Iris Jamahl Dunkle
River

We grew up in a town that took pride in
high water marks. History is like that—
river gone muddy with too much

time. We forgot the sewage scare, how it
shut down the river for weeks, how we were
afraid to swim for fear of getting sick. We forgot

the way the gravel companies dug pits
deep into the river’s throat—so deep
the salmon couldn’t come back to spawn

because the river always swelled with rain to cover
what we’d forgotten. So, too, were we blind
to the hollowed-out men who began to appear

sometimes on streets, sometimes as blue ghosts on
T.V. haunting the wards of hospitals
in the faraway city. But when one

of us opened our throats to ask what’s wrong,
we were hushed, redirected toward safer
courses, that were cloudy as the river
gone swollen with too much rain and fear.

So that when we grew awkwardly into our bodies,
when we pressed our skin against another’s skin
the risk of the disease felt distant as the far off sea.

Until the pits swallowed us up. Until history
came washing back like a high tide and nothing,
not even our own brackish hearts, could save us

from what was hiding underneath the surface.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle is the author of Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013), selected by Ross Gay as the winner of the 2012 Trio Award, as well as the chapbooks Inheritance (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and The Flying Trolley (Finishing Line Press, 2013). Her collection There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air is forthcoming in January 2016. Iris teaches writing and literature at Napa Valley College. Learn more about Iris and her work at www.irisjamahldunkle.com.

This poem is not previously published.

Edward D. Currelley
We Wait

We wait, bodies weakened, bedsores, intravenous drip.
Our sunshine, a meal delivered by a smile, an empathizing touch.
We wait, for mask covered faces, the feel of latex gloves.
We wait, longing for kind eyes, a gentle non-judge-mental voice.
We wait, for potential cures valued greater than life itself.
We wait, forgotten.
Our dreams of hope, crying out for,
Empty souls
Broken hearts
Broken spirits
Broken minds
We wait, for a future everlasting.
We wait, for the non-existent existence.
We wait, for the kind words of remembrance.
We wait, for the waiting to end.

Edward D. Currelley is the author of the children’s book I’m Not Lost, I’m With You and the young adult book That Krasbaum Kid, both forthcoming. His poems have appeared in Sling Magazine, Mom Egg Review, and DoveTales, as well as in the anthology Across the Way: Mountains (Eber & Wein Publishing, 2014). Edward is the president of Pen To Mind Books & Child Development Concepts, Inc. and lives in New York.

This poem is not previously published.

Nicole Callihan
Going Ghost

for Michael, for Keith, for Eric

those days it must
have felt so different

the body dropping out
from under you

the chest where the head lay:
gone

fingers that ran the line of the hip:
vanished

even the river is different
oh, my dead prophets:

you truly knew
what I only practice

longing and longing
and longing and

ache of passion
turned ache of grief

turned gone

Nicole Callihan is the author of  SuperLoop (Sock Monkey Press, 2014). With Zoë Ryder White, she wrote A Study in Spring (forthcoming), chosen by Bob Hicok as the winner of the inaugural Baltic Writing Residency Chapbook contest, in conjunction with Rabbit Catastrophe Press. With Ruby Young Kellar, she wrote Henry River Mill Village (Arcadia Publishing, 2012), which documented the rise and fall of a tiny mill village turned ghost town in North Carolina. Her chapbook, The Deeply Flawed Human, is slated for release with Deadly Chaps in spring 2016. Nicoles poems, stories, and essays have appeared in The L Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, Forklift, Ohio, PANK and as a Poem-a-Day feature from the Academy of American Poets, among others. Nicole is the Pedagogical Coordinator and a Senior Language Lecturer at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. She lives with her husband and daughters in Brooklyn, New York.

This poem is not previously published.

Joss Barton
HIV IS MAGIC

HIV IS MAGIC

the virus casts seroconversion spells

into pink flesh

wet with salt

and bleeding sap

onto worn bleach stained sheets

HIV IS MAGIC

it pulls rabbits from the rosebud holes

HIV IS MAGIC

it makes brooms dance across the floor sweeping up cocaine and shards of molly rock

bEPITY-bOOPITY-bOO

drag queens untuck their cocks from blue ball gowns and wave them like wands over the heads of shirtless faggots sniffing poppers on crowded dance floors

bEPITY-bOOPITY-bOO

we always knew our bodies were vessels of black magik

we demolished civilizations great and small

we turned out tanned farm boys on the streets of L.A.

making them stroll parking lots

their white smiles glowing under street lamps

bEPITY-bOOPITY-bOO

white men fuck the cotton holes of black boy voodoo dolls while the hairy cunts of trans men are cream pied and streamed across gay communist porno sites

this bitch stays on the Truvada buffet

we call her the

TRUVADA RYDR

she summons white demons from the graves of aids nostalgia

commands them to suck and pinch her nipples until the endorphins flood her head with cum lusts

TRUVADA RYDR

exhales ganja clouds and snorts hills of pink molly before slipping on her iridescent pumps

she brushes her face with blush

and paints her lips with raw reds

TRUVADA RYDR

burns at the stake

in the name of more respectable faggots.

Joss Barton is a writer, photographer, journalist, and artist documenting queer and trans* life and love in St. Louis. She was a 2013 Fiction Fellow at the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Emerging LGBT Writers Retreat and this summer was a contributing artist for Nine Network’s Public Media Commons Artist Showcase. She is also an alumna of the Regional Arts Commission’s Community Arts Training Institute. Her work has been published by Ethica Press, Vice Magazine, and Vetch Poetry: A Transgender Poetry Journal.

This poem appeared on Joss’s tumblr, New Amurican Gospels: Queer art & life in this terrifying New Amurica.

EDITOR’S NOTE: “joss barton is the future” (Stephen Farquhar).

Monica Wendel
Traditions

My boyfriend and I always have sex
on the first day of my period, and never use a condom.
Sometimes I forget that the blood
is my period, and, when he pulls out,
another tide pulls my chest under
and tells me that this is the first time,
something has changed or broken.
This is not really the case, and fits strangely
in memory when I sell my underwear
at a love motel, no touching, for $75.
Even stranger when all I do with that money
is go to the mall and buy more underwear.
My boyfriend likes it. He likes the new cotton
under his hands, or a strap that rises up
when I sit down, and he likes when I tell him
the story of the turnpike and the motel,
the man’s shaven head and when he dropped
hints about a wife…just traveling through,
the man said, as though I was worried
that I might see him again.

Monica Wendel is the author of No Apocalypse, (Georgetown Review Press, 2013), selected by Bob Hicok as the winner of the Georgetown Review Press Poetry Prize. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Pioneer (Thrush Press, 2014) and Call it a Window (Midwest Writing Center, 2012). A graduate of NYU’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, she has taught creative writing at Goldwater Hospital, St. Mary’s Health Care Center for Kids, and NYU, and is now an assistant professor of composition and creative writing at St. Thomas Aquinas College. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Rattle, Drunken Boat, Forklift Ohio, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals. In spring 2013, she was the Writer in Residence at the Jack Kerouac House of Orlando, Florida.

This poem appeared in Drunken Boat.

Roger Ian Rosen
Growing Up in the Shadow of AIDS

from the Reflections on a Queer Childhood essay series

I, like so many gay men of my generation, have never had sex without the specter of death hovering just above my head. And I, like so many gay men of my generation, discovered who I am, and how this country feels about who I am, while growing up in the shadow of AIDS.

I was born in 1972, in a suburb of Washington, D.C. On July 4, 1981, on the eve of my 9th birthday, The Washington Post mentioned AIDS for the first time, although it was not yet referred to as AIDS. At that point, it was still just a mysterious disease. The Washington Post wouldn’t refer to it as AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, until December 10, 1982. I was 10.

Obviously, I didn’t read those articles as I was still more interested in choreographing big, splashy showstoppers to the soundtrack of Xanadu than I was in issues of public health and safety. I was too young to experience firsthand the tidal wave that crashed down upon an entire generation of gay men, leaving them either dead or shell shocked. Too young to understand what was going on, or why. Actually, that’s not completely accurate. I was at that strange age between understanding and not understanding, between knowing and not knowing. I wasn’t capable of fully grasping what was going on and how it affected me, but I was capable of feeling what was going on and how it affected me. The messages were pretty gosh darned clear.

AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals. —Jerry Falwell

Lovely. Clearly I’m not wanted here.

As the years wore on, I became increasingly conscious of the fact that the debate that raged in this country wasn’t about ways to stop the disease or its most efficacious treatments—the debate generally revolved around whether we, as a country, should just let the faggots die since they’re the ones getting it and they brought it upon themselves.

The government should spend less money on people with AIDS because they got sick as a result of deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct. —Senator Jesse Helms

Then came Ryan White, who passed away from AIDS complications on April 8, 1990. The reporting was unambiguous—Ryan White’s case was newsworthy because he did not belong to the group that was supposed to get it; he was innocent, having contracted the disease through a blood transfusion and through no fault of his own. Because of that innocence, the prejudices he faced were viewed by the public as unwarranted. The headline for his obituary in The New York Times read, “Ryan White Dies of AIDS at 18; His Struggle Helped Pierce Myths.”

From that obituary:

“After seeing a person like Ryan White—such a fine and loving and gentle person—it was hard for people to justify discrimination against people who suffer from this terrible disease,” said Thomas Brandt, the spokesman for the National Commission on AIDS.

Keith Haring died the same year from the disease, unable to “pierce myths.” Apparently, none of the 120,453 U.S. lives that had been lost to the disease up to that point were fine or loving or gentle.
(And before anyone writes me a note about how Ryan White’s death was tragic, my point isn’t that his death wasn’t tragic, it’s that all the deaths were and are tragic.)

When Ryan White died, I was mere months away from the beginning of my own sexual life and the implication, vicious as it was, was not lost on me: if someone could be innocent, it only stood to reason that others could be guilty.

I was not like Ryan White. I was guilty.

The poor homosexuals—they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.” —Pat Buchanan

I should probably insert a Ronald Reagan quote here, but St. Ronnie was, literally, deadly silent on the issue until May 31, 1987, at which time over 50,000 Americans had contracted the disease and nearly 41,000 had died from it. Let that sink in for a second: our president didn’t publicly mention a health crisis until it had claimed nearly 41,000 American lives.

What I experienced in those early years of the epidemic and through my young adulthood was its own special kind of horror—the horror of figuring out who I was against the backdrop of a country that seemed perfectly happy to let me die an excruciating death; whose stunning reaction to a disease ranged from a willful lack of understanding and compassion to outright glee at the annihilation of a generation of gay men. Men who deserved it. Men whose families wouldn’t visit them at the hospital. Men whose bodies were being thrown away in garbage bags.

But for the accident of the timing of my birth, these men were me. Their pain, mine. Their alienation, mine. Their suffering, mine. The deadly moat of apathy that surrounded them, mine. Their casually discarded lives, mine. Their deaths, mine.

Oddly though, I am thankful for the lessons I learned as the lava was hardening on my identity: Never forget who you are. Never forget where you come from.

Roger Ian Rosen writes a bimonthly series called Reflections on a Queer Childhood on VillageQ. He has also written for Amtrak’s Ride with Pride series as well as Baristanet, a blog that covers local news in Essex County, New Jersey. As a performer, Roger has worked throughout the US and Europe as well as on Broadway. Roger serves on the Human Rights Campaign’s Greater New York Steering Committee as the Volunteer Coordinator for New Jersey. Roger is a son, brother, uncle, step-father, husband, and soon to be grandfather. It is his most fervent wish that he henceforth be referred to as a GILF. To that end, Roger is indulging his body dysmorphia by dieting and working out excessively in an attempt to get back to his birth weight. Roger is an angry gay. You can find more of his musings, writings, and rants on his Facebook page and on his blog, Rogeronimo.com. Follow him on twitter @rogeronimo_com.

This essay originally appeared on VillageQ.

Barbara Peabody
Las Madres

Every Wednesday we cross the border
To meet above Emilio’s bar in Tijuana
With five, six, seven madres
Mothers or wives of people with AIDS
El SIDA, they call it here

Cross the border into a world
Where treatment is non-existent
Where patients are untouchables
Where the barbed wire fences of
Disgust and scorn divide them
From prying neighbors
Where families abandon children
On hospital steps in unworded hope
Someone can soften their deaths.

These are brave women
These would not abandon their children
They fear infection by their children
(Information has not reached the barrio)
They fear neighbors’ discovery
Of the secret disease inside their homes
They fear hate, they fear fear itself
They fear the child’s sure death
They’ve always been able to laugh at life
Now despair crowds their homes
Its rank odor in every corner
Now there’s no time to laugh

Yet they come every Wednesday
By foot or even taxi
Not to talk of death and disease
Nor prying eyes over the wall
Nor fingers pointed at sons—maricόn!
But to make chistes and chismes
Jokes and gossip, small talk
The price of mangos and manteca
Derision of husbands who fled in shame
Maybe Papá is a maricόn, too, people might say
Ha! But ni modo, he was no good anyway
Laughter explodes in crystals
Mejor sola que mal acompañada
Sί, better alone than in bad company
The women laugh, first time in a week

Relax for a moment, cross arms in agreement
Nod heads, smile and sip their coffee.

Barbara Peabody is the author of the poetry collection Cries and Whispers (CreateSpace, 2009) and the memoir The Screaming Room: A Mother’s Journal of Her Son’s Struggle With AIDS, a True Story of Love, Dedication And Courage (Oak Tree Publications, April 1986). Her son, Peter Vom Lehn, died of AIDS in 1984. Barbara started the AIDS Art Project in San Diego in 1984, using her experience as an artist and training in art therapy to support people with AIDS in San Diego. About the same time, Barbara and two other mothers co-founded MAP, Mothers of AIDS Patients, to give support to mothers and families who were caregivers of their loved ones. Later, under a Ryan White CARE Act grant to the Visiting Nurse Association, she started a Spanish-speaking group of mothers and wives of people with AIDS in Tijuana, Mexico. Today Barbara continue her AIDS advocacy and activism in Tucson, where she lives and works as an artist and writer.

This poem is not previously published.

A. Riding
(Let Us Drink Together From This Grail)
No matter what.

from The Exhibitionists

If they were looking out … they would have seen me at the ridge, gathering myself from the climb … how I approached the fence through the flurries of snow, 200, 100 yards. That I stood under the spot where they’d scarecrowed you. I did not remember to cut down your body. That I turned and slowly trudged my way back. To them, my surrender may always seem like the promise of one biding time … for the right time, to revenge. Even for all that great white flag of snow.

In any case, living or dead, I could not have carried you. Living or dead.

Inside.

I have died or where I will die or where at least much of me has already died, but inside: the impossible moiling of an infinite worm more beautiful than anything I could possess myself to imagine. Possessed me after I could. The writhing you see is not mine.

Outside.

The death fever is closing in on your brow, now swollen pink veins wriggling with worms pores sputting pus. The death fever is sweeping in on you now–I seeded its dank swamp heat into all four winds and used all my charms to persuade every road and path, every air current and water channel to change course, to lead to your hollows. I breathed into every breath! I bled into maggots… I spat plague into your plague mouth.

Take me with you. Back into the good good earth.

My penis is a water snake and how grand and deadly it is sliding through the rivers; it will kill everything; oh but it falls pray to a billion mosquitoes, a thousand devouring piranha mouths! A skeleton that floats slowly towards the source like a garland of blanched fall leaves; glide backwards backbone, you vertebrae of everything, towards the throne of your grave, into the glaciers, the frozen semen, capping everything, as if you made everything, as if I made you.

Inside.

I let you cut off my skin.
I begged you to cut off my skin.
When you wore my skin I was so proud to have given up everything, my raw muscles bulged with selflessness and dripped with generosity.
Your teeth grating over my skinned cock.

It felt right being deceived by you. It felt like returning home.
It was comforting to be betrayed by you.
I wore your neglect as a shawl and was warmed.
I sat before the hearth burning one cold stone.

A. Riding’s work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, The Adirondack Review, Red Fez, A Glimpse Of, Southern Voice, Apocrypha and Abstractions, YAWP, Yummyrotica, Conte Online, Exquisite Corpse, Oblivion Dispatch, Old Growth, Sex and Guts Magazine, The Face of New Orleans, and others. Riding received the Mary McCarthy Prize for fiction and has founded, co-founded, or been a member of a number of performance spaces and art companies.

This poem is previously unpublished.

Judy Bankman
Silent Plague

for Randy Shilts
after “Change” by Langston Kerman

In 1980 it surfaced
a deflated balloon
a quiet water
& Harvey Milk was already dead
& the Castro was a piney purple valhalla
& disco beats pounded into the night like
mini earthquakes
& the Orange County Connection played his blond Canadian charm
at all the bathhouses
& the sassy queens and beautiful boys started dying
from ‘gay cancer,’ its black magic the length
of a pregnancy term
& the newspapers didn’t care because it was a
Homosexual Disease
& the NIH had better projects to fund
& the CDC freaked but couldn’t do much
& the gay politicos were all split between
stop fucking so we can survive
and
don’t tell us not to fuck, we have come too far
& the lesions showed up like cat scratches
on necks and calves and backs
& vacations to the Yucatan were cancelled
& it was hard to walk up the stairs
& lovers worried like Jewish mothers
about their darling boys
& sometimes fucking brought relief
& sometimes exhaustion’s gaunt face refused
& muscles began to shrink
& pneumonia hit like a sack of lead
& the San Francisco Bay was a shiny plate of glass
& death was like a leap year
& the calendar was all blank pages
& sunken eyes gazed terror-stricken from hospital beds
& the scarlet letters were four
& thrush bloomed white volcanoes

Judy Bankman is a Brooklyn-based poet and plant-nurturer. She is awed by the co-existing vulnerability and resiliency of human bodies on planet earth. Judy’s poetry has appeared in Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Souvenir, Axolotl, Wilde Magazine, and Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place.

This poem previously appeared in Linden Avenue Literary Journal.

David J. Daniels
Coriander with Mortar and Pestle

When you texted me
you were positive,

my attention was first
called to consider

The Language of Botany.
My attention was then

called to consider
The Language of Seismic Rupture.

I was standing alone
in the kitchen

and the word warm
came to me.

I was prepping a meal
for someone else

when the word
intensify.

I looked hard at the seed
in its stone bowl

and thought
how the seed, first

by resistance,
then by hurry,

would take its punishment,
cracking

at any hint
of a fault line, then,

the soft fibers,
the raincoat torn,

to open up to pulp.
I was trying

to prevent
by argument

that feeling of revelation,
having read

somewhere how the longer
withheld, the sweeter

the oils were.
My attention was then

called to consider
The Language of Old-School Grammar:

the oils were or the oils
are? I kept looking at

the time
when the fruit

of all things
from the seed head

split, and I sped it
toward completion.

David J. Daniels is the author of Clean (Four Way Books, 2014) winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize and finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He is also the author of two chapbooks, Breakfast in the Suburbs (Seven Kitchens Press, 2012) and Indecency (Seven Kitchens Press, 2013), selected by Elena Georgiou as co-winner of the 2012 Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. David teaches composition in the University Writing Program at the University of Denver.

This poem is not previously published.