David Bergman
The Man Who Watched Birds

For Jim Hubbard

He hadn’t grown up among birds except
for the chicken his mother baked each Friday.

His parents called anything that flew
into the yard a sparrow, that is

if it wasn’t a robin—distinguished
by the red patch pinned like a heart to its chest.

It wasn’t until he entered the dark
wood of middle age that he learned

to tell a warbler from a wren,
a cardinal from a towhee,

or figured out that by standing
in the right spot he could spy

an entire bestiary floating overhead,
or that all he needed was to transfer

to the avian world
the skills he’d developed in his youth

for watching men to discover
in binocular observation a pleasure

that was, if somewhat less intense,
at least as gratifying.

As easily as he learned to differentiate Juan
from Billy or Gabriel by their outlines

on the dance floor so he could tell
the various raptors by their silhouettes

as they sailed across the opalescent sky.
And the birds were just as untouchable,

just as remote, just as habitual and impulsive
as the men he’d followed at a distance.

He enjoyed the bird’s sexlessness.
Of course he could tell male from female

in some species by their size, color and crest,
but they didn’t grow those jangling genitalia,

the balls and breasts, that made the differences
between man and woman so obvious.

He liked to imagine birds as pure spirit,
skimming the tops of waves and mountains,

their eyes peeled for the helpless below,
whom they’d raise up and gracefully swallow.

He kept a list of sightings as he had recorded
every glimpse he got of Billy or Gabriel.

Juan lived in the neighborhood,
and he saw him almost daily

saluting him like the red-tailed hawk
by slightly dipping his head.

He identified others on a seasonal basis,
as they migrated to breeding grounds.

A whole cadre of new faces appeared
each summer in the Pines,

gloriously-hatched fledglings,
like the ruby-throated hummingbird

who’d found its way to his balcony
to sip his red-flowered vine.

He’d known a boy like that,
slender as a wafer, a needle-sharp nose,

hands fluttering so swiftly they seemed to disappear,
zig-zagging through the streets, but knowing

exactly what he wanted— a strange and beautiful boy
who died like so many after a year or two.

Somewhere he had his name written down.
He had pages of them, their numbers reassigned,

their apartments refurbished and resold
at twice their former value. It took years

to exhaust the local habitats, but eventually
he was forced to find birding spots

further and further off, exotic sanctuaries
that required passports and days of hiking to get to.

Recently he marched all night through a cloud forest,
slogging through knee-deep mud to arrive

at the only place in the world
a species of hawk gathers to multiply.

They shrieked like Wagnerian tenors
for the rare female ready to be entertained.

Love me, love me. I am better than all the rest!
they cried in their limited vocabulary,

each sounding exactly like the other. And who
could choose among them, they were all so marvelous.

But not finding any mate, the boys flew off
sometimes in pairs, mostly alone, to catch

whatever they could rustle up from the mist,
He stood in wonder at the base of the cliff,

his arms stretched outward
as if he could lay his hands on their extended wings

and caress them for once as they took flight,
buoyed by the light, cool drafts of dawn.

David Bergman is the author of four books of poetry including Fortunate Light (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2013), Heroic Measures (Ohio State, 1998), The Care and Treatment of Pain (Kairos Editions, 1994), and Cracking the Code (Ohio State, 1986), winner of the George Elliston Poetry Prize. He edited John Ashbery’s Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987 (Knopf, 1989) and Edmund White’s The Burning Library: Essays (Vintage, 1995) as well as Gay American Autobiography: Writings from Whitman to Sedaris (University of Wisconson, 2009). Men on Men 2000 (Plume, 2000), which he co-edited with Karl Woelz, won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Literary Anthology. Most recently, he published The Poetry of Disturbance: The Discomforts of Postwar American Poetry (Cambridge, 2015). He is currently editing The Cambridge History of American Gay Poetry. David’s  poetry has appeared in Kenyon Review, Yale Review, Poetry, and The Paris Review, among other journals. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Towson University.

This poem is previously unpublished.

C. Cleo Creech
Fucking the Deaf

There was that year going
to Birmingham for NIH drug studies,
driving over each Sunday afternoon
for Monday mornings full of
fluorescent lit waiting rooms,
steel stethoscopes, finding veins.
Then the long drive back to Atlanta,
careful to remove any dry-blood
band-aided cotton balls.
There was that little bar
down the street from my hotel,
that cute little deaf boy—
where even without sign language
we seemed to more than manage.
He could read lips, read my body, and really
what was there to say.
I never lied to him.
But sometimes there were late night phone calls
where I’d turn my back, raise my finger
calling time out, my body suddenly
rigid and tense. Calls
from another country
land of too much talking
to this hotel room island nation
where I made love to this deaf boy
no questions, no answers
lips only for long kisses
bodies bathed in sweat and silence.

C. Cleo Creech is the author of art/chapbooks including Dendrochronology, Flying Monkeys, and Phoenix Feathers. His poems have appeared in Glitterwolf Magazine and in the anthology The Queer South: LGBTQ Writers on the American South (Sibling Rivalry, 2014), edited by Douglas Ray. In 2012, his anti-bullying poem, “The Peace of Gentle Waves,” became the text fore a choral work composed by Dean Rishel and performed in concert by the Greater South Jersey Chorus. His current poetry project is a daily pic/poem feed on Instagram @creech444. A North Carolina native, Cleo was raised on a tobacco farm deep in the Bible Belt and now lives in Atlanta, GA with his husband Michael.

Cheryl Clarke
In this hostile corridor

A quickening
nostalgia suffuses
me, this late evening

fin de siecle
between
two endanger-
ed sites.

The marvelous
have been blight-
ed by a blood-bourne

scourge. Flam-
boyantly frail, pretty
still marvelous you
nourish our failing
geographies.

As I face
your soliticitous-
ness over the counter
of this nasty
KFC and am dazzled by
your articulated brows
mascara
the discrete texture
of your facial skin
and buffed, cultivated nails

you recognize
me     too—
by my precise haircut

Cheryl Clarke is the author of the poetry collections Narratives: poems in the tradition of black women (Sister Books, Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1982), Living as a Lesbian (Firebrand Books, 1986; reprinted by A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014 ), Humid Pitch (Firebrand Books, 1989), Experimental Love (Firebrand Books, 1993); the critical study, After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers Press, 2005); and The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005 (Carroll and Graf, 2006). A new poetry collections, By My Precise Haircut, is forthcoming from Word Works Press in 2016. Cheryl retired from Rutgers University in 2013 after 41 years at the New Brunswick campus. With her partner Barbara J. Balliet, she is co-owner of Blenheim Hill Books in Hobart, the Book Village of the Catskills. She is an organizer of the annual Festival of Women Writers in Hobart, N.Y.

Photo by Ann E. Chapman

This poem is part of a longer piece entitled “The Days of Good Looks” from The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005.

Eduardo C. Corral
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome

I approach a harp
abandoned
in a harvested field.
A deer
leaps out of the brush
and follows me

in the rain, a scarlet
snake wound
in its dark antlers.
My fingers
curled around a shard
of glass—

it’s like holding the hand
of a child.
I’ll cut the harp strings
for my mandolin,
use the frame as a window
in a chapel
yet to be built. I’ll scrape

off its blue
lacquer, melt the flakes
down with
a candle and ladle
and paint
the inner curve
of my soup bowl.

The deer passes me.
I lower my head,
stick out my tongue
to taste
the honey smeared
on its hind leg.

In the field’s center,
I crouch near
a boulder engraved
with a number
and stare at a gazelle’s
blue ghost,
the rain falling through it.

Eduardo C. Corral is the author of Slow Lightning (Yale University Press, 2012), selected by Carl Phillips as the 2011 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, Beloit Poetry Journal, Huizache, Jubilat, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Quarterly West. His work has been honored with a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and writing residencies to the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He has served as the Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and as the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he lives in New York City.

Photo by JW Stovall

This poem was originally published in the Indiana Review (spring 2002) and appears in Slow Lightening.

MAR
Investment in sadness

Investment in sadness, revenue of tears

So limpid they could be bottled

Fructified by the works of a husband

With a shared syringe for mistress.

Unconscious of the pain that gave them birth

Gravity-compliant, obeying the first law of emotion,

They stream down the cheeks of the ageless mother.

Tingling the nose, lips and chin. Sparing the ears.

Bitter? Sweet? Needles to say.

Acidic? Alkaline? potential Heroine.

From her clandestine marriage onwards,

It has been of matter of liquefaction

Hand washing of her parents for dowry

Daily flushing of well-meaning society

Misery to fill an obese catalogue.

Yet pain is a potent galactagogue.

Breasts: Cans of virus-enriched milk.

Milk: Of unrequited human sadness.

And her famished, stunted baby

Positively suckles her leaking eyes.

MAR is the pen name of a writer who for personal and professional reasons prefers not to include a picture or detailed biographical information. She works in the sustainable development field and lives in Mauritius.

This poem is not previously published.

Chip Livingston
Dad Jokes Around Before Defining AIDS

He was a mountain gorilla and I was an old lady at the zoo.

There was blood on his clown suit; I was a 15-year-old boy.

He was a light bulb. I was seven angry lesbians.

Him: the difference between a venereal disease and a sly midget.

Talent scout; Aristocrat.

He: my father. I: another idiot dick sucker.

Chip Livingston is the author of the short story and essay collection, Naming Ceremony (Lethe Press, 2014); two poetry collections, Crow-Blue, Crow-Black (NYQ Books, 2012) and Museum of False Starts (Gival Press, 2010). Recent poems, essays, and stories appear in Court Green, Potomac Review, Cimarron Review, The Florida Review, Ploughshares, Hinchas de Poesia, and on the Poetry Foundation web site. Chip is nonfiction faculty in the low-res MFA program at Institute of American Indian Arts and is poetry faculty at the low-res Mile High MFA at Regis University. For more about Chip, visit chiplivingston.com.

This poem previously appeared in Naming Ceremony (Lethe Press, 2014)

Photo by Gabriel Padilha

Marie Howe
Rochester, New York, July 1989

Early summer evenings, the city kids would ride their bikes down his street
no-handed, leaning back in their seats, and bump over the curb

of the empty Red Cross parking lot next door where Joe’s car was parked, and
John’s white Honda, broken and unregistered…everything blooming,

that darkening in the trees before the sky goes dark: the sweetness of the lilacs
and the grass smell…

And the sound on the front porch steps was wooden and hollow,
and up the narrow stairway stuffy and dim, and the upper door maybe a little

open—and in the hall and left into his room: someone might be sitting there
reading, or sometimes only him, sleeping,

or lying awake, his face turned toward the door,
and he would raise a hand….

And the woman who lived below them played the piano. She was a teacher, and
sometimes we’d hear that stumbling repetition people make when they’re

learning a new song, and sometimes she’d play alone—she’d left a note
in his mailbox saying she would play softly for him. And those evenings,

when the sky was sunless but not yet dark, and the birdsong grew loud in the trees,
just after supper, when the kids wheeled by silently

or quietly talking from their bikes, when the daylilies closed up
alongside the house,

music would sometimes drift up through the floorboards,

and he might doze or wake a little or sleep,
and whoever was with him might lean back in the chair beside the bed

and not know it was Chopin,
but something soft and pretty—maybe not even hear it,

not really, until it stopped
—the way you know a scent from a flowering tree once you’ve passed it.

Marie Howe is the author of The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W.W. Norton, 2008), What the Living Do (W.W. Norton, 1997), and The Good Thief (Persea, 1988), selected by Margaret Atwood as winner of the National Poetry Series. With Michael Klein, she co-edited a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, 1994). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, AGNI, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. Stanley Kunitz selected Marie for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. Marie teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and New York University. She was the 2012-2014 Poet Laureate of New York State.

This poem appeared in What the Living Do (W.W. Norton, 1997).

John Whittier Treat
Nearly

Nearly twenty-five years, still one day, since then
the time when we stood across cold hewn rooms and looked
past what I had wanted (still want) just to see,
I mean steal, that journey of limb and halved-moon curves of

buttock. Now, stacked high above some place far from there,
a room with hot Saint Peter’s light cast through shutters onto a chair
where lay the quick discard of cotton, perfumed damp torn yours,
limbs yes, buttocks yes, youth no: the force of memories

manufactured if not maintained. Was the motion of a body
ever so sure and feeble? The hurling object knows Newton’s Law.
Don’t talk, be quiet. Cupping your hand across my mouth,
some things have to close in order to make more room

for others. My body now: a quarter-century of a place where
I had stopped in wait for all that was coming my way, and it has.
Old things made useful again, so go further and be sure to stay
This is that slap of pain and promise of proof for what was not love, but nearly;
We’ve learned in time that what our blood shares makes us special:
then, now, forever

John Whittier Treat is the author of the novel The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House (Booktrope Editions), forthcoming in fall 2015. His short stories have appeared in Jonathan and are forthcoming in QDA: Queer Disability Anthology (Squares and Rebels), edited by Raymond Luczak. John is currently working on First Consonants, a novel about a stutterer who saves the world. He lives in Seattle. For more information visit johntreat.com

This poem is previously unpublished.

Allen F. Clark
Tosca

For Larry Negri

Our first New Year’s Eve together,
we skipped a night on the town in favor
of a small dinner at home. Pasta with pesto,
a simple dessert. You made fresh linguine
while I assembled a pear tart. We had put up
the pesto the previous August. Your fingers
were green from tearing basil, mine red
from peeling twenty heads of garlic.
As we worked, we ate focaccia still warm
from the corner bakery, washed it down
with French roast.

For music we agreed upon Puccini, flipped
a coin to decide between Tosca and Boheme.
Tosca won. We never made it past the first act,
or to midnight. After all, Cavaradossi would always
die by treachery, Scarpia would force himself
onto Tosca’s blade, and she would always find
her parapet. After dinner we made love—
good, vigorous mansex—with a double climax
during the Te Deum.

But what of us? We did not survive our failures,
large and small. We both left the City, moved
to other towns, drifted out of touch. I came to wish
for a way to slow time, at least to mute its roar.
That we could have stopped our lives that perfect
evening. I could have lived forever without walking
among the panels of the Quilt when it came
to my new home town last week, and found
at my feet your name and dates on a field of indigo,
surrounded by silver stars.

Allen F. Clark’s poems have appeared in Assaracus, The Far East, and The Good Men Project. Following his service as a Navy corpsman in Vietnam, he had a career in the health sciences in San Francisco and Seattle. His Vietnam memoir piece was selected for inclusion in a special program by the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, where he now lives.

This poem is previously unpublished.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
I was never just, like you*

Whether fire, loneliness or love hurts more than death I don’t know, but I’m reminded of driving 14 hours to Key West. I grew up like a weed. The field became a swimming pool. They kicked me in the ribs. I remember pulling the elastic band of my underwear down behind my balls: now I can relax.

I remember sex on too much grass and the total separation of my head from what’s going on down there. Wait for news of one kind or another. There are sometimes trees. Once the ground beneath seemed a window we’d learn to fall through. I want to tell you that I’m dying. All over town, the buildings rise the way we learn to sleep.

What if, all of a sudden, out in the middle of public somewhere, you get a hard-on? You can look at your body naked in a mirror, with the furniture of the infusion clinic. His stainless steel ribs, thin as the blades of pocket knives. I confess to the hornet’s nest of police whistles. The whole hive courted me. I remember Liberace. His face gives nothing away but the job at hand. He wanted to protect me from the things out there.

Your face was new, as if it had never been used, a sweatshirt in Florida. You select colors: a streak of primary yellow. Karen brings plums from her garden, the thin skin of the tomato. We are grateful for the slenderness of needles. The nurse is called Bud, too: a gay man, but grumpy. Or sex: a white t-shirt, a kite flapping skyward, dreaming only of the ground. I want to be mentioned more. The hole in my chest a lip-smudge, life-like. Joe is going back to Arkansas.

Notes on the articulation of time: no longer gemlike, disinterested. They are not going to get me to think I am that important. I remember one cold and bleak night on the beach with Frank O’Hara. He walked through rain like it wasn’t raining, tomorrow morning he’ll take the Greyhound to Fayetteville. My shrink told me it was unnatural to be obsessed with the Nazi extermination of homosexuals. He knew that here in America we hide things. Hotels we stay in have no flowers left by management, we manage without. We steal. Various skin diseases and the paintings of Jackson Pollock. I remember when I tried out to be a cheerleader and didn’t make it.

When I was 15 he wanted to see me with my pants down. I admired his tongue. His own body giving way, with him caught inside. I remember how untheatrical the act of getting undressed can sometimes be: the purity of my body, a Buck knife twisted into a washboard stomach, distant neighbors stamping out the cinders, a yellow that uncurls. Black out. White rooms.

It’s spring and there’s another crop of kids with haircuts from my childhood. And the lesions joining them. Flying is graceful because it’s so hard to believe how fast you are really going. She reaches for him, holds nothing. I’d like to have a showdown, too. Room set at infrared, mind at ultraviolet. You walk at night, alone, the moon as brittle as a tooth. The dark swallows it, and sighs like we sigh, when we rise from our knees.

I remember catching myself with an expression on my face that doesn’t relate to what’s going on anymore. All around me are people unpacking anything of value to declare. Even our dinner parties gain a topic: the mystery of tap water, the way I cringe from flowers, and the blue sky. Feed it my hair, strand by strand.

The sex over and done, we were, more or less, our audience of aunts. A really fine thing, smashed to pieces. The door sees more than ever: yellow jackets, blue-bellied hornets, furry bumbles, two-inch wasps. Refuse to blink, we hoist our lives over this thin white cane of outrage. I dreamed the snow was you, when there was snow.

There’s no age when one doesn’t feel awkward, headlights open to the empty street. I remember trying to get a guy’s turtleneck sweater off, but it turned out not to be a turtleneck sweater. Boxes without front yards, built on old front yards. It still goes on—wherever hands can find response of hands; hold, in the hollow silence, a tangible warmth. First we have the radio on, for the music, and then we have it off, for the diplomatic corps. Rushing into someone’s colorless morning, we want a history. Even the idea makes me nauseous.

*This poem was created using phrases from the work of the 45 poets included in Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson Books, 2010), edited by Philip Clark and David Groff.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of the memoir The End of San Francisco (City Lights, 2013), winner of a 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction, and the novels So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights, 2008) and Pulling Taffy (Suspect Thoughts, 2003). She is the editor of Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (AK Press, 2012), an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, as well as four other nonfiction anthologies. Mattilda’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Time Out New York, Utne Reader, AlterNet, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Bitch, Bookslut, and The Stranger, among others. She is a columnist and the reviews editor at the feminist magazine Make/shift. Mattilda lives in Seattle, Washington.