Trista Hurley-Waxali
Complete

She always shows off her slender legs, disregarding her blotchy department store self-tanner and the dark purple
bruises on her knees. But it’s this lack of concern that I envy,
as we stand in our apartment, shortening her denim skirt

with our dull kitchen scissors

When she dances in the lights an air of confidence
is shown to others. Where after being beaten down by a boy, any attention is sought out like gold.
Leaving us to sieve out the users, the abusers, the ones who try to take her money as it falls to the stage.

This diner is the only one open, where the patrons wait for her. A “man” stares at her fake tits and says he’ll pay.
She hates the gesture but takes it, boobs bought from
a married businessman who said, “they’ll be an investment” and today they are paying off.

We head to the back to spark up a joint next to the dumpster.
Hoping to quiet down the ringing in my ears.
She pulls out numbers from her bra, starts balling them up and aiming for the open lid. We laugh as another hopeful loses their chance,
each time she scores.

She drops a few 1’s from her pocket into the tip jar
as we take our food. Her iceburg blue eyeshadow starts to crease when she smiles. I know she will want to rest her legs to prepare for it again: the walk, the talk, the meet, the dates.
The very thing that makes her whole.

Trista Hurley-Waxali is the author of the poetry chapbook Dried Up. Her work has appeared in the journals FORTH, Enclave, and Street Line Critics, well as in the Procyon Short Story Anthology 2014 (Tayen Lane Publishing, 2015). She has performed at the O’bheal Poetry Series in Cork, Ireland and in a Helsinki Poetry Connection Poetry Jam TransLate Night Show. Trista lives in West Hollywood, where she is working on her first novel, At This Juncture.

Jim Nason
You Bring Yellow Tulips

i.
James Schuyler, master of azalea,
rose and hyacinth, wrote an elegy
for Frank O’Hara, who stopped breathing
the blues on the New York City afternoon
Lady Day whispered her last note
and died.
Michael Cunnigham wrote a novel
about Virginia Woolf after her suicide in Sussex
where three grey sparrows held court
on a branch of Field Maple
and a green-brown bomber
shot across a rain-streaked English sky.
Mark Doty wrote a poem
about Michael Cunningham
writing on Virginia Woolf and the Bleecker Street
flower shop where Mrs. Dalloway, but not the real
Mrs. Dalloway, said she would buy the flowers herself.

ii.
Meryl Streep in sunglasses
walking down a Manhattan street
through what appears to be
snow, arms heavy with forsythia,
hydrangea and roses, enters a tumble-down
building, looks out a window where glass should be.
A decrepit elevator takes her up
through the graffitied core of a warehouse.
The rattling gate opens onto a dying-from-AIDS
poet, she steps into his loft apartment, seems to be
holding her breath while simultaneously talking, as only
Meryl Streep can. She places the flowers
in two vases—blue hydrangeas in one,
yellow roses in the other, and picks trash
off the kitchen floor.

iii.
You bring yellow tulips
when you come for dinner. Yellow tulips
in January! I say. You also bring Mâcon-Villages,
your crazy down-east accent and I pretend
not to see bruising, blotches like blue-white flowers
on your chin and cheek, how you struggle
to swallow your night time antiretroviral
with a gulp from your glass
of red wine.

iv.
In the movie, Mrs. Dalloway
is in love with the dying poet.
She misses her youth, longs for
that first kiss, the promise
of a single perfect day. Now this
slow and confusing death, the poet’s suicide
tumble from a flung open window—sadly
beautiful with its gently-falling-snow effects.

v.
Bessie, Billie—enough of the blues,
sad as a marigold’s stench, you say. Let’s watch
that movie again, the one with red roses
in every unhappy vase. Where Meryl melts
down in the end, with a single mauve orchid
on the window ledge, reaching
like Lady Liberty, for the moon
or is it Mars? up there
among satellites, stars like cinquefoil—
silver-blue flowers, étincellant.

Jim Nason is the author of the novels The Housekeeping Journals (Turnstone, 2007) and I Thought I Would Be Happy (Tightrope, 2013), as well as a short story collection, The Girl on the Escalator (Tightrope, 2011).  Jim’s poems, essays and stories have been published in literary journals across the United States and Canada, including The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008, 2010 & 2014. He has been a finalist for the CBC Literary Award in both the fiction and poetry categories.  Jim recently finished a new short story collection, Damned if You Do; his third novel, The Spirit of a Hundred Thousand Dead Animals; and, his fifth poetry collection, Touch Anywhere to Begin. Jim teaches fiction at George Brown College and is the new owner and publisher of Tightrope Books.

Roberto F. Santiago
Becoming Turquoise

She called me Turquoise, and she was right.
I was, or more likely am. Turquoise as the boiling dark.
Turquoise like Shaft, or Isaac Hayes, or shaft like taking
an elevator all the way down. Down like a euphemism
taken too far. Taken too far like down to the balls,
Turquoise as a ballad of any boy like me.
Turquoise like the sweat of two other men.
I’m sorry,     fear made me say two,
but there were seven, or several, men
that tasted like warm water and wanted me
to fuck ’em Turquoise that night.
A Turquoise that turns into a man,
or woman, or not.
Turquoise like fear that keeps me a secret
because you might say I had it coming.
Or fear like you might say things like God’s wrath,
or a plague. Or Turquoise like friends whispering
about you even though they don’t know if they are
Turquoise, or not.

​Roberto F. Santiago is the author of the poetry collection Angel Park, (Lethe Press, 2015). His poems (and some prose) have appeared in the journals Assaracus, CURA, Nepantla, The Acentos Review, Gingerbread House, Selfies in Ink, English Kills Review, and Hypothetical, as well as in the anthologies  The Waiting Room Reader: Stories to Keep you Company (CavanKerry, 2013), edited by Rachel Hadas; Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011), edited by Kevin Simmonds; Me No Habla With Acento: Contemporary Latino Poetry (Rebel Satori Press 2011), edited by Emanuel Xavier; gape-seed (Uphook Press, 2011), edited by Jane Ormerod and Ice Gayle Johnson; and The Best of PANIC!: En Vivo From the East Village (CreateSpace, 2010), edited by Charlie Vázquez. Roberto is a ​2015 Sarah Lawrence Summer Fellow, ​a 2014 Lambda Literary Fellow​,​ and the recipient of the 2011 Alfred C. Carey Poetry Prize. Currently, he works as​ an educator​ in San Francisco. You can follow him on Twitter @theRFSantiago.

This poem is not previously published.

Eduardo Moreno
My First Ball

Perhaps her first real partner was the cab.
—Katherine Mansfield, “Her First Ball”

Exactly when the ball began I would find it hard to say.
Perhaps my first real partner was the magazine I picked up which read G.R.I.D.
Perhaps my first real partner was that article in which I recognised myself.
Perhaps my first real partners were all-of-those-men-covered-in-cutaneous-lesions.
Each of these men – the article read – had had thousands of sexual partners which translated into innumerable sex acts. The article broke these figures down.
Perhaps my first real partners were these figures: sex acts per week, per night, per hour.
How many sex acts are occurring now? I jumped. I couldn’t move.
Perhaps my first real partner was desire.
Perhaps I realised then that I wouldn’t always resist my desire.
Perhaps my first real partner was desire.

Exactly when the ball began I would find it hard to say.
The ball began in a booth in the Mission, video flicker urging us on
The ball began with a kiss in the Castro, rainbow flag flapping
The ball began in the library, a trailer park, Brompton Cemetery under the trees
The ball began in October: I’d been expecting it, I didn’t expect it. He called me over.
Perhaps he was my first real partner. I don’t remember his name.
The ball began with diagnosis: I remember bare branches, the oncoming winter.

Exactly when the ball began I would find it hard to say.
At diagnosis, they gave me five years.
After diagnosis, the ball moved me to Miami, London, Sydney.
Before diagnosis, the ball.
After diagnosis, the ball.
Perhaps my first real partner was Stephen.
Perhaps my first real partner was Louis.
Perhaps my first real partner was Michael.
Perhaps my first real partner was Jay.
Perhaps my first real partners have all gone.

Exactly when the ball began I would find it hard to say.
Five years after diagnosis, ritonavir.
Perhaps my first real partner was ritonavir.
Perhaps my first real partners have all gone.
Perhaps I will live forever.
Perhaps we’ll all live forever.
Perhaps my first real partner was atripla.
Perhaps my first real partner was truvada.
Perhaps we’ll all live forever.

Exactly when the ball began I would find it hard to say.
Perhaps my first real partner was desire.
Perhaps my first real partner is how come I’m still here?
Perhaps my first real partner is love.
Perhaps my first real partner is maybe I’ll wear gloves to the ball.
Perhaps my first real partner is probably I won’t.

Perhaps my first real partner is we have always had this ball.
Perhaps my first real partner is I will love you at this ball.
Perhaps my first real partner is I will fuck you at this ball.
Perhaps my first real partner is this fuck should last forever.

Eduardo Moreno’s short stories have appeared at blithe.com, questions.com.au, Mini Shots, Poslink, and in the Best Gay Romance and Best Gay Erotica series published by Cleis Press. A native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Eduardo lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he works as a bookseller. He was a 2014 Lambda Literary Fellow and is currently working on his first collection of short stories.

This poem is not previously published.

Ashley Inguanta
Five Ways of Becoming an Unknown City

One.
Do you remember when we sat in that room, full of someone else’s used things? You handed me a black button-down and said, “Try it on.” It fit.

I floated around, a satellite. I said, “Thank you.” I said, “Let’s dance now, all of us.”

Two.
I look out my window—top floor—and lean into Brooklyn.

The concrete, the brick, the people, the cars—all of this
moves like glass shattering, a landscape
scattered for the finding.

I am a building,
a hollowed heart, an awful poet, a terrible cook,
a toppling tree, a hungry human, a nomad—
always dreaming of a steady something, walking
into a bloom of hardened love,
a spinning Earth.

Three.
An angel spins in the desert, far from us, and I ask you
to bring me back to this place of skull and bloom.

A rocket launch, a shooting star, the way body
spins into an inevitable translucency—

is there a difference?

Four.
Last night I dreamt of a movie: I was watching it, and you were an actor. They gave you hair extensions, and I could tell where your real hair ended but it didn’t matter, you were beautiful as always, illuminated by the grocery store light.

You were older than you looked by 100 years. That’s how time worked in the movie: Like magic, like pain.

In another scene, there was a great earthquake, and you were young then—a baby—and the camera was steady, calm.

The night was deep, dark, shaking.

Five.
You left the Island covered in my stories, wrote them all over your body. I’m sorry, I have to go, you said. You were nothing but words, butterflying onto that train. I couldn’t stop you. I tried.

I remember falling, tumbling like a bird shot down. And when I reached the bottom, finally, I wondered why there weren’t more holes in the sky. I woke up to rain sliding down window, like the way your fingertips had moved down my spine, the palm of your hand on my lower back. You have the back of someone who is too worn, you said.

Once you told me that everything you felt was bigger than the sky.

Once I kissed your hands and left all those words.

Once I found comfort in waiting.

Once I trusted you when you said, I want to know you when you grow old. Because you believed I would.

Once I felt myself fill like a city blooming with orchids, with skyscrapers. With metal, with root.

To become an unmapped place is to lose promises, is to unravel.

Ashley Inguanta is the author of For the Woman Alone (Ampersand, 2014) and The Way Home (Dancing Girl, 2013). Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Adrienne: A Poetry Journal of Queer Women, OCHO, The Good Men Project, SmokeLong Quarterly, PANK, Wigleaf, Gone Lawn, Pindeldyboz, Elephant Journal, Breadcrumb Scabs, and Sweet: A Literary Confection, among other journals. Ashley’s stories have appeared in the anthologies Love Magick (Armory New Media, 2014), edited by Francesca Lia Block, and Stripped (lulu.com, 2011), edited by Nicole Monaghan.

Photo by Lauren Laveria / Lauren Rita Photography

This poem is not previously published.

Marcos L. Martínez
Epistles to Reinaldo Arenas: Invocation

I take you into my mouth, Reinaldo Arenas, mouth your praises: honeysuckle, night-
blooming-jasmine, bougainvillea te invoco sweet sickly vine that chokes off any stem it
clings to moonstroked blossom whose scent burns off come dawn riotous purple-prosed
pistil and stamen branch all thorned up.
We banter down boulevards of books. “Before night falls,” you say, “I’ll strip you bare.
Tu piel una pàgina para leer. Tu espalda la espina de un libro.” You stroke my back,
Arenas, caress each word. The alleys and sidestreets of old Nueva York mazed library stacks.
We parade paragraphs about one another. Pen in hand we scribble penis in hand we diddle we
stroke each character on the page. I’ve absconded the past to transcribe you.

Reinaldo, mi amigo, mi amor: this is the whore you’re words have made. You’re my
skin, my spiritflesh, my holy ghost of the holy of holies of O. Que puta soy. I’m nearly as old
as you were when you died, and I’ve had three soulmates in this life. The first died five minutes
after I held him in my arms at Genesis Hospice. A spontaneously shattered wineglass by my
nightstand his T-cell count obliterated like crushed glass in the blood a spear of light shot
through his veins then gone by dawn. Is that how it was for you, Reinaldo? The grasp, clutch,
choke of breath before morning?
My third soulmate is an enigma: all boat-liquid-fuel-ignition one moment leaking
coolant the next but something’s cracked in the engine between us nothing works right
anymore. Still, he’s the taste of laughter, the curl and fin of wakes thrust up from the stern: blue
water, blue horizon, all shot through with diesel fumes. It’s beautiful it’s cobalt it’s clouded up
and this is the murk I’m left with as my second soulmate stands beside me oblivious yet looking
out onto the waves.
Reinaldo, mi barquito, you are the tender bridled to the boat of mi lengua. My tongue,
your words: we’re writing this in tandem.

Marcos L. Martínez is Editor-in-Chief for Stillhouse Press, an independent press affiliated with George Mason University’s Creative Writing Program. As a Sally Merten Fellow, he taught creative writing to high school students and adults throughout Northern Virginia. Marcos earned his MFA in Fiction at GMU and is a Lambda Literary Fellow. His work has appeared in The Washington Blade, RiverSedge, and Whiskey Island. A native of Brownsville, TX, Marcos lives in Alexandria, VA with his husband Wayne Johnson.

This poem is not previously published.

Dennis Rhodes
Guilt

I have lived on someone else’s time.
I’ve stolen off with someone else’s days.
Yes, I’ve made love in someone else’s bed
and have worn their clothes – a splendid fit!
I have treasured someone else’s years,
used some wisely, others gone to waste.
I have answered to someone else’s name
a thousand times and smiled a phony smile
when I’ve needed to. Was it Mark’s? Was it Jim’s?
I’m a fraud. A charming one at that.
I’ve savored kisses meant for other lips—
Andrew’s? Billy’s? Who the hell can say.
I have cheated scores of men out of time.
I have taken more than my share of life.

Dennis Rhodes is the author of Spiritus Pizza & Other Poems (Vital Links, 2000) and Entering Dennis (Xlibris, 2005). His poems and essays have appeared in BLOOM, Chelsea Station, Lambda Literary Review, The Cape Cod Times, New York Newsday, Fine Gardening, Avocet, Backstreet, Ibbetson Street, bear creek haiku, Aurorean, and Alembic, among others.

This poem is not previously published.

Elaine Sexton
To 1989

If I could forget you completely
I would, year that took
Larry, that took John,

that took Eduardo
and Sean and Tom,
year of ignorance

on a tear,
gouged with fear
and your relentless, brazen

winning streak,
your gamblers
run amok,

stink of death,
stink of void,
wherever did that terror go?

each day of breathing
a beating endured
in the chest, heave

of pneumonia,
cavity of sorrow,
ACT UP and walk outs,

year of joyless Central Park,
the hidden life
of the Ramble,

year of what it means
to be a top, year of
SILENCE = DEATH,

next of kin, being us,
we discover we are
next of kin, kin

being too scared
to visit, too scared
to share a dish.

I remember you,
I remember
what’s left of you,

I remember
who you spared, and who
you swallowed whole.

Elaine Sexton is the author of the poetry collections Causeway (New Issues, 2008) and Sleuth (New Issues, 2003). A third collection, Prospect/Refuge, will be published by Sheep Meadow Press in late 2015. Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals including American Poetry Review, Poetry, Art in America, Oprah Magazine, Pleiades, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry Daily. She teaches poetry and text and image workshops at the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute, in the graduate program at City College (CUNY), and beginning this summer at New York University. She serves on the board of Q Avenue Press and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

This poem is not previously published.

Jennifer Chapis
Two Poems

Houseboat

White-throated swifts mate mid-air—

impossibly connected,
the trust-tumbling couple
loses 500 feet.

The rule against making love
at the family Christmas gathering
is clear.

A downpour’s soundtrack, boat oak creaking,
chirrup of canyon birds:

we cannot renounce feeling—
in love we learn love.

How the Invisible Move

Have you ever had a sex dream
without the sex?—inserting the tab,
closing the cereal box, a mournful turn on.

Born under his father’s bottle,
his arm broke faster than glass.

In San Sebastian, I comb the sand
for glass transformed

through its beating, consider love
an attainable miracle.

When I hear of his brother’s suicide,
I imagine their lookalike souls:

Two stallions step from fog,
silver flashing in forelocks

like a dazzling red thread
woven through an abandoned lark’s nest.

Jennifer Chapis is the author of The Beekeeper’s Departure (Backwards City , 2007). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, American Letters & Commentary, Salt Hill, and other journals, as well as in Best New Poets 2005 and 2006. Jennifer received the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize chosen by Mark Doty and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and other book awards. She taught in the Expository Writing Program at NYU for over a decade and co-founded Nightboat Books with Kazim Ali in 2003. Jennifer is an energy healer and founder of the All Love Healing Center in Wilmington, NC, where she leads workshops in meditation and her signature program Writing for Healing™.

“Houseboat” previously appeared in Spire and “How the Invisible Move” appeared in Thin Air.

Erik Schuckers
September Song

These houses, deadleaf brick, each room
a sealed box of wood and plaster, worm scaled,
gorgeous as a seance, music
in the sigh of every tenured joist.
Mandarin wax clots Oriental carpets slowly
unlooming. This graduate twilight. Padding
the ruptured bricks, past Trader Joe’s
bags tumescent with plastic, I’m no
threat. And you, breathless three miles away.
This is where we meant to land, but let’s not
maudle while these strangers’ tidal
lawns lap iron gates, and I’m another
middle-aged witness crying in the street.

That first night, we sat on my dormitory
floor, precariously wired. What did we say?
Which hall, which room, was mine?
I’ll search the campus maps online
for hours and still not remember. What I do:
your purple polo, collar popped, and how
we moved imperceptible as fractions
through the hours until, hoarse and hollow,
rumor of sunlight in the window, we bridged
that final, irremediable inch. Your unfolded
palm. The fall of hair by your left eye.
My god, we drove how many midnights
out for cigarettes and the joy of sailing

REM’s Out of Time through my junked
Rabbit, ceiling fabric bellowed with cold
air. Wasn’t it cold, even in April, even
when I wrecked the daffodils and a fifth
the first time we split, when Chris and Sarah
drew me to their drafty house, thesis pages
drifting on ash floors, antique dust
and blanched quilts, a battered coffepot?
Would you know their street, or what you said
when you woke me the next morning, so bright
and sad, or what else it was your mother
said when I came to drive us to our first
apartment, and she chased you through rooms

smothered in white wool, Lysol spray and rubber
gloves to decontaminate the faggotry with which
I’d doomed you. I recall a single
line, camp chestnut delivered with the best
grande dame guignol she’d got: “He looks like he’s
gonna give you AIDS.” I wish I’d forgotten
less, since she’s the one who’ll see you
to the gate. I need to zoom in tight, to catch
a carat of sorrow in her eye, a mote of tender
scruple. Later, when pain became the static
through which our voices broke too
infrequently to save each other, when
our glamorous Kodachromes were safely burned,

remember how we slept beneath a press-on sky,
dosed with poppers, cock, and wine,
how tenderly we tried to say nothing
we couldn’t take back? That last apartment
stifling in August, the cheap lino weeping
at our feet. A drought of boxes. Videos
melting into milk crates. If we had
failed one another differently,
we might be home by now.

Erik Schuckers studied literature and writing at Allegheny College and the University of Sheffield. He has worked as a janitor, an apple picker, a medical records clerk, and as a bookseller in the US and UK, and he currently lives in Pittsburgh. His poems have appeared in Assaracus, PANK, The Fourth Wall, The Allegheny Review, and elsewhere.

This poem is not previously published.