Michael Tyrell
Birthday, Anniversary, Sympathy, Blank

She thought of zoos in parks, how when cities were under siege, during world wars, people ate the animals.
—Lorrie Moore, “You’re Ugly, Too”

I go to market to buy every card I can think of
but they are out. The racks are empty & I can’t help
picturing a vacant zoo because the animals are eaten
because there’s a war on, & why people say
abattoir when they really mean slaughterhouse.
The clerk informs me, “We are not making cards anymore.
From now on it will be only singing microchips
and hologram cakes, a sexy dream downloaded
into the brain the evening before a big day.”
My order would be too late, anyway. It is your birthday
and they have you in Intensive Care, in the unit
a semiprivate. You think that sounds military & erotic.
Are you sure there are no cards left? “I’ll check,” the clerk says,
pickle-faced, slithering down his corridor of monitors.
A woman on one console goes on & on about satellites,
how every satellite has a pulse, & itinerants from other planets,
if they have hearts, will know what we are, what substance
is beating or brooking or conspiring against us.
Birthday, Anniversary, Sympathy, Blank.
I can’t ever pretend to browse but I somehow like the wall murals,
the idealized George Eliot & her self-possessed smirk,
I can’t remember a word from her novels,
have I finished any of them, here I am somewhere
between Adam Bede & Daniel Deronda,
and it’s your birthday & Intensive Care has you,
you are expiring & by now you are expired, I’ll have to
redirect the subscription & collect the insurance,
delete you from my database, laser out the tattoo,
scribble the obit, hock the potboilers with your name in them,
white-out the embarrassing marginalia,
suck dry the account, dishonor the ticket, unearth the certificate,
permanently pull the phone like a bad tooth,
chip down the initialed box elder, edit all anecdotes
to the first tense, chuck the leftover tangelos,
let the koi back into the pond, dump your cacti,
scissor your documents because the shredder’s broken,
let your memoirs fall into the bathwater so no one can read them,
think up replies to insults I could never answer,
donate your gabardines, find significance in our ultimate
exchanges, appease your creditors, & saw the futon in half.
There’s always the risk of an invitation finding its way to you,
not unlike the poor dead coffee heiress who got one decades later.
The naked guy sprints around the store,
a rabid mongrel loose in a Vatican.
Those who make us secure will arrive before my clerk.
If someone naked were arrested now would you laugh,
I’m not sure you would stick around for it to happen,
you never cared for surprises, & it’s
true, surprise parties were never a surprise to you,
you preferred saying I was invited instead of alive

Michael Tyrell is the author of the poetry collection The Wanted (The National Poetry Review Press, 2012) and co-editor, with Julia Spicher Kasdorf, of the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2007). His poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Agni, The Best American Poetry 2015, Fogged Clarity, Iowa Review, New England Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. Michael lives in New York and teaches writing at NYU.

This poem originally appeared in Gulf Coast.

D.C. Wiltshire
uncle David/poz

I have spent so much time
trying to transmute you into words,
the insistent off-balance whir of the washing machine,
the white pulse of youth,
a searing singing opera of

name, place, time.

you were so terrible with children. but soft
with the adult unraveling
like a Cirque dancer from the sky
on twisted ribbon briefly
whose art dies when tiptoes touch ground.

name, place, time.

soon I’ll be seen
older than you were
when you washed away gently on red seas
a reed-thin rowboat for one:

shit,
that I should be held
to the same key of brilliance
as you a phantom leaping

D.C. Wiltshire, who shares both his first and middle names with his uncle David, is a sometime preacher, chaplain, and poet living in Durham, NC.

This poem is not previously published. This is D.C. Wiltshire’s first poetry publication.

Nicole Sealey
Virginia Is for Lovers

At LaToya’s Pride picnic,
Leonard tells me he and his longtime
love, Pete, broke up.
He says Pete gave him the house
in Virginia. “Great,” I say,
“that’s the least his ass could do.”
I daydream my friend and me
into his new house, sit us in the kitchen
of his three bedroom, two bath
brick colonial outside Hungry Mother Park,
where, legend has it, the Shawnee raided
settlements with the wherewithal
of wild children catching pigeons.
A woman and her androgynous child
escaped, wandering the wilderness,
stuffing their mouths with the bark
of chokecherry root.
Such was the circumstance
under which the woman collapsed.
The child, who could say nothing
except hungry mother, led help
to the mountain where the woman lay,
swelling as wood swells in humid air.
Leonard’s mouth is moving.
Two boys hit a shuttlecock back and forth
across an invisible net.
A toddler struggles to pull her wagon
from a sandbox. “No,” Leonard says,
“It’s not a place where you live.
I got the H In V. H I—”
Before my friend could finish,
and as if he’d been newly ordained,
I took his hands and kissed them.

Nicole Sealey is the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole is a Cave Canem graduate fellow as well as the recipient of a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. Her other honors include the 2014 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a 2013 Daniel Varoujan Award and the 2012 Poetry International Prize. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2011, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Third Coast, and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the Programs Director at Cave Canem Foundation.

This poem previously appeared in The American Poetry Review.

Robert Carr
Before You

there was a youth
before death
he jerked off
his joy
in the mirror
he jerked off
brushing teeth
under pilled robe
in the spine
of open books
on the fantasy
Jonny Quest
on Hadji in
the cowboy hat
of the Rifleman
he didn’t know
he didn’t know
that you
would show up
take the toothbrush
take the robe
the books
the poetry
rip off the story
crack the screen
he didn’t know
that you were out
there waiting.

Robert Carr is a new poetic voice emerging in the Boston area. Robert’s poems draw on his own gay coming of age in the first years of the AIDS epidemic, thirty years of service to people with HIV and other infectious diseases, his long term partnership with his husband Stephen and lessons learned from their son Noah. He lives in Malden, Massachusetts.

This poem is previously unpublished. In fact, The HIV Here & Now Project is proud to say that this is Robert Carr’s first publication.

Jenna Cardinale
Current Events

The assembly guest-speaker went off-
script.

He wasn’t asked to speak
to the other grades.
He wasn’t invited back.

A man introduced as Butch.
In acid-wash denim. In a Jheri curl.
In a very white town.

I don’t know a lot about narrative.
Those elements.
Who owns a story.
Who is telling what’s
news. Even now.

His story about drugs and sex and
something we’d heard before
because this was the 90s.

He was full of gestures.

“Had I known then.
Had I known then.
Listen, had I known.

I woulda cut the bitch off.
Man, cut this bitch off.” 

It’s a hard living, informing
the present. It’s a living.

Jenna Cardinale’s poems have appeared in Court Green, Horse Less Review, Verse Daily, 6×6, and Word For/ Word, among other journal. With Christine Scanlon, she curates Readings in Color, a mostly-monthly poetry series in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn. She lives in Brooklyn.

Julian Gewirtz
Psyche in Bed

To the god. Tonight
there are no visitors.

Stormclouds rise
over the near mountains, beyond

the finch-dense forest.
For nine and ninefold nights

I have waited
in darkness, lulled

only by wind-whine—
unmoving, bedded, mind-whir

muddles and buzzes
into body. From between

teeth seeps forth
a strange issue,

dries linen-white, paler
than graying face.

Untouchable.
Sores collapse open

skin-strata, shallow
basins, suppurated

sediment. Nerve-sensed
I survey the subsidence—

does blood slow
and flow around the wound?

Silt crumbles, heats,
as tubers sprout through

the eschar, onion-stalks
of bone, pungent. The blighted

tendons. Each night
hands return to rub

limbs with damp cloths
of camphor, but I know

my stench persists. Grows
the sullens like slow-flowing

moonwater. Brackish,
blackening, the unrushing

slough, breeding
like rancid trout roe, dug

into gravel redds. Eels
draw close, dazed. Residue

of river, place where streaming
stops. Tawny trace. Place

where water slows, and flow
is fallow. Have I fallen?

My shocked knees molder
and fold. My legs

lapse. I will not leave.

•

At times I vision
a shaded window.
The voice-veil

with greened gaze
avers: no grove
can grow on this hillock,

and if below it
somewhere flow
sap-slinks

they are locked
in a rock-drum,
deep and unrising.

And what fate,
spun from a frayed
thread uncut

by the rust-knife,
will sphere me to stay
if Eros does not—?

•

Bright: a begonia blooms. Yolky calyx whorls
below the twisted stigmas. Petalless yellow: the sepals.

•

Disorder
of grain-sand and light.
The love-wind, careless,

carrying a little
of chaff and seed, lifting
what is too
heavy. It came

to pass. Day
plunged into the far massif,
shatter-glass
into the deepening

where by my hands
you were and were,

hand-flail’s whining
unsettles the scale-shells,
then fan to the thresh-pile
vans of air-holding

the color of your hair
husk-grey. I was given
no tools. Raised my hands
to let your name rise . . .

From height-
over-the-mountain shadows,
the winds, thinned-warm,

startle cool eddies into
dry-spooled air,
unweaving the grain,

the half-crazed scatter of field-fray,

hazed. Rainclouds
follow the crossing
currents. Streaming
from the sky’s raised face.

Were you there, resting
on the low hay-bed,
looking toward me as I left

as a last breeze lazed
the wooden hold in
the granary.
What remains is only

cold and golden.

Julian Gewirtz was born in New Haven, CT. He was a Harvard undergraduate and is currently pursing a doctorate in history at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The New Republic, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Yale Review, among other publications. His critical writing has been published by The Economist, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal.

This poem was previously published in The Harvard Advocate.

Celeste Gainey
To a Dunhill Lighter

after Judith Vollmer
for Eugene

Luxe vessel of tiny fire
no thief will pick you from my pocket

no suave offer of a light by the gate
of Gramercy Park will hint Forget me

no HIV-bearing lover want you back
when it’s over Move on, I’ll be dead soon

I prize your smooth snap of ignition
the butane-blue flame

ricocheting from his world to mine
outlining long & manicured fingers

O, little cube of elegance
conjured from a gay boy’s make-believe

in the dry hills of Modesto
He places you in my palm

your 24-karat heft surprises
and weighs me down

He says goodbye turns away
Casablanca-style

my fingers fold & press against
your black lacquered case

When I see him again
it will be in the hush & glitter of dreams

Celeste Gainey is the author of the full-length poetry collection, the GAFFER (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2015), and the chapbook In the land of speculation & seismography (Seven Kitchens Press, 2011), runner-up for the 2010 Robin Becker Prize. The first woman to be admitted to the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees as a gaffer, she has spent many years working with light in film and architecture.

This poem is not previously published.

Dante Micheaux
The Blue Pill

Things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted
to repeat, I repeat
—though I am mortal: it was. From the beginning
of what is known as time, it was.
Then the laws of the One God came usurping, surpassing.
His prophets true, love declaring | His
prophets false, wall erecting. But before, when the felled
timber sheltered all, divided none,
it was. Garden or forest, near water where the Sweet Flag
showed itself, was the way.
One man lingered too long, until another did the same:
two together clinging
remembering the words of prophets true, love declaring.
Of which, a poet told
and playwright pled and painter painted, people paraded
and then we were free
again, for a short time. The glorious darkness of it,
sublime shadows
among the trees, we knew the anonymity of freedom,
fearless unadulterated
primal freedom won’t make you feed it or clothe it
naked nurturing height
of our pleasure it was. We demanded daylight also,
pressing into discourse,
so free we were—it made envious death more envious 
of us. So place
the speck of sky in our opened hands. It was paradise.
We want it back.

Dante Micheaux is the author of Amorous Shepherd (Sheep Meadow Press, 2010). His poems and translations have appeared in PN Review, The American Poetry Review, Callaloo and Rattapallax, among other journals and anthologies. He has been shortlisted for the Benjamin Zephaniah Poetry Prize and the Bridport Prize. Micheaux’s honors include a prize in poetry from the Vera List Center for Art & Politics, the Oscar Wilde Award and fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation and The New York Times Foundation. He resides in London, and is completing a study on literary influence and sexuality.

Sister Glo Euro N’Wei
Leaving Stones

This is not a history lesson.

Inscribed on the walls of the temple in Prague are the names of families erased. I cannot fill my pockets with enough stones to leave on the graves of lost generations.

Second generation holocaust memories haunt me. I wasn’t there, have only stories and absence of stories. Second generation holocaust blood memories.

Driving down the highway outside of Prague on the way to Theresien, or on the bus outside of Berlin on the way to Sachsenhausen, I could not breathe from the weight of the spirits of family who took this same route to their death, could only cry and gasp and touch the wooden bedframes, the rough wood of tables in barracks, feel my great-grandfather’s hand touch mine across the years. Bruno. Second generation holocaust body memories.

Yad Vashem outside Jerusalem, the calling of names. The temple in Prague, the calling of names. The museum in DC, the calling of names. They call my name, my people, my family, my dead.

Stitched into panels of fabric of the Quilt are the names of people erased. I cannot fill my pockets with enough stones to leave on the graves of lost generations.

Second generation genocide memories haunt me. As I was discovering my queer identity, my brethren were dying, leaving their stories, their absence of stories. Second generation genocide spirit memories.

Walking around the panels, I could not breathe from the weight of the spirits. Eric was the first of my friends to escape to the promised land of San Francisco, the first to fall to the virus. I grew up with Ryan White, with Rock Hudson, with Magic Johnson and Greg Louganis, grew up watching the generation of men above me lose the generation above them. Second generation genocide soul memories.

The memorial grove in San Francisco, the calling of names. The Quilt, the calling of names. The candlelight vigils, the calling of names. They call my name, my people, my family, my dead.

How did these become my horrors? There are too many dead for me to comprehend the weight of spirits, the chorus of stories.

I was born with generations of ancestors lost to holocaust and genocide. I was born with fear in my blood, with diasporas and pograms and disease. I was born with the fever of burning synagogues, the fever of burning viral nightsweats. I was born with my blood flowing with the tears of grief of lost generations.

No wonder there are days when all I can say is, I’m tired, days when I can’t breathe, can’t see the ripples of acts of kindness, can’t feel the love, can’t hear the stories through the deafening sound of absent generations, can’t see past the fear of being swept up, targeted and slaughtered.

I cannot fill my pockets with enough stones to leave on the graves of lost generations. There are too many dead. I carry in my pocket one stone. One stone for survival. One stone to remember lost generations. One stone to mark my body as a memorial to them and their stories. One stone for hope that we will no longer have to be afraid.

This is not a history lesson. This is a survival lesson.

Sister Glo Euro N’Wei is a Seattle-based queer health advocate, femme faerie, poet and nun. She believes that the most radical and revolutionary act is learning to love our queer selves. She is drawn to sparkly objects and seeks to embody the transformative power of glitter and love in action.  As a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, The Abbey of St. Joan, Sister Glo has been nunning her way through Seattle’s queer nonprofit scene for way more than a decade, raising thousands of dollars for charities, and spreading love, joy and smiles.

As a poet, she was a student at Bent, Seattle’s queer writing school, for the better part of a decade, and served for four years on Bent’s Board of Directors. She performed on the stage of Bent’s Annual Mentor Showcase five  years in a row, in TumbleMe’s October 2009 production And God Said Come Inside, and in Gay City Arts’ May 2015 Spoken Word Poetry Festival Word Play. The Femme Family NYC published her piece, “Gender Wishes” in their Femme Family Zine #1: Coming Out in Fall 2009. In 2011, she self-published her first chapbook, God’s Chin and in 2012 her second, Leaving Stones. She is a graduate of Artist Trust’s Edge for Writers program.

Jeffery Berg
Anthony,

from your fingers keys
dangling out to me
on the VHS box of Psycho III
on the metal shelf

in the back of Bobby’s
gas station. I am barefoot
though I am not
supposed to be. I can’t

rent Rated R movies
so I study your cryptic
eyes, concrete steps,
Gothic house, blue evening sky

in your shirt’s shade. Mother’s
off her rocker again,
the tag line says. My Mom pays
for gas where wavy haired Bobby stands

in his cream T shirt, smoking away.
Once he asked her in his scarred voice
if my Dad was out of town. For the
redhead boy who lost

his parents and sister in a fire:
a jar of money on Bobby’s counter. You wanted
Psycho III to be in the vein of Blood
Simple. While filming, you got

your diagnosis. Bobby winks
in the convex. His store smells
like minnows
in a lake. Little stars.
Big stars. Always a realm we are
unaware of. The odds of ending
up at Bates Motel. The odds
of you dying on September 12^th. Years later

your wife on Flight
11 on 9/11. Before the fire,
I watched my friend Hank
shove the redhead

at the Boy Scout cookout.
Called him a fat fag. The redhead’s mom—
heavy and redheaded too—
with big eyeglasses and a brown blouse

and blue jeans took her son in
her arms and walked him
to their light blue Taurus. I am not

sure what you trigger
in me. What will you mean
to me when I am off my rocker
years later watching you in Psycho III

too many times in a row, craving
to be a shut-in or in a lonesome
desertwalk with a suitcase
towards your motel. You, a legacy

in a black sweater under
owl’s wings. I forgo a PET
ice cream with its little wooden spoon
for change for the redhead.

Jeffery Berg grew up in Six Mile, South Carolina and Lynchburg, Virginia. He received an MFA from NYU. His poems have appeared in glitterMOB, the Leveler, Court Green, the Gay & Lesbian Review, Map Literary, Assaracus, Harpur Palate, and No, Dear. He has written reviews for The Poetry Project Newsletter and Lambda Literary. A Virginia Center of the Creative Arts fellow, Jeffery lives in the East Village and blogs at jdbrecords.

This poem is not previously published.