Ron Mohring
Now That You Know

How would you like it, he said, if I stuck
my cock in your pocket
and pissed in your boot? —Sure, why not, I said (it was a leather bar),
but he turned and fled,
unable to cope with specifics. This happened last night, but lately
it’s been the story
of my life. I think I’ll take out a personal ad: GWM, healthy & poz,
seeks partner in crime . . .
Make no mistake, I’m needy and willing to pay. I’m having
that dream again:
my daddy makes me blow him behind the tool shed. I swear
I can’t say if that’s
a memory or not; there are places even I refuse to go.
At the Now That You Know
workshop, our humpy leader asks for a list of body fluids
(he’s writing on the whiteboard)
but everyone’s afraid to say shit, so I riff off cum, jizz, cream, spunk,
spooge—he writes one word,
semen, and I laugh, a contestant on the wrong
game show. I’m only here
because they’ll do my blood work free; there’s not a thing
I don’t know (now that it’s
too late) about HIV, but some of these poor boobs look really scared,
so I decide to shut up
and dumb down. It’s two more hours of How to Wear a Condom,
How to Tell Your Partner,
a slide show tucked in somewhere, with optimistic pies and graphs.
I refuse to kid
myself: I figure on ten good years if I’m lucky and the Republicans
don’t round us up
and stick us on some island (or worse). Humpy Leader tries
to peek at my yellow
pad where I’m doodling a mesomorph—flashy teeth, killer pecs,
Tom-of-Finland
salami halfway to his knees—We’re losing you, he says. What’s that?
and what can I do
but grin and say This? Hey, this is for you.

Ron Mohring is the author of Survivable World (Word Works, 2004), winner of the 2003 Washington Prize, as well as the chapbooks Touch Me Not (Two Rivers, 2005), Beneficence (Pecan Grove, 2003), The David Museum (2002, New Michigan Press), and Amateur Grief (Thorngate Road, 1998), which won the Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award. His poems are included in the anthologies Common Wealth (Penn State, 2005), Poetic Voices Without Borders (Gival Press, 2005), How to Be This Man (Swan Scythe, 2003), Sweet Jesus: Poems about the Ultimate Icon (Anthology Press, 2002), and Things Shaped in Passing (Persea, 1997). His poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Artful Dodge, Bay Windows, DIAGRAM, Gettysburg Review, Hanging Loose and many other journals. After 35 years away, Ron Mohring has returned to his home town and recommends you read George Hodgman’s Bettyville for an inkling of what that feels like. He is the founding editor of Seven Kitchens Press.

This poem is previously unpublished.

Ryan Black
On the Cooling Board

Your logic can be overtaken by your sense as a parent.
Michele James
New York Newsday, Sept. 2, 1985

Cardboard cut to mean a grave; pall
and procession, the boy holds his breath

like a seal. Keep still, she says—his mother—
a prompt. He throws his leg over the makeshift

box, shuts his eyes. Greasepaint, talc. Rubberneck,
and their doubt’s laid bare: Save Our Kids,

Keep AIDS Out. South Ozone Park, P. S. 63.
Not the faith-stung or poor, but a disheartened

class. Placards spy the walkways. Lucky one,
keep still. Your likeness is enough

to fool this world.

Ryan Black’s poems appear or are forthcoming in AGNI, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He was a Norma Millay Ellis Foundation Fellow at The Millay Colony for the Arts. He is the Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing at Queens College/CUNY.

This poem is previously unpublished.

Michael Klein
District 9

It was a metaphor
for AIDS, for Apartheid, for the other
living on the margin—to think
they only just want to get into the place
everybody else already lives in.

There was a time
when all revolts began
where we lived on the margin
to state, and then to bend. To make the margin wider.

Michael Klein’s fourth book of poems (and some prose), When I Was a Twin, will appear in September 2015 from Sibling Rivalry Press. His first book, 1990, tied with James Schuyler to win a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He is also the author of two books of prose, The End of Being Known and Track Conditions, both published by the University of Wisconsin Press. He teaches writing in the MFA Program at Goddard College and at Hunter College in New York and lives with his husband, Andrew Hood, in New York and Provincetown.

This poem appears in The Talking Day (Sibling Rivalry, 2013) and is reprinted with kind permission of Sibling Rivalry Press.

Jameson Fitzpatrick
If You Go Back to San Francisco

you could sun some days on deck
but you couldn’t skip time like stones
over water. Deep in the Mission
none of the boys would be you
back in your leather jacket and jean shorts
back in the thick of youth, none of them
hearing the music you’re remembering.
Play it again: which friends you fucked
at which party, whose heart you broke,
who died. Somebody was an artist,
everyone was a writer, or else
the other way, back to San Francisco
I’ll follow faithful as a shadow
changing shape. Look, the club
where you used to dance with Miguel,
gone now—and the men who watched,
what happened to them? No filter
can compete with the fog like it spread
the nights that repeat yourself
young and naked in your mind
in the crowd’s warm center, never darker
your hair. Blond thing I am, younger
than you were then: do I hold you there?
Or, like a matte around a portrait,
sharpen your edge.

Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of the chapbook Morrisroe: Erasures (89plus/LUMA Publications, 2014), which collects 24 takes on a single undated, untitled text work by the artist Mark Morrisroe, who died of AIDS-related illness in 1989. Jameson’s poems have appeared in The American Reader, The Awl, The Literary Review, The Offing, Poetry, Prelude, and the Tin House online feature Broadside Thirty (poems in thirty lines or less by poets thirty or younger), among others. He is the editor of the Lambda Literary Review Poetry Spotlight, teaches in the NYU Expository Writing Program, and lives in New York City.

Photograph by Marcelo Yáñez

This poem first appeared in Lumina.

Madelyn Garner

My Son Confesses

for Omar

Each night you lower
the bed rail behind the white wings

of curtains and crawl in beside him, defiant
of sheets that are blood-smudged,

spongy with sweat, sour with fluids.

Brushing away tendrils of tubes,
trace the labyrinths of his body—

first with your fingertips and then
lips over tissue-thin skin.

He knows it is love that defies
as you, monitoring the vital signs—

offered groin, rising heat, race horse pulse—
ride his white-knuckled shudders

over the edge to a place beyond pain.

The Love of My Son’s Life

for Omar

He says some days you come home from work
with asado and guava empanadas.

Some days miraculous toys,
some days an armful of sweet-blooming Stargazer lilies.

Some days you wear Mickey Mouse ears;
another, a tuxedo with swish and tango. You are

whatever Brad wants you to be: his garden,
pool of healing waters, Chippendale stud.

Your love conquers even the vultures
perched on the dresser in the corner of the room.

Every day when you come home and find fever
a crown in his hair, latitudes awry, you serenade him

with Argentinean lullabies and the sweetest of lisps,
sugar his forehead with your fieriest kisses.

AIDS Ward. City of Angels, 1995

for Omar

Even as Brad’s thrush-full,
pith-white throat
numbs to water—you

sit on the sweat-stained bed,
cotton swabs in ungloved hands,
pulling viscous strings into a tissue

as if this were no more a chore
than mopping figure-eights
along endless corridors.

You brush his teeth and rinse until
the mouth is infant
and ready for your sleight-of-hand trick:

sweet orange removed from
your pocket, peeled and pin-wheeled
over the tray table,

each pulpy wafer placed
on his tongue—
you husband him.

Madelyn Garner’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2015, The Florida Review, Slant, Roanoke Review, PMS poemmemoirstory, Nimrod International Journal, and Water-Stone Review, among others. A retired public school administrator and English teacher, Madelyn is the recipient of the Colorado Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities for encouraging incorporation of the arts into school programs. She was a Leo Love Merit Scholar at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference and winner of an Aspen Writers’ Foundation’s Annual Writing Retreat scholarship. In 2010, she won the Jackson Hole Writers Conference Poetry Prize. With co-editor Andrea L. Watson, she published the anthology Collecting Life: Poets on Objects Known and Imagined (3: A Taos Press, 2011), which was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

“AIDS Ward. City of Angels, 1995” appeared in Water-Stone Review, Fall, 2011. The other poems in this sequence are not previously published.

Randy Evan Barlow
Necessary Pirates

I call them my pirates: this handful of pills I swallow each night.
All eight of them together, down the hatch they go.

They have a purpose in mind, a goal—to find and destroy
intruders that have found their way into my vessel—

but as all careless pirates do, they pillage and plunder,
forgetting that the ship they set upon to save, they may also sink.

You say that you love me. I know that you do.
But a thousand leagues separate word from deed, thought from action.

As you pursue every passing distraction, I feel your glance
checking if I’m still here, the same. That I haven’t followed

an unseen path without being noticed after all these years
is a wonder to me—and perhaps sometimes to you—but it is love.

Love has kept me from vanishing, and keeps you from seeing
this ship ripping apart from the inside out. The wind fades. I’m slowing,

preoccupied with these intruders, wishing you would quicken
your step, catch me before I fall—

Randy Evan Barlow was the partner of poet Ron Mohring. Ron is the author of the poetry collection Survivable World (Word Works, 2004), winner of the 2003 Washington Prize and finalist for the Thom Gunn Award in Poetry from the Publishing Triangle. Ron is also the founding editor of Sevens Kitchen Press. Ron provided the following statement about Randy and the provenance of this poem: “Randy was a sign language interpreter for many years until a progressive tremor ended his career. He lived with HIV and it’s complications through our entire 19 years together. I found this poem, the only one he ever wrote, among his papers after his sudden death in December 2014.”

This poem was written in November 2005 and submitted by Ron Mohring in care of the estate of Randy Barlow. It is not previously published.

Timothy Liu
Here

in the building where you take
the anonymous test, everything is
neutral, the lights overhead
repeating rows of honeycombed
fluorescence intermittently
abuzz, one tube flickering on
and off, unable to decide if
the men here are all here
for the same test. It took you
more than fifteen years to mark
the box same-day result, the box
you first misread as re-slut,
and though you are partnered,
you went to your appointment
alone. Perhaps it is melodramatic
to dwell on a test thousands
take everyday, but then you think
of the thousands who don’t,
preferring not to know
the consequences of the choices
they have made even if
the ones they’ve lusted after
hardly seemed a choice. And whose
was the voice who answered
your call and scheduled you in
the way any receptionist
or out-call body worker would?
Think of the high your neighbors
got each night while playing
Take Five or the Mega Millions
jackpot, how sometimes you too
gave in to impossible odds,
but who hasn’t had such fantasies
over a single life-changing
moment everyone can make
themselves party to, you wonder
on your way to the clinic
while passing the bodega’s
magic-markered sign now up
to 145 million as you reach
into your pocket for any change,
asking yourself if today might
be the day you’ll finally get
what you deserve, the chairs
in the waiting room now mostly
empty, you with the last
appointment, the other men
having walked out of the room
with band-aids at the crooks
of their elbows, already having
spelled their answers out
in blood, adrenaline pumping
at the starting block as you wait
for the gun to go off, not yet
knowing what will rule the day
this time around, only the steps
you took which led you here—

Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) is the author of Don’t Go Back To Sleep (Saturnalia, 2014), a finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Other collections include Polytheogamy (Saturnalia, 2009); Bending the Mind Around the Dream’s Blown Fuse (Talisman House, 2009); For Dust Thou Art (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005); Of Thee I Sing (University of Georgia, 2004), selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; Hard Evidence (Talisman House, 2001), Say Goodnight (Copper Canyon, 1998), a 1998 PEN Open Book Margins Award; Burnt Offerings (Copper Canyon, 1995), and Vox Angelica (Alice James, 1992), winner of the 1992 Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (Talisman House, 2000). Tim’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Grand Street, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review, among others. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. Tim is Professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey and lives in New York City with his husband.

This poem appeared in Don’t Go Back To Sleep (Saturnalia Books, 2014). It first appeared in The Progressive, May 2009.

Daniel W.K. Lee
At Risk

1.
Cuddling

(You) would not let me
finish the last dirty dish
greased from last night’s
mole; instead, (you)—
naked, white,
seraphim-skinned,
tugging me away
in retreat from morning—
beckoned me back
beneath the bedcovers

There (you),
like warm milk, slid
inside my bends:
fitting so well, I
could have,
like loss,
mistaken myself
for complete

2.
Conversion

You
medium of unbraided desire
you alone
unresisted
are my assassin
if
I mistook
you
for protection.

3.
Remembering

…you,
I will mistake
for everything
worth living for.

Daniel W.K. Lee’s work has appeared in journals including Agenda, The Boiler, Chiron Review, Dialogist, Floating Bridge Review, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, Lodestar Quarterly, Mary, Narcolepsy Arms, Off the Rocks, Psychic Meatloaf, Shampoo, Vice, Weave Magazine, and others. His work has appeared in anthologies including Between: New Gay Poetry (Chelsea Station Editions, 2013), In Our Own Words: A Generation Defining Itself—Volume 8 (MW Enterprises, 2010), Multi-Culti Mixterations (CreateSpace USA, 2010), Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems (Ragged Sky Press, 2009), Poetic Voices Wthout Borders 2 (Gival Press, 2009), The Queer Collection: Prose & Poetry 2007 (Fabulist Flash Publishing, 2007), Poetic Voices Without Borders (Gival Press, 2005), I Do/I Don’t: Queers on Marriage (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2004), Take Out: Queer Writing from Asian Pacific America (Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 2000), and Time After Time (International Library of Poetry, 2000).
Daniel lives in Seattle and writes cultural criticism at JAKE Voices and daniel extra.

This poem is previously unpublished.

D. Gilson
Triolet for Uncle Dennis

I have a life expectancy of ten more minutes, I will eat what I want.
—The Normal Heart

Towards the end, he’d only eat pudding
by the spoonful I’d feed him after school.
I’d walk to the kitchen (he’d lose his footing)
at the end of the hall to fetch his pudding,
vanilla or pistachio, stealing myself a cookie,
just one, not stealing, just one, the one rule.

(Cytomegalovirus eyes could not see the pudding
I fed him as we watched I Love Lucy after school.)

D. Gilson is the author of I Will Say This Exactly One Time: Essays (Sibling Rivalry, 2015); Crush (Punctum Books, 2014), with Will Stockton; Brit Lit (Sibling Rivalry, 2013); and Catch & Release (Seven Kitchens, 2012), winner of the Robin Becker Prize. He is a PhD candidate in American literature & cultural studies at The George Washington University, and his work has appeared in PANK, The Indiana Review, The Rumpus, and as a notable essay in Best American Essays.

Stephen Mead
Cautionary Tale

Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean, for far too long
your shine’s kept me captive
& it’s bad for the skin: pores
the size of craters
plus you’re rearranging my brain
with your high, your high.

Your Highness, king of the squeaks,
of ice-slick floors, of walls bright as comets,
I thought you were some kind of genie,
supposed you a cure-all. I mean you have such nice eyes,
the wise, the nerve-settling glint, good-humor
gold as your earring & clear
as your bald, your beautiful bald head.

I never expected to fall so, not this
strongly, for your smile on the tube, your face
on the bottle. Expected only duty done, services
rendered: a kitchen Pluto-pure, a bathroom
Atlantic-scrubbed.

Others simply left messes, grit or film,
& that made only for more teeth-gnashing
like the old-mud, the crumbs, the dishes,
the cig smog of past lovers, passing cats,
those old strays, friends.

What can I say? Nothing, no one compared.
You were entirely different, & obsession evolved—
A little dab on each wrist, behind knees, then
a passion of suds
in hopes you’d materialize—
& you did, you did—
Arms from the immaculate t-shirt, gentle but firm,
going going ‘round & who would have imagined
you were a satyr beneath the waist, that I’d touch, taste
those suede flanks the bottle’s picture never showed?

Oh Mr. Clean, we have to end this. Your luminosity’s too intense.
I’ve been burned sparer than paraffin & nobody else comes
as you’ve been coming, leaving the house blindingly white
with acetylene sheets, a strange den of iniquity replacing God, God even
for angels fear to tread here. You might pluck them for dusters.
You might prop them like mops, & I’m getting a little nostalgic
for randy clothes, for sweaty limbs. Yes, I’m beginning to miss quite a bit
the flesh, the stickiness spurting, & thanks,
thanks for taking this so well, you gym-toned Buddha,

you blazing Aladdin.

Stephen Mead is a visual artist, writer, and filmmaker. His poems have appeared in Ray’s Road Review, A Little Poetry, Great Works, and other journals. His suite of narrative poems, Whispers of Arias, was set to music by composer Kevin MacLeod.  He lives in New York.

This poem is previously unpublished.