Wendy Vardaman
cognitive dissonance

sometimes it seems like diving, dying,
prising free feet that grip the pool’s edge,
while overhead
the locked-straight arms start to shake, the instructor counting
to three again, waiting,
waiting, for you to let
go, for you to ascend or descend,
but no one can convince you of anything

other than what you already know:
solid surfaces do not yield
to persuasion, reason, eloquence, impassioned pleas, exasperated
commands to tuck the chin, to follow
the less than sign of twinned fingertips, to slide
in, certain that you will not, will not, gracefully thrown stone, slip through.

Wendy Vardaman is the author of the poetry collections Reliquary of Debt (Lit Fest Press, 2015) and Obstructed View (Fireweed Press, 2009). She co-edited the anthologies Local Ground(s)—Midwest Poetics: Selected Prose Verse Wisconsin 2009–2014, (Cowfeather Press, 2014), Turn Up the Volume (Little Bird Press, 2013), and Echolocations: Poets Map Madison (Cowfeather Press, 2013). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Poetry Daily, Rattle, and Portland Review, among many other journals and anthologies. With Sarah Busse, she co-founded Cowfeather Press and co-edited the journal Verse Wisconsin. Wendy lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

This poem is not previously published.

Stella Padnos-Shea
Swollen

She stored every scrap in her body:
this secret between ribs, that trauma in a toe bone.
On went years of perfection, long polished fingernails at a good job.
The prevalence of surface.
She thought her disguise fit better,
pushing each weakness deeper and downer
until she had them buried under years, under skin.
But they were gathering strength while she slept.
The souvenirs began to turn on her,
stain seeping from the inside out.
Her bones hurt; her fictions became fevers.
Incurable memories multiplied inside her.
She needed transplants from people who spoke their stories.
Voice becoming medicine,
poison evaporating like an echo.
Her truth became a tumor that wouldn’t stop growing.

Stella Padnos-Shea is the author of In My Absence, forthcoming in 2016 from Winter Goose Publishing. Her poems have appeared in Chest medical journal, The Comstock Review, Lapetitezine.com, and ldyprts.tumblr.com, an online collaboration with jewelry artist Margaux Lange. Among Stella’s identities are poet, social worker, Mama, therapist, Brooklynite, and Scorpio.

This poem is not previously published.

Gabriel Ojeda-Sague
The Constancy of Disease

Autumn is
a long-soaked
felt

in this
condition
I want
to be
prenominal
and unbound
like
Swedish children

it is
hot inside my feet
and cold
under my
pillow
no
life sojourns
here

I am at
critical mass
getting
to be
your father
I told
the joke
to the
neighbor’s
dog
I want the
ugly
bucket

in my
mind
I love the
autumn
but it’s not true
everything gets
heavier

don’t predict
the evening
I have
come to
admire it

I wish
every victim
of a cold-case
crime would have
her justice
something
is stupid
about
ways of killing

will you
scoop
another
piece of
my ego
into
a burnt dish

I am
leaving
again
for
certainty-driven
models
I believe
in my
deciding
mother

I have
asked
to be exported
from
season
change

at my
most
hateful
I changed
rubber into plastic
it was not
an impressive
transformation

I got a
terrible sickness
from the
alchemy
I got
really sick

I coughed up a lung
I rubbed
Vick’s
on it
I felt
recurring

doctor says
no need
for medicine
but its not true
everything gets
heavier

autumn predicts
I call my
mother
for love
I have
only one kidney
I lose
my skin in
a dog
door
I slobber
on yellow
pedals

teach me
how to
love
teach me
how to
love

Gabriel Ojeda-Sague is a Latino queer Leo living in Philadelphia, PA. His first collection, Oil and Candle (forthcoming March 2016, Timeless, Infinite Light), is a set of writings on Santería, war, and the precarity of Latino-American lives. He is also the author of the chapbooks JOGS ( lulu.com, 2013), a re-writing of The Joy of Gay Sex; Nite [Chickadee]’s (GaussPDF 2015), a collection of Cher’s tweets on systematic racism and violence; and Where Everything is in Halves (Be About It, 2015), poems against death through The Legend of Zelda. His work can all be seen on ojedasague.com

Daniel Nathan Terry
Elegy Written in November

I. The Backward Glance

On the way home from the store,
I thought I saw you, white bird of my childhood,
bathing in the public fountain on Market Street.

Or was it only a white paper cup floating
on the water’s skin like a wish that would not drown,
even though it had been wished away?

Then this evening, again I saw your face
in the face of the tired man
buying bread and beer

at the checkout of The Village Market.
And again, just now—in the window
above the frayed, green sofa—your face

in the reflection of my face, as I searched the air,
beginning to darken, for a bird I was certain
I’d heard call out a moment before.

II. Day of the Dead, 1994

David,

before you died, our friends strung your flotation bed
with a garland of pumpkin lights in celebration of Halloween,

your favorite holiday. When Tony, our old roommate,
came to visit, you were already a skeleton—your face

a ghost’s mask of morphine, your mind just earthbound
enough to pull your pale lips into a grin as you whispered: boo.

III. Negative

You are handsome and still
twenty-three on the brown scroll
of negatives curled in the camera
bag’s black next to Risk, Monopoly, Life—
board-games I will never play again,
next to worn-out dancing shoes
I would never wear now, but
refuse to throw away. So what?
I will leave you with them
on the floor of the closet.
I won’t deliver you into the light
of my fortieth year. Stay where you are—
little more than a child I loved
when I was little more than a child—
almost forgotten in the closet’s dark belly,
still pregnant with what is dead.

IV. Poncirus trifoliata ‘Monstrosa’

Common Name: Flying Dragon

When I look at the contorted citrus tree in winter, leafless, its green limbs twisted and curled
with long thorns sharp as claws, I can almost see the body of a dragon revealed in the plant’s
brambles. It reminds me of the ancient story about a painter so skilled, everything he created
looked real enough to breathe—with one exception—the eyes of his creatures were always
blank, intentionally unpainted.

The artist moved from village to village, leaving eyeless tigers and blind herons behind him on
walls and vases. The Emperor, enamored with the artist’s skill, demanded he paint a great dragon
to curl about the walls of his palace.

The artist obliged. He created his finest work—a dragon greener than the skin of the citrus tree,
each scale rendered perfectly—but with a face as eyeless as a branch. Enraged by the flaw, the
Emperor demanded the eyes be painted, that his dragon be complete.

Reluctantly, the artist acquiesced. But the moment he painted the eyes, the dragon drew breath,
uncoiled and flew away. And the Emperor was left with only the memory of his great dragon
and its waking eyes. But even this memory would not stay. Over his long life, it faded like a
procession of clouds that had almost returned the faces of lost lovers, but never their eyes.

V. David, Full-blown

They say you pulled the IV from your arm, disconnected
the morphine drip, tugged your street clothes over your bones
and walked from the hospital on your own. In a daze,

you caught the downtown bus, headed home. They say
they found you curled in your bed like a child,
that they had to wake you and take you back to the hospital,

plug you in for your own safety. Out of your mind, they say.
Disoriented. As if you left the hospital for no good reason.
As if you didn’t know where you were going.

VI. Heavy pumpkin

bought in October, round and bright
as the sinking sun—believe me,
I meant to slice you

a smile so terrifying you’d make the night
moths shriek as you breathed them in

through your teeth of fire and smoke
like an idol’s sacrificial throat.
But I couldn’t

bring myself to make a monster of you—
not with all the losses we’d suffered through

the fall. So I left you as you were by the garden gate
and assured myself

I’d made a holy gesture—
not to the leering dead—but to the autumn

harvest, to the promises of rebirth and youth made
by the spring and the summer.
Heavy pumpkin,

now it is winter and the long cold night
has picked up the knife I put down. And without

a thought, it has carved for us both—
and what’s worse,
it has carved from within—a rotting mask, a death-head’s
grin.

VII. David

I take it on my brow: I never loved you
while you lived. Gifts, suppers, that you brought

the quilt over my cold shoulder,
that my discomfort made you wakeful

as I slept on—these things notwithstanding—
your kisses never made me burn. I hold it in my heart:

you needed to be loved and I failed you,
that you were sick and kept it hidden,

that you chose to die as quietly as you lived,
that you reached my soul at last

through terror. I know it in the core of me:
no one deserves to be as frightened as you were

at the end, no one deserves to be afraid as I still am—
even if they are liars, cowards, slow to love, even

if to this day, they can think solely of themselves.
Right or wrong, God may brand my skin like Cain’s:

I have outlived you.

VIII. The Open Umbrella

that threw off its owner in a fit
of envy as a crow flashed overhead,
now lingers on the curb.

Cars and trucks pass by, trailed
by the soft, beckoning hands of the wind.
Who can blame the open umbrella

for refusing a lift from these strangers—
however welcoming? But how long
is too long to wait for forgiveness

from the one who held you
in the rain? Night comes,
the umbrella’s ribs blacken

beneath the starless sky. Concealed
from the moon, the umbrella’s heart
beats blacker still. The open umbrella

turns into a lamp of darkness.

Daniel Nathan Terry is the author of three books of poetry: Capturing the Dead (NFSPS 2008), winner of The Stevens Prize; Waxwings (Lethe Press 2012); and City of Starlings (Sibling Rivalry Press 2015); as well as a chapbook, Days of Dark Miracles (Seven Kitchens Press 2011). His poems and short stories have appeared in numerous journals, including Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Greensboro Review. He lives in Wilmington, NC with his husband, painter and printmaker, Benjamin Billingsley.

This poem appeared in Waxwings.

Walt Whitman
O Captain! My Captain!

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up – for you the flag is flung – for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths – for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) is the author of Leaves of Grass (1855, the first of seven editions through 1891). Born in Huntington on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and as a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War. Whitman continued expanding and revising Leaves of Grass until his death in 1892. He died in Camden, New Jersey.

This poem appeared in Leaves of Grass.

Laurel Ferretti
Joe Doe

For J.J.

None have known Joe Doe, MD.
GRID’s grip drew him into its obscurities.
Dr. Doe met his interest, chasing its mutable manifestations.

In command of the hundred,
the centurion’s bravado charged into battle
at the prospect of valiance.
Yet mere man
found it elongated into an engagement
of lifetimes.

The one hundred’s first attempt—to eradicate the scourge—
mangled in defeat.
Burial of the century.
The centurion’s manner dashed among the hopes
of his fallen
countrymen.

Dr. Doe’s sworn loyalty endures,
while his distance finds everyone anonymous.
The phantasms plagued,
disheveled
his hair.
Covered in a shirt and tie,
shadows keep him unkempt.

Behold the visage.

The one-hundredth leans
against the waiting room wall,
affixed among the polished pine.
You’re more than those thousand words.
You’re more than a feather of the quill that activated his certificate.
You’re more than a body, examined—upon a hardened, uncompassionate slab.
You’re more than the sum of your symptoms + side effects.
You’re more than the ignorance
in masked nurses’ eyes.

You are more.

Laurel Ferretti is an undergraduate at George Mason University, studying English with a Creative Writing concentration. She is particularly interested in utilizing poetry to process the psychology, emotion, and trauma of illness and pain. This poem is dedicated to the physician who treated Laurel for a severe form of chronic Lyme disease. He entered the world of infectious disease when HIV/AIDS was still mysterious. His first one hundred patients quickly died, which has affected the way he interacts with his current patients. “He is the only physician who did not give up on me; I am so grateful for his perseverance and innovative mind.”

Matthew Schnirman
Poem [Not one…]

[Not one angel arrives
in fever.]
In a dive

somewhere

around SoMa, looking
like a homo among the drags

of chicken-bears and freaks

and tweekers, Julienlifts
his shirt.

He shows that shingles hurt,
explains how

he’s just broke enough
to paint,

then jokes

that he’s six T-cells away

from a really good day.

As if the body were wilds
that go on forever.

Matthew Schnirman received his MFA from the University of Arizona. His poems have appeared in Phantom Books, CutBank, Whiskey Island Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and other journals. He lives in Seattle where he was a 2015 Jack Straw Writer and a former fellow at the Richard Hugo House.

This poem appeared in the 2015 Jack Straw Writers Anthology.

Quraysh Ali Lansana
Bible Belted: Math

Pro-Black doesn’t mean anti-anything.
—El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X)

there are at least twenty-seven
white people i love. i counted.

four from high school
five from undergraduate

years, maybe three from grad
school (one gay=bonus points)

and an assortment of compelling
melanin-deprived miscreants

in chicago and countrywide
two brothas in the afterlife

remain why i add rather than
subtract

Quraysh Ali Lansana’s most recent books include the anthology The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop, co-edited with Kevin Coval and Nate Marshall (Haymarket Books, 2015) and the poetry collection The Walmart Republic (Mongrel Empire Press, 2014), co-written with Christopher Stewart. Forthcoming titles include A Simple Gift (Penny Candy Books, 2016) and Clara Luper: The Woman Who Rallies the Children, co-written with Julie Dill (Oklahoma Hall of Fame Press, 2017). Quraysh is a faculty member of the Creative Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a former faculty member of the Drama Division of The Juilliard School. He served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University from 2002-2011, where he was also Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing until 2014.

This poem appears in The Walmart Republic.

PreetamDas Kirtana
Why Survive a Plague?

All of these candlelight vigil-years later and I remain on the sidelines: baffled and still so afraid.

Longtime AIDS activist and AIDS survivor Spencer Cox died at age forty-four from complications of the disease. Spencer was at the front lines of AIDS activism for over 20 years. First with ACT UP and then with Treatment Action Group, he helped get activists a place at the table with the pharmaceutical industry and federal agencies and sped up the development of life-saving AIDS medications. But in 2012, just a few weeks after fielding questions at a premiere of the documentary “How To Survive A Plague,” in which he appears in archival footage in the vigor of youth and health during the heyday of ACT UP and TAG, Spencer Cox died at Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. In the months before his death, he had become depressed, started using meth, and stopped taking his HIV meds. “He saved the lives of millions, but he couldn’t save his own,” his longtime friend and fellow activist Mark Harrington was quoted as telling The New York Times.

I can’t help but wonder if, rather than ask how to survive a plague, a more relevant question might be, “Why Would You Want To Survive A Plague?” This is the documentary I want to see.

I’m reminded of a couple of analogous situations that have prompted similar questions.

During my relatively brief but vital period of participation in 12-step recovery groups, I was frequently annoyed by often well-meaning people who would explain that these various substances, from cigarettes to cocaine, were bad for us; as if this fact would be a revelation to the addict. What a stunning denial in assuming that we WANTED to survive! What about our lives and the society we’ve created together made sticking around more attractive than our willing descent into addiction and death?

Secondly, I’m reminded that here, in this part of the American Southwest where my husband and I now live, there are a good number of people that the rest of us call conspiracy theorists but who think of themselves as survivalists. Personally, I’ve never been interested in surviving in a world where I would have to litter my yard with the bodies of those hungry and stupid enough to come after my stockpile of kidney beans. But there is a population of people, perhaps even a growing percentage of people, who want to survive NO MATTER WHAT. Again, I’m not among them.

I remain on the sidelines: baffled, wide-eyed, and more than a little afraid; but unwilling to survive no matter the cost, to be “safe” regardless of the isolation, to remain “on the beach” no matter what or who else is washed away in the tide of loss and suffering.

I was on the sidelines then too.

Sidelined and baffled:

In 1988 other gay men were scared enough to be unwilling to use a clean drinking glass in a longtime friend’s home. “I brought my own, thanks,” he said. “Weird,” I thought.

Sidelined and wide-eyed:

I’d been “out” all of what felt like ten minutes after a lifetime of fear from zero to eighteen. And now, now that, maybe, I could learn to not be afraid, now that maybe I could learn that I could be loved, now I was supposed to be afraid to love? No. No thanks. I’m here. I’m queer. I’m getting use to it. Fuck fear.

Sidelined and more than a little afraid:

On bathroom floors, hit square in the head with an aneurysm. In hospital hallways. With lesions and rare cancers and thin as a suggestion of our loved one under a sheet, the bodies piled up. Friends would not stop dying.

But unwilling to just “survive,” to be “safe”…alone.

Between marches and tears, between hospital visits and hospice trips; between funerals and dancing triumphantly to Sabrina Johnson’s house anthem “Peace in the Valley,” between the sound of ventilators and Doc Martens on Pennsylvania Avenue pavement…on the sidelines of fear, in stolen, precious moments of abandoning grief and remembering that we are men, gay men, gay men hurting, gay men loving; loving and hurting and grieving and healing in each other’s arms and between each other’s legs.

I was neither martyr nor saint nor “bug-chaser,” but a few of us could not, would not let fear win or even rule. A few of us would rather risk full contact and contagion rather than guarantee sanitized isolation. It was never more than then: the moment. It was life and death. It was loss. It was loss that was legion. It was love and the high risk and actual cost of love. It was personal. It’s always personal actually.

Every support group conversation, every “safer sex” talk or article rightly discusses the importance of the HIV-positive person disclosing their status with a potential partner; discussions include the respect involved in doing so. Most go on to advise that in dealing with the nearly inevitable rejection that will follow disclosure, to not take it “personally.” Don’t take it personally? How? This advice feels cold, removed from relational reality, and ridiculous to me.

Really? Don’t take it personally?

The man who, moments ago, was my lover is not avoiding me, you say, but just avoiding the virus. As it turns out we’re kind of inseparable, my virus and I. So you see it’s more than a little difficult to not take it “personally”.

It was personal on the phone, sharing secrets and laughing together.

It was personal at dinner as we nervously avoided using the L-word trembling on our lips; both of us worried that labeling it “love” would make it immediately evaporate.

It was fucking hot and deeply personal in the bar; as deep as his tongue in my mouth in the dark corner near the men’s room, as personal as his panting promises and plucking my attentive cock through the parting spaces of the 501 rivets stretched across my crotch.

It was personal when he said he wanted me, when he said he needed me, when he talked about nights and days and forevers;
but
in the steely, unbearably heavy moment when the color drains from his face,
when it feels like some soundtrack has been interrupted and all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room,
the moment when he simultaneously swallows dry
and loud enough to be heard, says, “oh,” and reaches for his shoes and you know, you know that this is it, again, one more time,
one last time, maybe,
and you know,
as your heart sinks so low so fast as to now always be under foot,
that this,
this was
not
personal.
And you’re on the sidelines…again.

Like I’m on the sidelines here in this conversation. I think many of us are. I think most, if not all of us, are actually on the sidelines.

The documentary “How To Survive A Plague” and the deep loss of Spencer Cox bring us and this issue back in to focus. After contributing so much and surviving so long Spencer is gone and we’re left with the mystery and questions of why someone who fought so passionately for and with all of us would have stopped taking his own medications and hastening his own death. Apparently surviving is not enough. How do we live and love and heal together? The profound lack of purpose, loss of passion and belonging that filled, or rather emptied, Spencer’s post-activist life has rightly been implicated. I fear this is true of many of our post-AIDS-as-a-death-sentence lives.

On Saturdays, I work at a coffee shop in the village near where my husband and I live. Last fall a cheery, extroverted, 50-ish man came in, ordered his coffee and stayed for a spell. He welcomed every distraction from his laptop and greeted and made lively conversation with each new customer that came in. In our conversation I learned that he had lived in this village twenty years ago, had lost all of his friends to AIDS, and had just been discharged from the hospital a few days before after another round of treatment for his own cancer. I was filled with sadness, a sense of camaraderie, and curiosity. Here was someone like me: someone else who had, inexplicably, survived the loss of his friends, the decimation of his world; but he seemed somehow happy. He laughed easily and made jokes with strangers. He must know something. He must have learned something for which I’m still searching twenty-five years later. I had to know and before my mind could reconsider I heard my mouth ask, “Are you glad that you survived?” His immediate answer was a hammer to my heart. Without reflection or hesitation he said, “No” and I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there a moment, my mouth open like a stupid fish, my breath caught again on that knot of grief in my throat that has never quite dissolved and my eyes welling up with tears. I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t know what to do.

I do know that I’m not alone and that maybe, in this one situation, I wish that I could say that I am. But I’m not alone and neither is that laughing and lonely man from the coffee shop. There remains an entire splintered, scattered, and searching population of us here
and still here
and still not knowing why. Why are we here? Why are we still here?

How do we step out into the tentative silence of a potentially momentary cease fire and find each other, not ourselves, but each other
and some molten and molting, melding, merging and morphing real community beyond sexual freedom, beyond heterosexist proving, beyond medical search and rescue, beyond political muscle, so beyond all of this that we’re back,
back to just you and me,
and then three
and then more,
broken and beautiful
and diving
together
so deeply into our common humanity
that we at last hit the Divine.

PreetamDas Kirtana lives in New Mexico with Kevin, his spouse, the love of his life. PreetamDas blogs at 2greatcommandmentpreschooler. His work has appeared in Dayton City Paper, semantikon.com, zackhunt.net (the blog of Zack Hunt) and calebwilde.com (the blog of Caleb Wilde). PreetamDas performed as part of Listen To Your Mother Albuquerque 2015.

This essay in not previously published.

Richie Hofmann
After

When the sun broke up the thunderheads,
and dissonance was consigned
to its proper place, the world was at once foreign
and known to me. That was shame
leaving the body. I had lived my life
from small relief to small relief, like a boy pulling a thorn
from his foot. Wet and glistening,
twisting toward light, everything seemed
recognizable again: a pheasant lazily dragging
his plume; the cherries dark and shining
on the trellis; moths hovering cotton-like
over an empty bowl; even myself,
where I reclined against an orange wall,
hopeful and indifferent, like an inscription on a door.

Richie Hofmann is the author of Second Empire (Alice James, 2015). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and Poetry, among many other journals. Richie received a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He received his MFA from Johns Hopkins University and is currently a doctoral student in English at Emory University in Atlanta.

This poem appeared in Second Empire.