Evan J. Peterson
Otto; or Up with Dead People

—Directed by Bruce LaBruce, 2008

A hasty transfusion: tube ripped from arm
and spurting: hot jets:

Starring Flesh as “Too Precious A Thing in These Times”

Your meatkiss collapses, a nethermouth,
porn-vacant,
a body waiting to be signed.

Facial wasting: lipidystrophy [no fats]: slipping
the elastic, eyes sucked back and teeth
plucked of hemoglobin, but please!

Leave your torso intact. Fresh and chiseled,
a newly struck tombstone.

Infrared doesn’t lie; aren’t we all hot
for the right Predator?
Fingered meats on pile
in the abattoir.
Who’s king of the heap?
[I mean, come on—you fucked worse
than zombies, yeah?]

No pic, no chat/no fats/no femmes/no Blacks/Asians/no
Humanity

Skin your head, snout to glass.
Lose the jackboots, unstrap suspenders,
bring your teenage angst,
your sperm-und-drang.

Starring the Zombie as “Unextraordinary”
mere jerk of nerves, no different than life
your capacity for reason untainted
by embalmer’s fluids[hot jets]

Still, the undead have difficulty accepting suicide.
The Revolution is your boyfriend. The Apocalypse:
he’s just a fuckbuddy.
When there’s no one around
Except for the Policeman in our heads

Raise the dead like a greased fist. Power to the people.
Yeah there’s no one around
Let’s pretend that everyone’s dead:

Evan J. Peterson is the author of Skin Job (Minor Arcana Press, 2012) and The Midnight Channel (Babel/Salvage Press, 2013). With Vincent Kovar, he edited Gay City 5: Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam (CreateSpace, 2013), a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Anthology. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in journals including Weird Tales, The Stranger, and Nightmare, as well as in the anthologies The Queer South: LQBTQ Writers on the American South (Sibling Rivalry, 2014), edited by Douglas Ray; Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books (Minor Arcana Press, 2014), edited by Bryan D. Dietrich and Marta Ferguson; Arcana: The Tarot Poetry Anthology (Minor Arcana Press, 2015), edited by by Marjorie Jensen; and Aim for the Head: An Anthology of Zombie Poetry (Write Bloody Publishing, 2011), edited by Rob Sturma. His first full-length prose book, a safe sex memoir tentatively titled The PrEP Diaries, will be published by Lethe Press in 2017. Brought to life in Miami, Florida, Evan now lives and writes in Seattle. Check out evanjpeterson.com for more.

This poem appears in The Midnight Channel and contains lyrics from the song “Everyone’s Dead” by The Homophones, featured prominently in the Bruce LaBruce’s film, Otto; or Up with Dead People.

Lorraine Currelley
This Journey of Grace

we have shed tears, cursing the night
questioning who, what, when,
where and how

embracing our present
navigating our new way of being
we are not less than or broken
nor have we ever been
we remain life worthy
living each day with continued
wonder and expectation
breathing gratitude and hope
never hiding in fear, shame or guilt
these will not love nor support us

instead we choose to kiss sunlight
and be warriors of healing
comforting those needing
speaking bravely of courage and
in the midst of new found faith and grace
we will acknowledge that
we have saved ourselves

Lorraine Currelley is a widely anthologized poet, writer and member of the Pearls of Wisdom Storytellers as well as the founder and executive director of Poets Network & Exchange, Inc., a positive, safe and supportive space for poets and writers at all levels. Her awards include the 2015 Arts for A Lifetime Grant from the New York Public Library, a Bronx Council for the Arts 2014 Seniors Partnering with the Arts Citywide Residency ( S.P.A.R.C), and BinderCon Scholar Grants for 2014 and 2015. Lorraine was president of the Harlem Arts Fund and is a board member at Pen To Mind Books & Child Development Concepts, Inc. and Blind Beggar Press as well as an adviser for Writing for Peace.

This poem is not previously published.

Chris Bullard
Incurable Romantic

For John Kelly (1959-1992)

You loved the intrigue and the dangers
in your flings with handsome strangers,
so planned for this, one last affair,
a visit to a pied-a-terre
with him of the perpetual grin,
black-clad, imperious, and thin,
that most significant other,
who would put you back together
by granting you a happy ending.
With him, it’s always “the real thing.”

Now, at Holy Sepulchre Park,
in summary of your short arc,
we praise you in the present tense
as though by speech we might make sense
of senselessness. As you, we’re forced
to admit our own intercourse
with death whose clever seduction
is not negation, or destruction,
but acceptance. Some may desire
to give to darkness all their fire
and lose themselves in that embrace;
you sought there a state of grace.

Left behind, we shall conjure up
some place for you in our gossip
about those gone, imagining
a heaven, for the time being,
in which you shall stay beautiful,
if part of a different circle.

Chris Bullard is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Grand Canyon (WordTech Editions, 2015) and the chapbook Dear Leatherface (Kattywompus Press, 2014).  His work has appeared in the journals Rattle, River Styx, Pleiades, and Green Mountains Review, among others. He received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. from Wilkes University. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Chris now lives in Collingswood, New Jersey.

This poem appears in the collection Back (WordTech Communications, 2013) and is posted by permission of the author.

Smriti Verma
Mother

It goes like this: the first fist, finger grab, opening of eye,
babbling. The skin, soft as feathers. And gravity, reaching
from under, pulling down our skins, one from each finger.
I swore to keep you safe, swatting away the flies, as delicate
as you were. And you, child, goddess, infant of dying woman,
infant of my dreams of near-coming. A tiny hand, an ant,
or a maggot, maybe a bird. If a bird, then a dove. Perhaps,
a pigeon. Or maybe the quiet cocoon, but not the whale.
The whale—only when the water reaches deep and you,
you don’t let its salt hurt your wounds.

Smriti Verma’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Word Riot, Open Road Review, DoveTales Literary Journal, Canvas, Textploit and Yellow Chair Review, and is forthcoming in Alexandria Quarterly, Inklette and Cleaver Magazine. She is the recipient of the Save The Earth Poetry Prize 2015, offered annually by John Felstiner, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and Charles Weeden of The Weeden Foundation (read her award-winning poem). A high school student in Delhi, India, Smriti is a poetry reader for Inklette and an editorial intern for The Blueshift Journal.

This poem is not previously published.

Rickey Laurentiis
Little Song

Given what I am,if
not cannibal for, animal for: he
who let go a door in me, be-
cracked my sternum to a hundred flashing moths, oh handsome, oh—Truth
be told:I hungered this, needled it out, I
stretched for this. Always a field stirs, would
stir, for want of being filled. Dwell
of me, my Eden, my Hook. In
pleasure weren’t we founded? At the
start didn’t we blend and blur?I would be his bravery,
illusion
of his fearlessness and fear. Given what I amonly, of
meat: cut fire: the inconsolable: of these, Him.

Rickey Laurentiis is the author of the debut collection Boy With Thorn (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize chosen by Terrance Hayes, and a selection for the Pitt Poetry Series. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, Rickey is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Washington University in St. Louis. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Fence, Kenyon Review, New England Review, New Republic, Poetry, and elsewhere. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Rickey currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

“Little Song” appears in Boy with Thorn, by Rickey Laurentiis © 2015. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Ocean Vuong
Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong

After Frank O’Hara / After Roger Reeves

Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Here’s the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red tripwire.
Don’t worry. Just call it horizon
& you’ll never reach it.
Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not
a lifeboat. Here’s the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty into.
Don’t be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean,
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here’s
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here’s a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here’s a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake—
& mistake these walls
for skin.

Ocean Vuong’s first full-length collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press (2016). He is also the author of two chapbooks: No (YesYes Books, 2013) and Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010), which was an American Library Association’s Over The Rainbow selection. A 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, Ocean has received honors and awards from Poets House, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and a 2014 Pushcart Prize. His poems have been featured in Best New Poets, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, and the American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. His work has also been translated into Arabic, French, Italian, Hindi, and Spanish. Born in Saigon, Ocean currently resides in New York City.

This poem appeared in The New Yorker.

Thomas Goins
Losing Race

Born in the South I avoided the traps: liquor
nicotine, cocaine, deferred dreams. “You smart,”
I’d hear them say. “What you got now, a doctor’s
degree. Haha. You done us proud. I knew’nt since
you was a little boy you’d teach. Or preach. The way
you’d stand ‘fore us and read, Little Dr. King.

Now say. . . Here it comes. “Still too good fo’ girls?
People talkin’ bout that white boy you came
back roomin’ with is mighty close, but I tell ’em you
ain’t got no sugar in your tank. No, Lord! Not you!”

So I went North, my “white boy” in tow, and we lived
fine until he caught the long-flu. We knew.
The 90s warned our time was soon, but the test
marked me clean. Clean? Clean—the word I wore
readily shaming him.

But I didn’t leave. He left me. When I held him
the 29th of June, his belly was full of sleeping pills;
I kept him as the paramedic announced the end. “Sorry
for the loss,” came first, and my test a year later brought
“Lucky to be negative.”

“Lucky” and “loss” to reference one life stayed with me
as an oxymoron, and things like surviving
the South and living up North didn’t matter without my
white boy.

Thomas Goins is a native of Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he is an English Language & Literature major at Fayetteville State University (UNC-FSU). Thomas is an intern at Conjure, a new UNC-FSU digital literary journal that will feature writing and visual art of students and alumni of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) across the country. The  name of the journal comes from the short story collection The Conjure Woman (1899) by African American novelist Charles W. Chesnutt, one of the founders of the college that eventually became Fayetteville State University. The journal, a project of the Department of English at UNC-FSU, is projected to debut in 2016 under co-editors Carole Boston Weatherford and Dr. Maria Orban, a Chesnutt scholar. Thomas has a book review forthcoming in GLINT, the UNC-FSU literary journal.

This poem is not previously published.

Francine Witte
Give me back

my childhood. I’d know how to use
it now. This time, I’d savor the sun
thumping down each night like a pink
Spauldeen. And give me back seventh
grade, Mitchell Gorstein, all those silly
minutes I wasted, waiting for you to
notice me. Turns out, you were thinking
of Judy in the third row. Give me back
those achy nights in high school when
I cried for hours over Bobby Traub. How
he dumped me cause I wouldn’t sneak
out. Give me back how I screamed it
all on my mother. Better yet, give
me back my mother. And give me back
the night I told my husband, the one
man who finally loved me, that he
wasn’t enough, and that I found
someone who was. Give me back
his broken face, his broken heart.
No better yet, don’t. But most of all,
give me back one morning, any morning,
glittering like Christmas, my future
wrapped in boxes waiting to be opened,
tissue paper and possibility waiting
to rise up like the just-woken sun.

Francine Witte is the author of the poetry chapbooks Only, Not Only (Finishing Line Press, 2012) and First Rain (Pecan Grove Press, 2009), winner of the Pecan Grove Press competition, and the flash fiction chapbooks Cold June (Ropewalk Press), selected by Robert Olen Butler as the winner of the 2010 Thomas A. Wilhelmus Award, and The Wind Twirls Everything (MuscleHead Press). A retired English teacher, Francine lives in New York.

This poem previously appeared in Willow Review.

Jee Leong Koh
Eve’s Fault

Eve, whose fault was only too much love
—Aemilia Lanyer, “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum: Eve’s Apology”

God won her when he whipped out from his planetary sleeve
a bouquet of light. They watched the parade of animals pass.
He told her the joke about the Archaeopteryx, and she noted
the feathers and the lethal claws, a poem, the first of its kind.
On a beach raised from the ocean with a shout, he entered her
and she realized, in rolling waves, that love joins and separates.

The snake was a quieter fellow. He came in the fall evenings
through the long grass, his steps barely parting the blades.
Each time he showed her a different path. As they wandered,
they talked about the beauty of the light striking the birch,
the odd behavior of the ants, the fairest way to split an apple.
When Adam appeared, the serpent gave her up to happiness.

For happy was she when she met Adam under the tree of life,
still is, and Adam is still Adam, inarticulate, a terrible speller,
his body precariously balanced on his feet, his mind made up
that she is the first woman and he the first man. He needed
her and so scratched down and believed the story of the rib.
She needed Adam’s need, so different from God and the snake,

and that was when she discovered herself outside the garden.

Jee Leong Koh is the author of the poetry collections Steep Tea (Carcanet Press, 2015), Payday Loans (Poets Wear Prada, 2007), Equal to the Earth (Bench Press, 2013), and Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (Bench Press, 2011), and a collection of poetic essays, The Pillow Book (Math Paper Press, 2012). Shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize, his work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. Hailing from Singapore, Jee currently lives in New York.

Photo ©2010 by Cathryn Lynne

This poem appears in Steep Tea and is posted here with the kind permission of Carcanet Press.

Drew Attana
That Street with all the Food Carts

Thick pollen in the air, mixing
with the Clorox scent of those cum
trees. Walking downtown, put upon
by the few days of city sun,
our ankles were even thicker, jutting
up from our low top Cons.
Camo shorts and Hatebreed
shirts cut to the shoulders.

We were bad.
We were hardcore.
Thinking we owned the city.

A Jeep, red or black—
the color doesn’t matter.
Stopped at the nearest light, the driver
laid on the horn and called us faggots.
Andy asked if I wanted to fight.
We tossed up our arms like villagers
with torches and a group of muscles and
old money slithered across the street.

Head against the base of the closest tree,
the driver pleaded for us to stop,
until the door of Greek Cusina
opened, the chef wedging between us.
Andy and I limped away, hobbling to
the train, knuckles, lips split, and our
skin was stained, red or black—
the color doesn’t matter.

Nor did it matter that Andy was the
only gay friend I had, or that he had
just received a positive result, or that
I wasn’t sure if I had fought for him, or
for myself. What did matter, was that
I couldn’t know for sure whose blood
was whose, or how someone gets HIV.

Or how to see myself after I shied away
from him once we cleaned up. The
mixture of fear and cowardice and
shame, like bloodstains and paint jobs,
kept him at arms length—
as far as the distance between
those unexplored crevices of sexuality.

And my ignorance of it all.

Originally from Los Angeles, Drew Attana spent over a decade getting into trouble from Tijuana to Portland, before heading South. His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry has appeared in Eunoia Review, Drunk Monkeys Magazine, Yellow Chair Review, Pathos Literary Journal and is forthcoming in Common Ground, Cargo Literary, and Apeiron Review. He is currently living and writing in Lafayette, Louisiana.

This poem previously appeared in Eunoia Review.