that hold me.

Julene Tripp Weaver is the author of a chapbook and two full-length collections. Her latest, Truth Be Bold: Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS (Finishing Line Press, 2017), was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction, and won the Bisexual Book Award for the Best Bisexual Poetry Book, as well as four Human Relations Indie Book Awards. Her work is online at The Seattle Review of Books, Voices in the Wind, Antinarrative Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, MadSwirl, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice. Weaver is a psychotherapist in Seattle, WA. You can find more of her writing at julenetrippweaver.com.

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Deborah Marshall
They Are We; Us, Them

after Bob

A disenfranchised
pagan, straight, white hag knows squat
about World AIDS Day’s

anniversary.
3 a.m. insomnia
recollects fragments:

Fearing exposure
at Dignity’s soup kitchen
my friend quit serving

meals to the homeless
at the Arlington Street Church,
made meatballs from home.

Then June ’88,
I fractured at The Castle
viewing The Names Quilt.

A vast sea of graves,
The AIDS Memorial Quilt:
leather, photos, names,

sequins, badges, toys;
panels 3 feet by 6 feet
of love, mourning, fear.

A tsunami swelled
of ungrieved, unresolved
pain and loss.

Ms. Social Justice
at 35, pestered sponsors,
marched for AIDS walks.

Then, Paper Prayers,
the Boston Pediatric
AIDS Project funder.

Tom Grabosky and
Howard Yezerski joined
spirits of giving.

A 4 by 12 inch
artwork for a donation.
Prayer wallpaper.

I painted more strips,
pushed my artsy friends, children,
church to donate.

I wore red ribbons.
Black, white and red all over.
Serviam challenge!

When in doubt, grad school.
Hospice and substance abuse
internships. Psych jobs.

Art as therapy.
Your choice: to die using or
in recovery.

Biohazard bags.
Universal precautions.
Needle-stick scares.

To heal, but not cure.
Detox, shelters, home visits
for twenty plus years.

I salved some, saved none.
Now retired, my grandkids
and I collect cans

for the food pantry,
write sympathy cards for pets,
adopt rescued dogs,

and “practice kindness.”
Infected with meaning, I
continue to heal.

Deborah Marshall, aka Nana Boots, is a grandmother and visual artist. A retired art therapist, she is a writer and photographer whose poems and images are derived from life experiences. She spends her nights with her spouse and their boxer, Frances.

Marisa Lucas
2008

My uncle’s eyes swim with depths
that I refuse to understand—
afraid that if I look too deep,
I’ll never be myself again.

His teeth are rotten, lips splitting and bloody
as he rambles on about things
that never quite make sense.

These are the words of a meth addict,
or a dying man who tries
to hide from death with needles
and pills that infected his blood
in the first place.

I was taught young never
to touch his drinks,
never get too close—
Just in case.

His life is shadowed
as he sinks lower
into his old habits, but
he only lets me watch him drown.
Warns me of becoming him,
tells me to save myself.

Everyone blames him, his
sexuality, but he always says
it was his childhood that drove him
to it in the first place.

Marisa Lucas is a masters student at the University of Findlay, where she is studying Rhetoric and Writing, and also works as a Teacher’s Assistant. She is the author of the poetry collection Cyclamen and Rue (CreateSpace, 2018).

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Kelley Lewis
new psalm for communal lament

after How to Survive a Plague

lord,
you have been called
a god of liberation,
freeing slaves
using plagues
and parting seas.

again, your people are in turmoil.

lord,
when bodies are speckled
with new leprosy,
new aches,
new bondage,
you let your people become their own saviors,
dying on old rugged crosses.
you watch their spots
turn to hospital breaths,
whispers of your name.

you claim you came
not for the strong
but the weak,
aching bodies.

you came
to heal the blind,
the leprous,
the empty souls
searching for reclamation.

but those hospital breaths
turn to black trash bags
for bodies called unholy
in your name.

lord,
people claim your will
as they call the dying sodomites
instead of victims
of their own humanity.

even the healed are
bound by past chains—
even when reclaimed.

lord,
they cry out.

if you are a god of liberation,
why are your own people
steeped in their locusts
and frogs,
waiting for you
to let your people go.

EDITOR’S NOTE: How to Survive a Plague is a 2012 documentary film about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, and the efforts of ACT UP and TAG to spur development of treatments, and combat stigma, denial, and discrimination. It was directed by David France, a journalist who covered AIDS from its beginnings.

Kelley Lewis received her Bachelor of Arts in Literature and in Creative Writing from Ohio Northern University. She is now an M. Div. candidate at The Methodist Theological School in Ohio, with a specialization in Feminist and Womanist Studies. Her work has appeared in Fearsome Critters, Penumbra, ReCap, and Polaris. An activist with multiple marginalized identities, she seeks to lift up all people through love, writing, spirituality, and service. Her cats, Moses and Snickers, keep her company—as well as her husband, Jordan.

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Davidson Garrett
The 1980s HIV Blood Test

I had to make an appointment
to see my primary care physician,
signing several confidential forms
on the day the blood was drawn.
After the red juice slowly trickled
into a test tube, the waiting began
with ten days of sleepless anxiety.
My mind began playing games
conjuring the worst case scenario.
Will I be positive or negative?
Finally, the call from the friendly
receptionist: “Your test results
just arrived.” I asked to be alerted
with the fateful information.
“Sorry―you have to come back,
we can’t disclose anything
over the telephone.” Another
visit confirmed for a week later.
At last, I’m sitting face to face
before the white-coated doctor
to hear news that may or may not
alter my life. Shuffling papers
he says: “You are……………”

Davidson Garrett lives in Manhattan and drove a yellow taxi for forty years to help subsidize his artistic pursuits. A member of Actors Equity and SAG/AFTRA, he recently curated the 11^th Annual Boog City Poets Theater in the East Village. Davidson is the author of the poetry collection, King Lear of the Taxi (2006, Advent Purple Press), and the chapbook, To Tell The Truth I Wanted to be Kitty Carlisle and Other Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2013). In 2017, his spoken word play, Conspiracy Theory: The Mysterious Death of Dorothy Kilgallen, was performed for the Boog City Poetry, Theater, and Music Festival after earlier being published in the performance arts journal, Nerve Lantern. More info at davidsongarrett.com.

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Korbin Jones
Seeds & Skin

Yes,

I let that man // settle inside me.
Age like cider.   Honeycrisp.

All this sweating: a fever.   An outward expression
of the men I’ve swallowed,
the fear I’ve swallowed // since meeting him.

Is like my silence—caused by fermentation.

And yet I want to press my tongue   into him,
rip it from his body. Present this dying torso
which for him // I have prepared.
Kiss him softly on the neck.

Call him Daddy.

Korbin Jones received his B.A. in Spanish and in Writing from Northwest Missouri State University. He is currently an MFA Poetry candidate at the University of Kansas. His translation of Pablo Luque Pinilla’s poetry collection SFO is forthcoming from Tolsun Books. His work has appeared in various journals, such as Noctua Review, Levee Magazine, and Polaris. His manuscript, songs for the long night, is currently seeking a home.

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Dennis Rhodes
1987

On the morning my neighbor Greg died
it was dreadfully clear that AIDS
had hit home. 1987 was
the year. I treasured my status
as VP of a large PR firm:
handsome, self-important, aware
of everything and everyone
around me. I lived in a grand
closet, wore thousand dollar suits,
adored my brownstone apartment
on the Upper West Side. I did
not actually like my neighbors. I found them
aloof, reasonably friendly.
And that was that. Their door was
open as I left for work. Bob
said simply “Dennis, Greg is gone.”
At that moment, I stopped fooling
myself: I’d never been tested
because I lived as if I were
immortal. I wore a Rolex—
I remember getting the news
about Greg at ten after eight.

I knew I could not deceive myself
any longer. That afternoon
I went to my doctor. I got
my results seven days later.
I couldn’t wait to get into
jeans and a tee-shirt, and go to
the gym. I was suddenly changed
into a normal person. Death
knocked on the door right next to mine—
never got that close to me again.

Dennis Rhodes is the author of Spiritus Pizza & Other Poems (Vital Links, 2000) and Entering Dennis (Xlibris, 2005). His poems and essays have appeared in BLOOM, Chelsea Station, Lambda Literary Review, The Cape Cod Times, New York Newsday, Fine Gardening, Avocet, Backstreet, Ibbetson Street, bear creek haiku, Aurorean, and Alembic, among others. Rhodes served as literary editor of Body Positive magazine (an important source of information for people living with HIV and AIDS in the 1980s and 90s) and later as poetry editor of Provincetown Magazine. He co-founded the Provincetown Poetry Festival and ran it from 1999–2001. For a number of years, Rhodes hosted a radio program on WOMR in Provincetown, featuring interviews and poetry readings with a different Provincetown or Cape Cod poet every week.

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Marjorie Moorhead
Long Term Survival

If I were to throw a stone
and watch the ripples go back, back,
through waters of some thirty years,
there you’d be.

Back a little further, and there you’d be, stronger.
Still full of life’s dramas; bursting with creativity.
No track marks mapping grief.
And I? Full-cheeked; rosy with naiveté.

Not yet ravaged by diseases preying on diminished immunity;
their treatments and their prevention.
Shaman now, conceding to ingestion of pills in a daily cluster,
I chant my spell of beseechment:

Take toxicity away; let there be harmony and balance in my Being.

Surviving, feet are in both places; light, and dark.
Having met Mortality in grisly proximity,
it rides along close, forever in the back pocket of Life,
and I know each morning as a gift others never got to open.

Marjorie Moorhead lives near the NH/VT border, where she writes about her surroundings and life on our troubled, beautiful Planet. She has work in two anthologies, many online poems of the day, and will have a chapbook out in May, 2019

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Risa Denenberg
Tikkun Olam

We are (not) a dying species.
Our biosphere is (not) past repair.
The house is (not) broke(n).

Folks are (not) founts of wisdom.
There are (no) tablets writ in stone.
Every day, we worship (mammon).

A canon yields to no one with(out) a gun.
The bullies have (not) crushed us.
But we are (not) the bullies.

Everything (does not) depend(s) on us.

Risa Denenberg is the author of Slight Faith (Moonpath Press, 2018), 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.

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Mark Ward
Under, Neat

I bite at the socially acceptable
part of my body: the nail.
A tide held back by teeth,
the quick meets the skin,
the nerves threaten escape.

I pick my nails with themselves.
Occasionally the picker falters
becoming a sliver slid under
a nail, now all nerve,
a faltering, a chest tightening.

I press against it, feeling the flood,
a transmission underneath the skin.
Prodding, I control the traffic lights,
the reasoning. I catch my breath,
acclimatizing, the lab rat failing the test.

Mark Ward is a poet from Dublin, Ireland. His work has featured in Poetry Ireland Review, Skylight47, Tincture, Assaracus and many more. He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, a journal of LGBTQ+ poetry. His first chapbook, Circumference, is out now from Finishing Line Press. http://astintinyourspotlight.wordpress.com

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