Kamilah Aisha Moon
Madear Tests Positive

Logger of long hours inside
& outside of home,
Night-gowned lighthouse,
Owner of used breasts, tear-soaked
shoulders & a well-worn lap,

in whose arms
could you have rested,
succumbed without fear
of breaking boughs, hell
or high water to pay
for pleasure, for remembering
you are a woman?

Love dropped you, hard
from over 30 years high.
Who wouldn’t take the first
warm, veined hand offered?
How could you have known he was
a sharecropper of loneliness,
sower of radioactive
sweet nothings like seeds,
bathing you in bittersweet brine
without apology or gratitude
before diving his dwindled self
back into the earth?

You couldn’t, like none of us could
or can know. Yet, as every other crisis
lived through, you remain royal
in faith-rending circumstances
still, still. & always.

An exhale after waiting
for so long shouldn’t cost
this much. When the worst
befalls the best, injustice
stuns us silent as a dying star
weeping alone in the dark sky
to herself.

Queen mother, burn
until your breath
becomes holy smoke.

Kamilah Aisha Moon is the author of She Has a Name (Four Way, 2013). work has been featured in Harvard Review, jubilat, The Awl, Poem-A-Day for the Academy of American Poets and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize winner, she has been selected as a New American Poet presented by the Poetry Society of America, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde Publishing Triangle Award. Kamila holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has been a recipient of A recipient of fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Prague Summer Writing Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and the Vermont Studio Center. 

This poem is not previously published.

Achat Sha’alti
Traditional Hebrew song from Psalm 27

This song is sung frequently in Jewish services, but never with so much kavanah (spiritual intentionality) as during the Days of Awe, from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, which this year we celebrate today. Many find great comfort in singing these words or hearing them sung. I do. Since I’ve been attending High Holiday and Shabbat services at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the LGBT synagogue in New York City, I have learned from Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum that it is okay to exercise self-determination in my beliefs about God, whether God exists, what kind of God God is. Rabbi Kleinbaum says, “I believe in God, but the God I believe in is not the kind of God who cares whether or not you believe in God.” What I know about God is that God does not want us to be ashamed of our race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, or HIV status.

—Michael Broder

This recording were ripped off shamelessly and without permission from Mechon Hadar, an educational institution that empowers Jews to create and sustain vibrant, practicing, egalitarian communities of Torah learning, prayer, and service. If I can find out who the singer is, I will credit him.

Paul Monette
Here

everything extraneous has burned away
this is how burning feels in the fall
of the final year not like leaves in a blue
October but as if the skin were a paper lantern
full of trapped moths beating their fired wings
and yet i can lie on this hill just above you
a foot beside where I will lie myself
soon soon and for all the wrack and blubber
feel still how we were warriors when the
merest morning sun in the garden was a
kingdom after Room 1010 war is not all
death it turns out war is what little
thing you hold on to refugeed and far from home
oh sweetie will you please forgive me this
that every time I opened a box of anything
Glad Bags One-A-Days KINGSIZE was
the worst I’d think will you still be here
when the box is empty Rog Rog who will
play boy with me now that I bucket with tears
through it all when i’d cling beside you sobbing
you’d shurg it off with the quietest I’m still
here I have your watch in the top drawer
which I don’t dare wear yet help me please
the boxes grocery home day after day
the junk that keeps men spotless but it doesn’t
matter now how long they last or I
the day has taken you with it and all
there is now is burning dark that only green
is up by the grave and this little thing
of telling the hill I’m here oh I’m here

Paul Monette is the author of the poetry collections West of Yesterday, East of Summer: New and Selected Poems 1973-1993 (St. Martins, 1994), Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog (St Martins, 1988), and The Carpenter at the Asylum (Little, Brown, 1975). Monette is also the author of the memoirs Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1988) and Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1992), which won the National Book Award. His novels include Halfway Home (Crown, 1991) and Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (Little, Brown, 1978). Monette taught at Milton Academy and Pine Manor College before moving to Los Angeles with his partner Roger Horwitz in 1977, where he became active in the city’s gay rights movement. He died of complications of AIDS in 1995.

Photo by Star Black (1978)

This poem appeared in Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog. Posted with kind permission of the author’s literary estate.

Brane Mozetič

only when thousands of kilometres away from you
do I dare admit that I’ve fallen in love
with your sperm, with the death that it brought.
I watched it, spilled out over your stomach,
and drowned my face in it. Its scent, which became
the scent of death, brought me
endless orgasms. As though I were using you
for my self-destructiveness. You know it
too, just in a different way. I’ve
pulled thousands of words from your sperm,
put them to music which held me
on the edge. It seemed to me that I wasn’t worthy
and that you’d leave me too.
I couldn’t get rid of my father who
didn’t think it worthwhile to stand beside me.
That’s why I didn’t find it unusual when you left me
a thousand times. And each time I
returned to the edge of your stomach with wet
cheeks I lay there waiting for you
to get up and leave once more.

—Translated by Elizabeta Zargi and Timothy Liu

Brane Mozetič is a poet, writer, translator, editor, publisher, gay activist, promoter of Slovenian literature abroad and many other things. To date, he has published 14 poetry collections, two novels and a short stories collection. He has more then 30 books published in translation abroad, most of them in Italian, English and German. He has translated over twenty books, mainly from French, including the works of Rimbaud, Genet and Foucault (plus Maalouf, Daoust, Cliff, Brossard, Gassel, Guibert, Dustan, Vilrouge, Duvert, Rachid O, Izoard). Brane is the editor of the book series Aleph and Lambda, which has published more than 100 LGBTQ titles, and has edited several anthologies and publications for the promotion of Slovenian literature abroad. He is the program coordinator of the annual Living Literature Festival and has been coordinating the Ljubljana Gay and Lesbian Film Festival for over twenty years. He is also the author of three provocative performances/installations and three picture books for children.

This poem appeared in Banalities (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2008).

Ed Madden
Parrot

for JW, Austin, TX

When the newspaper ran a retrospective
on AIDS, a photo spread of those who’d passed,
early activists, others simply public
about their status, I was surprised to see

you there. You never told me, though we didn’t
talk a lot. We met in Pease Park
about the time my girlfriend dumped me, and
before I found a boy I could be open

with, or about, and out. Maybe
I should’ve guessed, given the care you took,
despite my adolescent and urgent haste.
I remember your parrot watching us,

rocking as I took you, the few times
I went to your place (mostly you came
to mine), and once your husband interrupted
us, a whispered chat behind the door,

then left us to it, the parrot still watching
from across the bed. You’d bound up
the stairs at my apartment whenever I called,
and we’d be at it, hungry, saying nothing.

I don’t remember when we stopped, or why.
I had forgotten you, just another
nameless man from back then, my furtive
grapplings before I’d finally named myself.

When I opened the paper that day, saw you,
read the last name I never knew,
I remembered that it felt like friendship,
when I was new to it, and I was grateful.

Ed Madden is the author of Prodigal: Variations (Lethe Press, 2011), Nest (Salmon Poetry, 2014), and My Father’s House (Seven Kitchens Press, 2013). His collection Ark is forthcoming in 2016. His poems have appeared in Assaracus, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, James Joyce Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Collective Brightness: LBGTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011), Best Gay Poetry 2008 (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2009), and Texas Poetry Calendar 2010 (Dos Gatos Press, 2009), among others. Ed is an associate professor of English and director of Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina.

This poem is not previously published.

Christina Quintana
And How.

An education in the theater
means Angels in America,
The Baltimore Waltz,
The Normal Heart.

It means cocky tech directors
suddenly tearing up
over stories of friends lost;
former dancers building empires
in the wake of their tribe.

An education in the theater
means learning
the gay mafia is real,
and how.

Take our health,
our lives, our family.
We  build  worlds,
most fabulous, glamorous, glorious,
from downtown to midtown,
for all time.

We fight in grand sets,
costume dramas,
Tennessee Williams;
in Regional, Broadway,
and Off.

We remember in
orchestra seats,
dressing rooms,
rehearsal spaces.

unique
New York
New York’s
unique
you know
you need—

Fresh-faced chorus boys,
hometown stars lined for miles at the EPAs,
leaning in for the big break,

and they can have it.

The show goes on.

Christina Quintana is a New York-based writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots. Her plays have been produced in Atlanta, New Orleans, and New York City, and her poetry is published in First Class Literary Magazine, Emotive Fruition + Radiolab: Elemental Poetry for the Masses, and forthcoming in Raspa Magazine. She is a former Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow and graduate of the MFA Playwriting program at Columbia University. For more, visit cquintana.com

This poem is not previously published.

Kevin McLellan
Concerning Honey

The beekeeper on the roof of the opera house
in Paris said, There aren’t farmers anymore…
only agricultural companies and they use pesticides.
I turned off the TV, took Atripla
with plenty of water, and went to bed.

*

Returning from the bathroom
in the middle of the night
my half-closed eyes caught sight
of black spots swirling like enlarged
microscopic cells on the bedroom door.

*

It’s been 6 years. I wonder what %
of us abstain from sex. After watching Franco
play Ginsberg, I realize I’ve not been frank.
It’s because of you reader
why I haven’t asked, do you wanna fuck?

*

Sometimes my ability to reason isn’t reliable.
Sometimes I make lists.
Sometimes obsessive-compulsive.
Sometimes I eat too much.
I decide to join a gym and closely monitor my diet.

*

The fig martini was gorgeous!
But I’m always concerned with how
the sugars will mix with the medicine,
so I stay up much later than planned.
I decide to watch a movie.

*

Swinton with Jarmen. Cruz with Almodóvar
and after Scientologist cock. Kidman
after Scientologist cock. Swinton after Jarmen.
Oh, and Kristin Scott Thomas in French!
Elizabeth Taylor passed away today.

*

If a naked woman was showering here
don’t you think these jocks would watch?
The gym has group showers, and I can’t help
but look at their cocks and the stream of water
that runs down and off them to the tiled floor.

*

Soon after she miscarried. For so long,
I didn’t know my mother had.
My best friend miscarried
as did another friend.
I can’t know what it must be like.

*

A side effect can be diarrhea.
Another is abnormal and lucid dreaming.
Last night I visited the National Lost Letter Facility
and Café to pick up a twined bundle,
but I didn’t recognize any of the sender names.

*

The young monk at the Central Square
Post Office didn’t occupy very much space.
He hadn’t sealed his box,
and the teller sent him on his way
to purchase some packing tape.

*

…1000’s of miles away. The panicked here
bought up all iodine tablets and survival kits.
Did you? Please donate to the Red Cross…
I’m reminded day after day
that there are other kinds of ruin.

*

Were they safe to eat? Still sweet tasting?
I heard that a guy who cleaned the filters
at Seabrook Station was supposed to toss
the lobsters back in the ocean,
but he was caught for selling them on the side.

*

I find myself relating to “Ebben? Ne Andrò
Lontana” when Callas sings I shall go far away,
and when I play this recording, my canaries
stop eating and situate themselves like an audience.
I move closer in my cage too.

*

My diet mainly consists of:
red grapes, tomatoes, peppers
radishes, spinach, kale,
oatmeal, walnuts, and brown rice.
Oh, and clouds of gold.

Kevin McLellan is the author of Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015) and the chapbook Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 201), a collaborative serious with numerous women poets. The chapbook Shoes on a wire (Split Oak) and the book arts project [box] (Small Po[r]tions) are both forthcoming. He is the winner of the 2015 Third Coast Poetry Prize and has recent or forthcoming poems in journals including: American Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Interim, Kenyon Review, West Branch, Western Humanities Review, Witness, and numerous others. Kevin lives in Cambridge MA.

This poem appears in The Body Electric (Ars Omnia Press, 2013), edited by Aimee Herman.

Dean Kostos
Luminous Barge

for Michael Hébert

“Aybair, not Heebert—it’s French,” he said.
In Julius’s Bar & one week less than legal, I fed

on men’s attentions. Michael & I clung
to each other, buoyed through smoke that stung

my eyes. “You don’t have to go back to Philly—your choice.
Stay in New York, chez moi,” he said, voicing

my desire. “I live above the Jackson Hole. Be my guest
if you like burgers—they’ve got the biggest

& the best. Then we can go upstairs for dessert,”
he added, smiling. “Sounds great,” I chirped.

We jammed the relished slabs in
our mouths, grease trickling down our chins.

Upstairs, he muttered, as if in response,
“About this bunk bed—had a roommate once . . .”

Sidestepping the past, he set
records on the turntable, hoping I’d forget,

then swooped back, his arms a cape
around me. The music, the books—the very landscape

of his apartment formed details of a world
that belonged to others. Compelled

to be of it, to drink its air,
I made mental sketches: bureau, Levalors, worn leather

chair. “Is that where you do your reading?”
I asked, padding across the room, proceeding

to look through slippery magazines on the table.
“You edit all these? I asked. “Boy, you’re full

of questions,” he said. “No, but they’re all Condé Nast,
our parent company.” I brushed my lips over the contrast

of textures between his cheek & neck—
the smell of soap on skin, of cologne on black

wool. “Listen, my little kouros,
some friends are making dinner for us

tomorrow night. I’m sure they’ll like you.”
I asked, “Are they translators, too?”

“Some, but most have their hands
occupied with the politics of publishing. And

now, I’ve got my hands occupied . . .” He leaned
& kissed my closed eyes. “Closer, Dean.”

Sexual release tendered sleep: I floated
on his bed, a luminous barge, devoted

to him. Suddenly: Goldfinger! Shirley Bassey’s shrill
voice scraped away sleep like a wooden strigil.

“4:30 AM! What the hell?”
I yelped. Startled, I jolted & fell

out of bed. “Oh, it’s that drag queen bartender upstairs,
getting home from work. Just wait, there’s

more—Doris Day: Once I had a secret love
that lived within the heart of

me. All too soon my secret love…
shuddered through the floorboards, loud enough

for each word to arrive intact. “Don’t worry,” Michael
comforted, “he’ll finish his drunken cycle

& the music will eventually end.”
Michael eventually moved to California. I blended

my life with New York. Passing the Jackson Hole on East 64th,
I’ve been tempted to ring his buzzer. In truth,

I know he’s not there, but I imagine the buzzer will activate
a memory-machine bringing back expatriated

selves—promises long erased.
A dusty July. Friends & I subway Manhattan’s maze

to the Great Lawn, to view that multicolored cemetery:
The Quilt. I navigate grave-sized panels—territory

sprawling like patches of farmland seen from sky.
I guess we’re lucky beauty can lie,

I think with a stifled laugh,
then glimpse a blue, appliquéd epitaph:

Translator of French * Ami Très Cher
Michael Hébert

Dean Kostos is the author of This Is Not a Skyscraper, (Red Hen Press, 2015), selected by Mark Doty as the winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award. His previous collections are Rivering (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012), Last Supper of the Senses (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005), The Sentence That Ends with a Comma ( Painted Leaf, 1999), and Celestial Rust (Red Dust, 1994). Dean’s work has appeared in over 300 journals, including The Bangalore Review, Barrow Street, Boulevard, Chelsea, Cimarron Review, Mediterranean Poetry, New Madrid, Southwest Review, Stand Magazine, Western Humanities Review, on Oprah Winfrey’s website Oxygen.com, the Harvard University Press website, and elsewhere. Dean is the editor of the anthologies Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry (Somerset Hall, 2008) and, with Eugene Grygo, Mama’s Boy: Gay Men Write About Their Mothers (Painted Leaf Press, 2000). His memoir, In the Toot: A Memoir of Bullying, Suicide, and Survival, will be released in the fall of 2016.

This poem appeared in Assaracus and in This Is Not a Skyscraper.

Ryan Dzelzkalns
Dull Scrub of Blue

I was a very poetic scientist, / a real numskull, and I lost
all my funding. I used it up / buying myself dresses to take off.
—Catie Rosemurgy

there is no right answer
but to swallow everyday

say ossuary
say my body
say father will die
not like this

I thought I’d give it a try
I never have any fun

I’m sorry
there’s no fucked raw
just the rest

defuse this dirty bomb
each morning
tongue of bluets

I am lightheaded
or ebullient go ahead
biohazard away

body tossed to wind
all my insides blue

blame the knife
otherwise healthy
try and catch it
when it falls

not alive but waiting
why am I so afraid

notice his eyes, blue
shoot across my face

the bloom has failed

Ryan Dzelzkalns is a midwestern boy at heart. He has poems appearing or forthcoming in Echolocation, Midwestern Gothic, Narrative, Revolver, and SWAMP. He received an MFA from NYU and now works for the Academy of American Poets. He is the tallest man in New York.

This poem is not previously published.

Joyce Ann Underwood
Two Poems

Elegy for Jon Smith

I stood in your room.
Your books still lined the walls—
Your paintings hung in the hall.
I heard Dylan sing,

A hard rain’s a gonna fall…

Your room smelled of incense
And the tobacco you rolled
On that little silver tray. At the end,
I was outside, with love aglow—

Always feeling in the way.

Anger looked out upon
The scene—your room a
small town Babylon.
Hollywood could never compare

To the despair that filled your room.

Years ago Burroughs
Whispered from the shelf:
One more hit won’t hurt at all…
But it was one more hit

That made you fall.

The books that still line your walls;
Your paintings hanging in the hall—
All that’s left of the you I longed to know;
the only ones who saw it all;

From last hit to last call.

They saw your first bottle of AZT.
They watched Reagan lie on TV.
The looked on as Cobain sang his last
While you read the cards with impunity.

They watched over you and me.

Paint under your fingernails
We’d talk for hours in your private cell
Full of books and art,
And books on art. And hell.

If not for that final knell—

We’d be chatting about Burroughs, Anger, cards, and Cobain.
About you children: Angelica, Aaron, Johanna, and Lorraine.
About art and music, literature, and the pain.
Listening to Dylan sing about the rain.

Half an Hour

For half an hour I was positive.

The kit my lover sent me
Sat on my cluttered bathroom counter
I sat, broken and heaving on the floor
As panic turned to despair

On the phone to my brother
Sobbing—”I’m sorry
I’m sorry
I’m so sorry”

There is nothing else to say –
“I knew better
I loved recklessly
Despite your warning words.”

My brother’s voice, calm in my ear,
“Read the papers again
To be sure.” To be sure—
For half an hour I was positive

My brother’s half an hour has yet to end.

Joyce Ann Underwood blogs at First Person Narrative and Write Like a Rock Star. Her work has appeared in Kairos and Offbeat Home. Joyce is a writer, mother, wife, voyeur, and friend. She loves Duran Duran, hates cleaning, and really needs to learn to let things go. Growing up in Crescent City, Florida, Joyce spent many afternoons listening to the old-timers tell the life stories of about just about everyone they had ever known. From this upbringing sprung a love for oral storytelling that would grow into a passion during her years studying Medieval Oral Poetry at the University of West Florida.

These poems are not previously published.