Tamer Lorika
Intentions

Editor’s note: In order to preserve the formatting of this poem, I am posting it as a PDF that will open when you click on the link below.

Intentions by Tamer Loriker

Tamer is a queer author of queer fiction and poetry in Washington, DC. He likes dragons and giant robots. Visit him and read more of his work at tamerlorika.wordpress.com.

This poem is not previously published.

Mary Carroll-Hackett
The List of Dangers

Mama knew by heart, a home health care nurse in the 80s, only one of three in our frightened town willing to keep doing the work she loved. I took an oath, she said, to care for the sick, don’t recall it making no exceptions. She loaded her nursing bag, boxes of supplies, into that battered old Chevy, setting and running as many as fifteen infusions a day, praying as she drove, not for them, the patients even our priest called sinners, but for herself. I pray for me, she said, that I can do what they need, make it easier somehow. They called her Miz Elizabeth, and thanked her for coming, again and again, despite all those who warned her against them. God made us all, she’d say, laughing and getting to work, and only at home did we see how much she loved, how she mourned them when they went, how they each took a part of her heart in their passings.

Mary Carroll-Hackett is the author of the collections The Night I Heard Everything (FutureCycle Press, 2015), Trailer Park Oracle (Kelsay Books, 2015), If We Could Know Our Bones (A-Minor Press, 2014), Animal Soul (Kattywompus Press, 2013), and The Real Politics of Lipstick (Slipstream, 2010). Her work has appeared in Carolina Quarterly, Superstition Review, Drunken Boat, Slipstream, and The Prose-Poem Project. Mary lives in Farmville, Virginia, where she teaches at Longwood University and with the low-residency MFA faculty at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

This poem is not previously published.

Prince Lamaj
Awaken

You wanna know why HIV is important to me because the numbers are far
more than I could believe all the babies crying cause mom and dad’s
life has ceased if wanna know why HIV is important to me

You want to know why HIV is important to me because unprotected sex is
seen as cool and free it’s stupid and causes our populations to
decrease so wrap it up before you enter the sheets

You wanna know why HIV is important to me because I’m a black man and
I’m affected directly
My gender has larger numbers and my women have more than me if you
wanna know why HIV is important to me

You wanna know why HIV is important to me because I have friends who
live with this daily always questioning why, contemplating suicide,
from this bullet’s boom to their pride if you wanna know why HIV is
important to me

You wanna know why I research this wicked disease why I track its
progression with cunning and ease
To bring all the naysayers down as I please because HIV is important to me

Do you wanna know why I educate my youth And lay out to them the
despicable truth, That most that are dying look a lot like you, If
you want to know why HIV is important to me

Do wanna know why HIV is important to me because its existence is
hushed in the secrets we keep
Which doesn’t turn up til your next doctors visit screen if you wanna know
why HIV is important to me

Now don’t get me wrong not picking on those affected
Not targeting you please don’t feel neglected
Just bringing consciousness to clear public vision
For knowledge is power and power is worth living

Prince Lamaj was born and raised in Charleston, SC, and studied psychology at South Carolina State University. He currently lives in Washington, DC, where he is active in the spoken word poetry scene.

This poem is not previously published.

Phillip B. Williams
The Sky Unveiled by Lightning

I could see if his arrogance were understandable,
as if making defensible the offense was some quality
largely unique and in its rarity largely wanted—
and want it I would had it been there and his crown
not transparent, not a haunting on his head, shining
as any sunken treasure would if possible to find
and reveal, let touch the sun. How to distinguish
between denying that shattering is possible and fighting
against the possibility of shattering, having discovered
that fragile part of yourself, embracing it no more
wanting it than the keeping of blades of glass inside
is a desire for the glass. When to remove what hurts
can quicken the kill—perhaps, that’s why I stayed.
I rally all the small diffusions into my weakest hand
to save a life. His. Mine. To bloody. To bleed.

Phillip B. Williams is the author of the poetry collection Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016), as well as the chapbooks Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc., 2011) and Burn (YesYes Books, 2013). Phillip is a Cave Canem graduate and the poetry editor of Vinyl Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Kenyon Review Online, The Southern Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, West Branch, Blackbird and others. Williams is currently a Chancellor’s Graduate fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is completing an MFA in creative writing.

This poem is not previously published.

Christine Stoddard
The Family Curse

“Is she dead yet?” came a tight voice on the other end of the phone
one suffocating June day before my high school graduation.
I stared at the receiver and hung up without answering, alone
in the living room while my parents prepared for our weekend elation.
After emerging from a four-year-long coma of exams and football party drama
and having that cap-in-the-air moment when I hugged my diploma,
there would be cake, presents, friends, advice.
Everyone there to congraluate and console me about this new era in life.

That was, until she picked up the phone and deafened the celebratory tone.

The woman who birthed and abandoned me.
The addict who sold the marrow from her bone.
My mother only in the strictest biological sense.

She wanted to know if her accidental creation had finally fallen to the family curse
cast not by wing of bat and eye of toad but a vaginal delivery and high viral load.
Every week, she called about my mortality and, every week, I wished her damnation,
though we both already knew a hell of pills and hospital walls painted puce.

No number of honors would take my HIV away.
Extracurriculars and letters of recommendation were equally impotent.
My medications and fear of love were my day-to-day,
yet she needed to remind me of what I would never forget.

When I walked the stage the next morning,
I had a vision of a grave I thought was mine,
but it was hers, muddy in the cold rain.

Two days later, the phone rang again with the news she died in a car crash.
But before that, I kissed a boy—a real boy—a boy all mine for the very first time.

Born and raised in Virginia, Christine Stoddard is a Salvadoran-Scottish-American writer and artist. In 2014, Folio named her one of the top 20 media visionaries in their 20s for founding Quail Bell Magazine. Christine’s work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Feminist Wire, the New York Transit Museum, Bustle, The Brooklyn Quarterly, and Tulane Review, among others. She is the co-editor of The Nest: An Anthology of The Unreal (Belle Isle Books, 2013) and Airborne: An Anthology of The Real (Belle Isle Books, 2013) and co-author of Images of America: Richmond Cemeteries (Arcadia Publishing, 2014).

This poem is not previously published.

Ceci

Two Poems

Cuba – ‘15
I smile with glee at the headlines
Cuba has successfully become the first country in the world to eradicate mother-child transmission
“Ah, no more like me”
Yet, my whole world comes tumbling down when ignorance spreads like wildfire through social media
Why do all of these people suddenly feel that they have the right to deny me a healthy family?
“Why are HIV+ people having babies?!?!”
Because I have the right to a family just as much as the next person
“Why would you put a baby in that risk?”
How far are you going to stretch this? Should people with predispositions to other illnesses be denied the right to a child too?
I grew up just like most little girls, dreaming of that dream relationship and the dream family with the dream house
And it breaks me to have to sit and watch all of these comments go by

Whispers

What is it about those three letters that can make some so
Bold feel so timid
And what are the statistics on the amount of times people have had to whisper those three letters because of fear
The world may lie to you, to keep you trapped in the box of stigma
Your voice will stutter because you’re scared of the impact when those words finally come out
But there’s something about that sense of liberation when you first allow your words to flow smoothly out and “confidently” tell someone you’re positive

Ceci is a member of the Youth Committee of CHIVA, the Children’s HIV Association, a UK charity that works with children and young people perinatally infected with HIV. CHIVA’s activities include therapeutic residential camps for HIV-positive youth and support to medical professionals who sometimes struggle to talk to young people about difficult issues like sex and relationships. The CHIVA Youth Committee is an empowerment project whose members represent the views of their peer group and engage in education and awareness activities, including speaking at conferences and to the media.

These poems are not previously published.

Susan Oringel
New York City (Without You)

It rains: I buy and hold
my own umbrella, my strides
unchecked. I don’t see
Broadway shows, but miles of art,
Murillo and Velazquez

at the Met; Klimt, Shiele,
Schad, whose sexual
energies make me ache;
Dickinson’s turbid, dreamlike,
canvasses of loss.

I eat on the street, latte with muffin,
skewered meat, while accidentally passing
Aquavit, where you and I once
lunched, the gray gargoyles heralding
a passageway to subterranean riches.

I price a rosewood table with flared legs
you wouldn’t like and wander
through the glitter at Tiffany’s,
pretend to buy you diamonds
like the Christmas earrings you gave me.

From Central Park, Strawberry Fields,
the widow lives a block away
from the gray “Imagine” tile she’d had
commissioned for her John.

and a leathery red anthurium that looks
unreal. Nearby, the Vietnam exhibit
at the Museum of Natural History shows how
one tribe worships their dead. Artists design
the lost’s one favorite possessions in paper,

a robe, a pipe, even a VCR, and then
burn them to send the beloved comfort in heaven.
So I imagine burning your old
motorboat, your Thunderbird convertible,
and my breasts.

Susan Oringel’s poems have appeared in English Journal, Maryland Poetry Review, and Blueline, among others. With Andrew C. Leone, David Unger, and Beatriz Zeller, she co-translated for a book of Latin American Poetry, Messengers of Rain (Groundwood Books). Awards include a fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center and Albany-Schenectady League of Arts Individual Artist Grant.

This poem is not previously published.

Martha Rhodes
That First Summer

You want to dip yourself
into the soft vanilla swirl
of that young boy’s cone,
push your tongue into its center
but you are wrapped, head to toe,
every inch of you and it is dead August
so when you enter the thick lake
you can’t feel its green wetness
or taste or smell the sweet water
at all. While others slide off shoulders,
you can neither kick nor move your arms.
You lie beached, and stared at, sun spots
laser’d into your forehead multiply spontaneously
across your torso. And now you are banned—
verboten—from the lake. And next day, the lake,
the largest in the world, is drained lest some of you
escape.

Martha Rhodes is the author of four collections of poetry: At the Gate  (Provincetown Arts Press, 1995); Perfect Disappearance (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2000), winner of the Green Rose Prize; Mother Quiet (University of Nebraska Press, 2004); and The Beds (Autumn House Press, 2012). Her poems have been appeared in Agni, Columbia, Fence, New England Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among others, as well as in the anthologies Agni 56: Thirtieth Anniversary Poetry Anthology (Boston University, 2002), edited by Askold Melnyczuk; Appetite: Food as Metaphor (BOA Editions Ltd., 2002), edited by Phyllis Stowell and Jeanne Foster;  Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press, 2001), edited by Susan Aizenberg and Erin Belieu; The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology (Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference/Middlebury, 2000), edited by Michael Collier; Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction, and Deliverance (Sarabande Books, 1997), edited by Sarah Gorham and Jeffrey Skinner; and The KGB Bar Book of Poetry (Harper Perennial, 2000), edited by David Lehman and Star Black; and others.

This poem is not previously published.

Mirvan Ereon
Immuno-compromised

I have sores all over me:
They scar my fragile surface
Like constellations
Spanning the universe
Of my feeble flesh.
I gasp and sigh.
I hear the delirious
Whispers from my thighs.
These are not moans
But the sole sounds of my bones
Breaking into mourning.

Maybe I should be glad
That something still feeds on me.
I want this love to die
But it cannot be.
It is the disease
Which runs alongside
The potent malady in my being.
Compromised I will forever be.
But with you, I find the strength
To make myself immune
Against all this insanity

A poet, artist, author, polyglot, madman, fetishist and self-confessed deviant, Mirvan Ereon started his prolific career after he discovered he was HIV- positive in February 2012. He became a full-time indie writer, translator and book reviewer. He maintained several websites, mainly on literature, his art, his writings and HIV/AIDS in WordPress, Blogspot and Tumblr. His Twitter is @posithivecutie and his blogs include The Sexy Squid and http://posithive-cutie.tumblr.com. Mirvan Ereon was diagnosed with HIV in February 2012 at the age of 21. He died of AIDS-related complications in August 2012. He lived in the Philippines.

This poem appeared on Mirvan’s blog, The Sexy Squid.

Miguel M. Morales
elders

you were my first gay friends
you men wearing black leather jackets
and your activist drag.

you taught this timid brown boy
to yell, to scream, to rage
at our killers who invoked
morality and cited nonexistent
policies conjured on the spot
to keep us from exposing them as
AIDS PROFITEERS.

you showed me how
our voices could stop traffic, how
our voices could upend the system, how
our voices could save lives.

you taught me how
to find this voice
—this voice.

you taught me about my queer body
even as yours were under attack.
Mark Cheney, you bald-headed,
bad-assed, muther-fucker.
you filled a vial with your positive blood,
smashed it against the
city council chamber doors
to protest AIDS budget cuts.
they quickly arrested you because
your blood was a deadly weapon.

after my first arrest,
you took a button
off your jacket that read:
I WAS ARRESTED
FIGHTING AIDS
and pinned it to my shirt.

I wish you were here
to teach me how
to be old.
How to wear my
gray and my wrinkles
with the same pride
as you wore your black shirt
with the pink triangle
because

▲ SILENCE=DEATH
and ACTION=LIFE▼

Miguel M. Morales’s work appears in Duende, Pilgrimage Magazine and Raspa Magazine, as well as in the anthologies Hibernation and Other Poems by Bear Bards (Bear Bones Books, 2014), edited by Ron J. Suresha; From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction (Tincture, 2011), edited by Charles Rice-Gonzalez and Charles Vazquez; Cuentos del Centro: Stories from the Latino Heartland (Scapegoat Press, 2009), edited by Latino Writers Collective; and Primera Página: Poetry from the Latino Heartland (Scapegoat Press, 2008), edited by Latino Writers Collective. His reviews have appeared in Lambda Literary Review and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. Miguel is a Lambda Literary Fellow, a member of the Macondo Workshop at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, and a VONA/Voices alumnus. As a journalist, Miguel earned numerous honors including the Society of Professional Journalists’ First Amendment Award. He lives in Olathe, Kansas, where he is a Library Information Specialist at Johnson County Community College and serves as the president of the Latino Writers Collective.

This poem is not previously published.