Prudence Chamberlain
Retroviral

In 2015, *** inadvertently ingested HIV blood on an emergency call-out. After 31 days of antiretroviral treatment, there is a three-month waiting process for the all clear.

62.

The eye is the organ of vision & on you it is like a blue/green heartbeat looking with the quiet sight of diagnoses. I imagine the imperfect spheres of your movement, that certainty undoes a sweeping circumference as you purposeful & porous blink once or twice.

In 2013 an eye-­licking fetish swept through the adolescent population of Japan & pink-­eye spread amongst students in urban areas. The bacteria in the mouth is dissimilar to bacteria in the eyeball; it can lead to blindness. Oculolinctus and tongue to membrane porous and spit and almost red.

Plasma water glucose mineral ions hormones carbon dioxide red blood cells albumin leukocytes platelets haemoglobin self-­diagnoses on the Internet new ophthalmologist of the Wikipedia page.

You get blood in your eye in a professional and consummate way while my hypochondria is both inherited and cultured and we are different in that way.

HIV is found in the bodily fluids of an infected person which includes semen vaginal and anal fluids blood and breast milk. 95% of those diagnosed in the UK in 2013 acquired HIV as a result of sexual contact & you get it in the eye; it is its own pun & your chances of infection are somewhere under 1%.

I am shit at my office job you can start hearts with your hands it is a training process with a system we sit outside of and for now we can touch one another medically and hold hands in public in the right places if we’re ready for it.

Prudence Chamberlain is the author of the debut poetry collection I sit on your face in Parliament Square, forthcoming with Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. Her work has appeared in 3:AM, Poems in Which, Luna Poetry, HYSTERIA and Jungftak. Prudence recently finished her PhD in the poetics of flippancy and feminism at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she lectures in Creative Writing.

Octavio R. González
Violin Sex

gold medal around his neck
the flecks of his eyes

shards of goldenrod
Crayola smile

mirrored thing so lovely
you tell me

lines of cocaine as white
as your eyes

envisioning

the ecstasy of me, this room, this
meeting of bone muscle skin

a performance you want to attend
the sex so damn good you want it all

over again, and when it’s done
the perfect cupid’s bow of your lips

gives me that expensive kiss
a gift so dazzling, but this

time it’s free: I would love to

stay in bed with you all day, but
I have places to go, people to see

—and the laugh track surrounding
us, whoever that is, when the fantasy

is done, the body lies down and plays dead
with a noose around its head—

trips on the carpet as he asks you to
dance the tango in a blindfold:

this love, like Plato’s triangle,
never to behold the crueler

measures of reality,
inexact and slightly

hypocritical—small lies of yesterday
morning, perhaps after coffee,

when repeating the scene you realize

how he said, your hands touching me
like a master handles his violin.

Octavio R. González is the author of the poetry collection The Book of Ours (Momotombo Press, 2009), a selection of the Letras Latinas/Institute for Latino Letters series at the University of Notre Dame. His work appears in numerous journals, including Puerto del Sol, miPoesías, The Richmond Review, and OCHO. He is currently working on a series of love poems, among other projects. Octavio teaches English literature at Wellesley College.

Alison Stone
Not Cure, Not Denial

…Murderers are easy
to understand. But this: that one can contain
death, the whole of death…
can hold it to one’s heart
gently, and not refuse to go on living,
is inexpressible.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Fourth Duino Elegy

Eleven years you held death in your body,
lulled to sleep with songs where
clouds support a castle’s weight
and princes feed a kingdom with a dragon’s blood.
Now it wakes and nibbles. You
suffer fevers, thrush, your doctor’s cold

insistence that the virus is a cold
and patient god who will wait
years to reap a body.
Once I was the broken one. You
did my laundry, rubbed my neck, drove me where
the sea was endless and its jeweled waves calmed my blood.

Tonight the moon spills silver. Blood-
flecked insects glow in the cold
light. We walk in woods where
years ago you
carved my name into the body
of an oak. A dark bird circles, waits.

Voice flat, you say, “My life is a wait
between funerals.” Those who shared your blood
are dead. “Why love anybody?”
Branches drop their shadows as you
dig up flowers. Morning opens its cold
eye. I shiver, drift off into memory where

you made the world a place where
each ripe hour waited to be picked. You
had pulled me out of heroin’s cold
hug, its house of promises and blood,
kissed me bold and weight-
less. Your tongue gave me back my body.

Sun lifts its gold. Weak rays lack the warmth my body
craves. Vines bend beneath dark berries’ weight.
You crush them, smear the pulp and blood,
brush away my arm and stand where
I can’t touch you. Eyes cold,
fingers clenched, you

practice death’s cold No. Love, I beg you
risk a now where passion stirs your blood.
Fill your body. Make the darkness wait.

Alison Stone is the author of Dangerous Enough (Presa Press, 2014), Borrowed Logic (Dancing Girl Press, 2014), From the Fool to the World: Poems in the Voices of the Major Arcana of the Tarot (Parallel Press, 2012) and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award and was published by Many Mountains Moving Press. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, and a variety of other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded Poetry magazine’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin award. She is also a painter and the creator of The Stone Tarot, a tarot deck reproduced from original oil paintings by Alison. A licensed psychotherapist, Alison has private practices in New York City and Nyack. She is currently editing an anthology of poems on the Persephone/Demeter myth.

This poem appeared in the journal Poetry and in the collection They Sing at Midnight.

Abigail George
Johannesburg

Desire, grief and loneliness were rivals—
I think of the memoirs that I have written
Of excursions, of executions, of experiments.
How I mourned.

I mourned the nothing loss of him—
Like spies. Smoke. Fat of the land. Mirrors.
In my moonlight house. The forests
Are armed.

It was difficult. I saw him in things—
Exits. Then not at all. It took me a long time
To triumph over all things. In the end I saw
Heaven.

All lightning is a lake of silver—
Tonight there is only a portal to Hades.
I needed sunlight. It was a golden ticket.
Like any prayer.

I endure summer nights. I endure sorrow—
Endure her invited guests at the banquet.
The uninvited well I imagine their deaths.
Like childhood.

It is dark here. I am trying too hard –
There is a great fire within me like a sea.
No flowers grow here. No grassiness.
No books.

Burial lies behind the closed door—
Closure. The villagers are waiting in the barn.
I am not giving up my psyche’s souvenirs.
Gretel dances.

I tasted the syrup of the perfect ending—
Cold, malignant fish I do not accept you.
The assignment is a game of win and lose.
Lectures are given.

Give me the contents of romanticism—
The white rabbits are ruling the wonderland.
Memory is clouded. Images paralyse me.
The lamp is bright.

Abigail George is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has appeared or is forthcoming from Africanwriters.com, Birds Piled Loosely, Every Day Poems, Hackwriters.com, ITCH The Creative Journal, Literary Orphans, Modern Diplomacy, Ovi Magazine: Finland’s English Online Magazine, Peaches Lit Mag, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Spontaneity, The Artist Unleashed, The Copperfield Review, The Voices Project, Three and a Half Point Nine, and Toad Suck Review, as well as in a number of anthologies. Abigail has received two National Arts Council Writing Grants, one from the Centre for the Book and another from the Eastern Cape Provincial Arts and Culture Council in South Africa.

This poem is not previously published.

Gregg Shapiro
Extraordinary Measures

What’s the difference between running in place
or in circles? You still get there at the same time.
Too late, out of breath, empty-handed. I call out
the names of the dead. Awake, asleep, mid-air.
Moving my lips with or without my voice, waving
my hands to no avail. This is the age of responsibility.
Every breath an accusation, a finger stabbing the air.

Whispers, murmurs of education and prevention.
Advice given from behind a hand. Ask yourself
what you would do, what distance you would travel
to save a friend, a family member, a stranger. No
length too great, no act too ordinary. I pinch myself
awake from the same drowning dream. Starless, airless,
endless. Water black as rock, warm as a motor. Swimming

is out of the question, arms heavy as corpses. The drowned
float past, under the surface. Bottleless messages to
the living on the shore. Give rage a face, a mouth twisted
into goodbye. Two moist eyes that see everything,
unblinking. A nose for trouble and ears to listen for
the sound of nurses shuffling silently on schedule to
monitor a fever, a pulse, to preserve and protect what is left.

Gregg Shapiro is the author of Lincoln Avenue (Squares and Rebels Press, 2014), GREGG SHAPIRO: 77 (Souvenir Spoon Press, 2012), Protection (Gival Press, 2008) and the forthcoming short story collection, How to Whistle (Lethe Press, 2016). An entertainment journalist whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBT and mainstream publications and websites, Gregg lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with his husband Rick Karlin and their dog k.d.

This poem appeared in the anthology Among The Leaves: Queer Male Poets on the Midwestern Experience (Squares & Rebels, 2012), edited by Raymond Luczak.

William Shakespeare
Sonnet 94

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

William Shakespeare was the author of 38 plays and 154 sonnets as well as the poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). The Sonnets of Shakespeare was published in 1609. A complete collection of his plays, known as the First Folio, was published in 1623.

Winston Plowes
In My Dreams You Stay Alive

In fifteen years of hugging flint,
too often I fled from the table.
From Dad’s double breasted Sunday best.
To the front room set in aspic.

Spoon-fed by the Bakelite dial
you’re tightening your Bible belts by
lapping up hymns and polishing souls

I screamed for skin-to-shining skin
and shivered as you inched away
till now it’s come to miles from home.
Will no one stay forever?

When gift wrapped boxes die on me
my broken angels cannot spin
the words of silk to spare me now.
Then you unpack my second head
and throw me rings of flowers green.

Re-lace my wings and clip my hair
and walk away through fields of god.
Mummy—Show me how the softest
Parts of my body talk.

Return my rusty pre-packed heart.
Bury me with people my own size
with whom I will share more in common.

I am left with mutant genes
dripping through two childish hands
so crudely cupped.
But in my dreams, you stay alive—
Somehow.

For as long as he can remember, Winston Plowes has been disproportionately excited about covering blank pages with words, either with a pencil, fountain pen, typewriter or on his laptop. On one day these words might be serenely launched into the world like a majestic ocean liner. On another they might refuse to start like a rusty old motorbike. Experimental or conventional they are all welcome
and have been regularly published in print and on line worldwide. You can read more on his website: www.winstonplowes.co.uk.

This poem is not previously published.

Gregory Woods
My Lover Loves

My lover loves me with kid gloves.
That is, no matter who’s above
And who beneath
We use a sheath—
We never screw without a Condom.

He holds me in such high regard
He shields me like a bodyguard.
Although love’s dart
Has hit my heart,
He fired it safely in a Condom.

Security is what we crave
To save us from an early grave,
Our greatest wealth
Each other’s health,
Safely invested in a Condom.

Whenever he comes home from work
He brings me bribes, inducements, perks;
But of his gifts
The one that lifts
My spirit most’s a pack of Condoms.

Although his clothes are always fine
(Comme des Garçons and Calvin Klein)
He looks his best
When he’s undressed—
Yet even better in a Condom.

Among the catalogue of skills
Which generate our thrills and spills,
His special knack
Is to unpack,
Unroll, and lubricate a Condom.

Without the taste for being chaste,
We use a lube that’s water-based
And take great care
Never to tear
The tender membrane of our Condom.

As long as he takes care of me
I am not scared of HIV.
My lover loves
Me with kid gloves
But loves me most of all with Condoms.

Gregory Woods is the author of We Have the Melon (Carcanet Press, 1992), May I Say Nothing (Carcanet Press, 1998), The District Commissioner’s Dreams (Carcanet Press, 2002), Quidnunc (Carcanet Press, 2007), An Ordinary Dog (Carcanet Press, 2011), and Very Soon I Shall Know (Shoestring Press, 2012). Gregory was born in Cairo in 1953 and spent his early years in Ghana. He came to Britain in 1962 and studied at the University of East Anglia. He has taught in Italy, London, and Nottingham.

This poem appeared in May I Say Nothing.

Regina Jamison
Billy

Watched him go to bone
Thin as angel hair
Eyes wide we worried
Didn’t know what to do
AIDS was new
But so was our friendship
Our shared love for
Prince
We sang loud on the train
Blasted bass through the
Pain wishing compliments could
Save you.

Regina Jamison’s poetry has appeared in Me, as a Child (Silver Birch Press Poetry Series), Promethean eZine, and in Off the Rocks (Newtown Writers LGBT writers anthology series) volumes 14 and 15. Her erotic short stories have appeared in Girls Who Bite: Vampire Lesbian Anthology (Cleis Press, 2011), edited by Delilah Devlin, and Purple Panties: An Eroticanoir.com Anthology (Strebor Books, 2008), edited by Zane. An excerpt from her forthcoming novel, Lurleen, appears in Gaslight (Lambda Literary, 2015), an e-book anthology of writing by Lambda Literary Fellows.

Kristin Chang
Guanyin

my mother says there is only one way out of china and
that is through god. god opens her mouth & rivers patter out

like children in the night. children in the night spotting the street
like a skin. children in the night & our veins neon & opened

longways, our hands shuttered over our chests. a scent in the air
like incense or blood, isn’t that what they tried first, horseblood,

AiNing, hibiscus, ginger, horsefat, xiaomi, my mother tongued
every leaf til she grew a tree from her mouth & it stabbed the sky red

& the wound was the sound of a wingbeat. every night heat rose off
her body like birds, she carried her tongue like a blade & dreamt

every night of the baby she never fed. every window
a soft mouth & flickering tongue, pink as a fish,

hunger hard and glittered as a pebble understream. Wasn’t that
what came next, swimming & ginseng, silt swallowed off the river,

prayer: the future tense of our bones
still dust. my mother sits in a lap

of water, says women ruin the world. says
this is what he told me. says every day she

dreamed of the sun rousing in the night, that light,
so light I bobbed in her arms.

Kristin Chang is 17, lives in California, and spends her summers in China. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in BOAAT, Powder Keg, Winter Tangerine Review, Word Riot, and elsewhere.

This poem is not previously published.