Tamara Kaye Sellman
Immortality

To her he is Tut burnished in ambergris, a royal,
perfumed marvel, so when he nicks his fingertip,
when he whispers he is dying, of AIDS, when he
twines the bandage around the cut, the intense
crinkle of it buries her alive. Before her, walls of
catacombs parade preserved images of afflicted men—
half-shaved, scabbed, pale, emaciated. Each of them,
alone. Backs bend under invisible slabs of disease,
fingers excavate pills from papyrus cups. There is
glyphic laughter, crying, coughing. No dangle of
grapes, no palm fans, no solar bursts or baptismal
floods, no garden vines snaked around ankles, only
the dressing of his insignificant wound. Please be
there, he says, at the end. She offers a platter laden
with late-season figs, pomegranates, mint. Stuff your
skull with sweetmeats, she thinks, measuring him
like a tailor, her fingers massaging the thin selvage
of the roll of gauze.

Tamara Kaye Sellman lives in Bainbridge Island, where she works as a sleep health educator and MS activist. Her poems, short stories, and nonfiction have been published widely and internationally.

This poem was previously published in Switched-on Gutenberg, March 2001

Jennifer L. Knox
Waiting on the Ambulance

This music feels like a paper cut the size of my face, on my face.
Normally, I find the song very relaxing—there’s only two notes,
and the singer’s talking about a cowboy. The way it just kind of
rocks back and forth like a teeter-totter. I was going to say
something about fat people on the teeter-totter but then I thought,
“You could stand to lose a pound or two yourself, kiddo.” So it’s
just a teeter-totter with nobody on it. This kind of questioning—
fretting over the feelings of imaginary fat people—may very well
be what’s making me tired. I’ve had a long day, I think.
Did you ever see that Twilight Zone where a woman
named Barbara walks into a department store and she’s really a
mannequin on shore leave living as a real person for one month
but she forgets who she is? The other mannequins are waiting for
her to return so they can take a turn being real. When the mannequin
manager reminds her who she is, Barbara is not mad at all. “Oh,
of course. I remember now. I’m not real.” And she apologizes for
making them wait. I thought that showed a lot of class on her part.
I feel I’m waiting on a message like that: someone’s about to tell me
something and everything will fall into place, make a heck of a lot
more sense. This is a lovely home you have here. I have a what?
Where? On my face? Here? Here? Here? Here? Here?

Jennifer L. Knox is the author of four poetry collections, all from Bloof Books: Days of Shame and Failure (2015), The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway (2010), Drunk by Noon (2007) and A Gringo Like Me (2007). Her poems have appeared four times in the Best American Poetry series as well as in the anthologies Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003) and The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Scribner, 2008), both edited by David Lehman. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, and Bomb, among other journals. Born in Lancaster, California, she currently lives in Ames, Iowa and teaches at Iowa State University.

This poem appears Days of Shame and Failure and originally appeared in West Wind Review.

Noah Michelson
Kingdom Come

When it’s finished, and I have regained
the present, the bedroom recomposing
itself around the pulpy grapefruit-colored
air of first light, of not quite May,

each atom briefly discernible as himself, a son
separate from his scheming family, each dizzy
planet plucked from his refractory solar system
and singularly loved before retrograde;

when myself has been returned to himself,
and I have emerged from that closed-eyed
kingdom of spit and jerk, the emergency
over, called off, the ambulance delivered

to the station sedated, empty, disappointed,
the dumbfounded stadium of my body being
rebuilt, panting bulldozer, conveyor belt
of sodium and tablespoon of bleach;

then I ask what other men blinking awake
alone in this apartment building? How
many fluid ounces filling this spilt city?
What other illegible autographs drying

invisible across our exhausted chests?
Exactly what kind of mercy is this?

Noah Michelson received his MFA in poetry from New York University. His work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines and was also selected for The Best American Erotic Poetry from 1800 to The Present. He is the Editorial Director of the Voices Department at The Huffington Post and he founded and still oversees HuffPost Gay Voices.

This poem originally appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal.

Dan Encarnacion
Child

His hand is just something to grip
—Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

Walking through the carpark I find your body just
Outside my line of vision your body not like you at
The rosary where you flushed face buried beneath
A mortician’s hopeful palette as if embarrassed by
Your spotlit place no you’re standing next to a shear
Wall dapper in a fine-cropped beard smoking a Kent
Looking pensive looking numbed looking away red
Tip embering out the shadows left hand fisted solidly
Down in your pant pocket the awkward acceptance-
Emptied well-meant little boy seared behind thick
Cheeked premature hair that let that faceless man
Fuck you fuck you a faceless man in a porn store
Fucked you holed up in a tissue-sotted video booth
Came unto you came into you you’re whole heaving
Into your ear it was your face your blood-flushed
Face eyes veined raw with poor regret ten years
After that I stared at daggered when you told me
But was the cached catching voice of the fumbled
Hungried intentioned boy that rose to say that after
He pulled out he whispered to you as you caught
Your breath and wondered if your ass would snap
Back to shape wondered if the burn would soothe
Wondered if he would do more to you anything
More so you could get off too content a man said
Fevered you thought I will never leave you alone

The elevator stops at a floor not lit up on the inside
Panel the doors slide back and nobody is there in
The shine of the fire extinguisher hung in the hall
I find a frail recollection of your face your face still
Bearded van dyked a reflection that slowly includes
All of you hands down in both pant pockets bending
Over reading the instructions for proper extinguisher
Use like the meticulous inquisitive optimistic ten year
Old boy that won first prize at a state science fair and
In that hallway your manhooded ghost melts into that
Optimistic meticulous inquisitive boy beaming bright
Braced teeth in that browned photo you brought me
Of your scientific success the catching voice that spoke
For the frantic shaky pallid man that read instructions
In their extent to escape eye contact the catching voice
That asked the nurse at the clinic whether a person
Could catch HIV swallowing cum because you couldn’t
Admit an unfaced man fucked you fuck you you let
Someone you never saw fuck you

A Christian testimony transistors through the wall from
The kitchen next door the one with a wife with sallow
Eyes anxious stray a husband self-denyingly husband
Of gestures incorrigibly fey a rapturized voice pillowed
And pinched by insulation and pipes pontificates about
The beneficence of God glories in yielding to God and
Gives thanks to God for how He had directed it to the
Only affordable doctor who could help its palsied
Son I hear the catching voice of the earnest loyal
Conscripted altar boy a voice that I heard nightly and
Each Sunday seep through the phlegm of a shaven
Evaporating man a catching voice that made me turn
Face the outside edge of the bed the catching voice
Of the conscripted earnest loyal altar boy once spry
And sunny now spilling and spattering asking God if
The medication he had read about was really going
To be available for the sick to use a caught voice that
Asked God if getting AIDS was a punishment or just
An indication that his purpose on earth was complete
The loyal earnest conscripted altar boy who comforted
Himself that if his purpose on earth was complete then
His purpose must have been to love me a man voided
Of compassion to buff off my tarnish to help me clarify
Cleanse my life to ground me guide me to illuminate
My path towards some sort or other of yes spiritual
Transport yes your purpose was to love me because
He fucked you you once had said

I feel the catching voice of the meticulous intentioned
Loyal constricted boy I feel it earnestly fumble down in
Me but cushioned by folds of seclusion I feel it vibrate
In my throat as I lie in bed an exhausted voice I catch
Ask each passing night why he’s gay if it’s punishment
Or just a symptom that life would necessitate living
More self-consciousness than most

Dan Encarnacion earned an MFA in Writing at the California College of Arts and lives in Portland, Oregon. Dan has recently been published in Word Riot, Eleven Eleven, The Southern Review, and/or, The Blue Mesa Review, Assaracus, Blackbox Manifold and The Los Angeles Review. He was the featured artist for Reconnaissance Magazine (Issue 2, 2013) and is included in the anthology Reduce: A Collection of Writings from Educe Journal 2012 (Educe Press, 2014), edited by Matthew R. K. Haynes.

This poem previously appeared in Assaracus.

David Craig Austin
A Perfectible Curse

for Robin Nemlich

I.

All night, the sirens interrupt those lovers sleeping
peacefully or not, the consequence

of choosing life in this city, country, year—
gothic and spectacular as flame.

The end of January. The longest night returns
with each new change in temperature.

We huddle afternoons in cafes and bus shelters,
waiting for the weather’s passage,

the expected miracle we might or might not deserve—
or less, for the leather of our shoes to dry.

II.

All over town, the buildings rise
the way we learn to sleep, sometimes badly

and with regrets. The cranes lean from rooftops
like hands curled to hold the sky. Tonight,

fire burned through a warehouse near the river,
mailing smoke and ash to other tenements.

For hours, you could see the distant neighbors
on their roofs, stamping out the cinders

falling around them like confetti.

David Craig Austin (1961–1991) published poems in The Yale Review and Poetry East, among other journals. His work also appeared in Poets for Life: Seventy-Six Poets Respond to AIDS (Persea, 1989), edited by Michael Klein. A segment of his poetry library was donated to Poets House in New York City at the time of his death, and in his honor Columbia University bestows the annual David Craig Austin Prize for “the most distinguished thesis in poetry.” He completed one manuscript, The Merciful Country, which remains unpublished.

This poem appeared in Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson Books, 2010), edited by David Groff and Philip Clark, and is reprinted by kind permission of Barbara Austin Pieniadz.

Alessandra Francesca
The Best Place to Not See Paris

The best place to not see Paris
is in the doctor’s office.
In the swollen heat of a July afternoon,
in a room without air-conditioning

The walk from the inn leads you past
the Église de la Sainte-Trinité
Consider praying for rain.
Consider baptism for the swimming.

Even your organs sweat
They whisper threats
of revolt.
 They storm the Bastille
 of your bones.
They say,
Take us home.
They ask,
What did you swallow?

In the kitchen,
The innkeeper
Picks up the telephone
Her voice carries into the next room.

A rough translation:
“I have a small, adorable, American
With a large, not adorable eye.”

She asks you,
Tomorrow eez uur appee ber-fday?
Zey veel Zink ee give you zee black eye?

You say
 Yes. No. Wait I meant.
You say
 I am immune-compromised
 I am immune promised.
You point to the offending eye.
You say
 This is just my body.
 They don’t have shelters for women like me.

Alessandra Francesca is inspired by a range of artists, from T.S. Eliot to Humphrey Bogart. She has featured at several NYC Poetry readings, including Phillip Giambri’s Rimes of the Ancient Mariner, What the Hell is Love? and Great Weather For Media’s Spoken Word Sundays. She represented Mike Geffner’s The Inspired Word at the first 3Po3try NYC event. A featured reader in the Brownstone Poets series, her poem “Trashbag Full of Diamonds” was published in their annual anthology. Alessandra lives in Brooklyn. You can read more of her work by visiting her website, www.ilsaseeksrick.com.

Mary Ellen Talley
My Daughter’s Ghazal

Easy revelation that it comes in dribs and drabs, this growing up time.
Her fingers extended for pen, piano, volleyball, the slipping through of time.

The OB came to me in recovery and recommended no transfusion
due to hints of tainted blood, after I bore my baby Becca and hemorrhaged big time.

One day at 4-years old, Becca told us she couldn’t hug the preschool helper
as Miss Suzy might catch her cold and get sicker since this was worried time.

When Suzy’s living became hospice, we parents outlined each child’s hand
on a white pillow case surrounding message to ease her into sleeping time:

When you go to sleep at night, All our hands will hold you tight—
the same message sad families soon saw when saying goodbye at casket time.

Our Becca grew, danced her Irish jigs and reels with Jim of Baile Glas
who was stuck being HIV-positive from an earlier transfusion time.

It took more years for luck to turn on Jim and finally teachers Maggie
and Ralph said Jim couldn’t come back for St. Paddy’s Parade line-up time.

Sometimes I think about what formed my luck, my daughter’s early years
and Irish dance excursions that gave her some best and a worst time.

She woke her 12th birthday smiling when I announced dance class cancelled,
struck to silence when told the reason—Jim had died at 4:00 that morning time.

Twenty years later, her own children Irish dancers and don’t know AIDS invasion,
silence, sadness, jigs and reels high leaps of faith at funeral altar time.

Once worry merged with danger—now hoped eradication struggles with economy
as Mary Ellen and her OB find some refuge as they head toward retirement time.

Mary Ellen Talley’s poems have been published in Redheaded Stepchild, Main Street Rag, Windfall, Floating Bridge Review, Spillway, Ty(po-e:tic)us, Poems on Buses, Kaleidoscope and Quiddity, among other journals. Mary Ellen has worked with words and children as a speech-language pathologist for almost 40 years and currently works in the Seattle Public Schools.

This poem is not previously published.

Lonely Christopher
All Good Years

In the year 1993 in the municipal parking lot
a hapless woman collapsed against her car
and her earring fell off and she knelt on it
the sun was white and the roof was flat
and something evil happened in her skull
where her spine pierced her brain toylike
similarly near the end of the millennium
in the city an uncle the family disavowed
emaciated in a narrow bed with tubes in him
opened his mouth as his lungs filled with blood
and the black nurse put down her magazine
in the year 2009 the man with the truck howled
into the chest of some haphazard off-duty cop
near the drive-thru lane at a local restaurant
after unwittingly backing over a baby stroller
with a four week old newborn girl in it that
a mother had left unattended for only a second
and later in the year that the world ended (2012)
on the exact sites of provincial freak accidents
where the quotidian and unappreciated loss
drooled out of the chronology of petty histories
burnished fountains sprung from within the earth
and shot where years magnify into a heaven
and god leaned out the passenger-side window
of his brand new decked-out luxury vehicle
on the empyrean interstate in time to wink
at the sputtering faucets reaching up jealously
toward something I know that I will carry
but fear that I will never learn how to say.

Lonely Christopher is the author of the poetry collection Death & Disaster Series (Monk Books, 2014) and the short story collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, a 2011 selection of Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery imprint of Akashic Books. His plays have been produced in New York City and China. His film credits include the feature MOM (which he wrote and directed), the shorts We Are Not Here and Petit Lait (which were adapted from his stories), and Crazy House (for which he wrote the screenplay). He lives in Brooklyn.

Charif Shanahan
Eunuch

I.
beyond the village wall his wrists
tied with rope staked into sand his throat
empty his loincloth balled up and pressed
flush against the perineum warm
copper hammered thin and sharp
circles him therehis smoothest flesh
if not early morning it is exactly noon
his eyes roll back into frenzied lids
before the rip into him
and the great wound
covered in sweet wood ash and at last
the long sleep while dogs eat the blood-meat
discarded beside the well
and his waking in air cooled by night
to stand squinting through low fog
at a woman being swallowed by a snake

II.

By day three, waist-deep in clay,
he is ready, if still
breathing, to accept

the hot needle, probing
the lost urethra,
his body then put back

into clay. By month six,
the surface is a gnarl
of skin, discolored,

a quilt of yellow moons:
A shadow of hunger,
as a hand removed

from earth remembers
how it felt to be
submerged,

to enter another warmth
and then to be without—

Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Apogee, Barrow Street, Boston Review, iO: A Journal of New American Poetry, Literary Hub, The Manhattanville Review, The New Republic, Phantom Books, and Prairie Schooner.  His translations from Italian and German have appeared in A Public Space and Circumference, among other publications, and have been performed by the Vienna Art Orchestra. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and twice a semi-finalist for the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, he holds degrees from Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and New York University.  Formerly Programs Director of the Poetry Society of America, Charif is poetry editor of Psychology Tomorrow Magazine and a Fulbright Senior Scholar to Morocco.

This poem originally appeared in Prairie Schooner (Summer, 2015)

Davi Walders
The Thirteenth Floor

And not to have is the beginning of desire.
—Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”

Enter the clatter and clutter of the thirteenth
floor, the chaos of children under clinical
light. This is the land where they wait, thin
as spidery ferns, in wheel chairs hooked

to Critikons feeding nourishment. Vital signs
dot the halls: Phlebotomy Room, Disposal Area,
I have AIDS, please hug me. Pandas and Mickey
Mouse sprawl, Clue spews from a broken box.

Parents and grandparents sit among untouched trays,
rise stiffly to coax their tiny wards to examining
rooms. Pagers and phones ring. Loudspeakers call
someone, somewhere. Ask the child why she’s crying.

She weeps words of rage at her Snoopy bandaid.
Her arm is wet from mourning the all-gone Pocahontases.
She will not speak of her bruises or blond curls
soon to fall, nor of the four years her parents

count by days and hours. You will not see beyond
the hot waiting room, behind swinging doors into
labs that never close, refrigerators filled with
tissue and blood, into computers choked with trials

and data banks, into the work, the work, the work
of piecing fragile bit by bit. Imagine the nausea,
loss of hair, a lung, childhood, a child, the world
of grandparents, foster parents, aunts, uncles,

lovers burying a lost generation and carrying on.
Feel the night sweats, not just from drugs, disease,
but because of earthquakes and shear drops, sudden
plummets in funding, research, hope. This is the country

where a child grieves Pocahontas, the warrior princess,
well-woman flag she wants to raise on her bruised, stuck
arm. Fierce desire fills the room. Look out the window.
This is the height where white geese fly at eye level,

where snow crystals turn to rain, where the sun
suddenly breaks through. Turn back. This is the land
of doctors, nurses, staff stopping, stooping, scouring
cabinets and pockets, searching for the right bandaid.

Desire and determination, passports to the thirteenth
floor, stamped day after day, in a harbor where
a child finally smiles, pointing to Pocahontas
on her raised arm just below a small, sacred fist.

Davi Walders is the author of the poetry collections Women Against Tyranny: Poems of Resistance During the Holocaust (Clemson University Digital Press, 2011), Gifts (Orit Editions, 2001), and Afternoon in the Garden (Orit Editions, 2000). From the mid 1990s until 2005, she was director of the Vital Signs Poetry Project at the Children’s Inn at the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute Clinical Center in Bethesda, MD. The Project was supported by a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry to provide support and writing opportunities to families whose children were HIV patients at NIH during the years of clinical drug trials. The thirteenth floor of NCI was the location of the conference room where Walders and her colleagues held writing seminars.

This poem appeared in Cancer Poetry Project: Poems by Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them (Fairview Press, 2001), edited by Karin B. Miller, and was previously published in JAMA.