Nancy Bevilaqua
Seward Park

For David Parent, 1947-1990

Longer than I thought, the walk
Across Houston, through Seward Park
To a part of Chinatown I’d never seen.
It was September. Blue milk spilled from sky
To street, and lights were sparking on.
I don’t remember where
We meant to go, or who was leading whom.

Tarnished sea bass gasped in window tanks,
Slid their bellies in nervous shimmies up
The glass, losing scales, mouthing
Breathless O’s, then flipped
Back into the crowded dark,
To let the others have a go.

I watched you eat
And paid for it
In a restaurant where in the windows
Ducks hung by their necks on hooks, plucked,
All flesh, eyeless heads bent sideways
In attitudes of shame.
By the time you finished, it was dark.
Leaves under streetlamps fanned from branches
Over shadows splayed and swaying, cards
Held in a nervous hand. I meant to leave you then,
But you were talking
And I had no one at home.

Nancy Bevilaqua is the author of Gospel of the Throwaway Daughter (CreateSpace, 2014), A Rough Deliverance: Collected Poems 1983-2013 (CreateSpace, 2013) and Holding Breath: A Memoir of AIDS’ Wildfire Days (CreateSpace, 2012). Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Tupelo Quarterly, Juked, MadHat Lit, Apogee, Menacing Hedge, here/there, Construction, Atticus Review, Kentucky Review, Iodine, and other journals. Nancy worked as a caseworker and counselor for people with AIDS in New York City in the late 1980s/early 1990s. She now lives in Saint Augustine, Florida with her son Alessandro.

This poem originally appeared in Holding Breath.

Sarah Russell
March 20, 1994

The day Fred died
he asked us to sing “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.”
Fred couldn’t sing anymore. Pneumocystis
and radiation had scarred his throat and lungs.
“I’m waiting for the swallows to come back,”
he croaked. “You know, like Capistrano.”

If you go out in the woods today
you’d better go in disguise….

We reminisced about growing up
in the ’50s with Saturday morning’s treat
after chores—the “Big John and Sparky”
radio show, its teddy bear theme song,
and Sparky’s impossible adventures.
Sparky the elf, like Fred, wanted
(more than anything) to be a real boy.

At six o’clock their mommies and daddies
will take them home to bed

we sang as he drifted into a final morphine sleep—
the man who raised enviable tomatoes,
wore cowboy boots, gave huge, enthusiastic hugs,
loved ribald jokes and trimming the tree at Christmas

because they’re tired little teddy bears.

Sarah Russell’s poems have appeared in Red River Review, Misfit Magazine, The Houseboat, Shot Glass Journal, Bijou Poetry Review, Silver Birch Press and Black Poppy Review, among others. For more information visit SarahRussellPoetry.com.

This poem originally appeared under the title “The Day Fred Died” in VerseWrights (March 2014).

Austin Alexis
Dry Earth

Sexual abstinence: the landscape where he lives.
A desert, of sorts:
parched red soil,
ants like dots in an iris,
crooked-shaped cacti.
He feels safe from AIDS, here
where a horse carcass decays,
burning in sun-cooked air.
Miles without water beckon,
stretch before him,
yet he sees himself as protected
from all harm, all viruses,
all disease, all bacteria.

This desert will kill anything.
This desert will kill everything.
He treks across it
though he will not survive it.

Austin Alexis is the author of Privacy Issues (Broadside-Lotus Press, 2014), winner of the 2014 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, and the chapbooks Lovers and Drag Queens (CreateSpace, 2014) and Lincoln & Other Poems (Poets Wear Prada, 2010). His work has appeared in the anthologies And We the Creatures (Dream Horse, 2003) and Off the Cuffs (Soft Skull Press, 2003). His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Candelabrum, Connecticut River Review, Dana Literary Society On-line Journal, James White Review, Obsidian, Pedestal Magazine, Pieran Springs, and others. He teaches literature and creative writing at New York City College of Technology and lives in New York City.

This poem is previously unpublished.

Jim Elledge
A Young Man of Chicago

Walking beneath the Armitage el,
headed for Oak Street
Beach, I saw him on the other
side, shambling in the opposite direction.
A year earlier, he’d disappeared,
but now, he was back, dressed
in someone else’s body:
skin and bones, not buff, ashy flesh
that blotches punctuated. He grinned
and waved, the same grin that took
my breath away when we met
in line at Body Works on N. Halsted:
“If you spot me, I’ll spot you.”

He wanted me. He told me with glances
and words and caresses in the sauna,
the shower, before mirrors lit
to highlight chiseled flesh. I wanted
him, too, but needed something
like monogamy even more than another
lover, needed to watch his eyes
scurry across my body when, after curls,
crunches, squats, I showered.

And there we were, stalled in our steps, our
eyes locked, my Polish Adonis
and I, while a Howard train screeched
overhead. “Hi,” he mouthed as Mr.
Death slung his cloak around that blue-eyed
boy. I froze. I waved—sort of.
I hurried away. I never looked back.

Should I be ashamed for my half-assed wave,
for not yelling over the traffic-tangled street,
“Hey! How’s it hanging?” half-jest, half-
tease, for not crossing the street and
throwing my arms around him, saying

What?

Sure I should. And am. And have been nearly
four decades, since that summer afternoon
so full of sunshine and blue skies and
promise, when hurrying off,
I thought, Jesus Christ, I’m glad it’s not me.

Jim Elledge is the author of the poetry collection Tapping My Arm for a Vein (Lethe Press, 2015), and the biography Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy: The Tragic Life of an Outsider Artist (Overlook Press, 2013). His book-length poem A History of My Tattoo (BrickHouse Books, 2006) won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. With David Groff, he co-edited Who’s Yer Daddy? Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Anthology. He lives in Atlanta and San Juan, PR.

Steve Turtell
In the Garden
for Sydney Chandler Faulkner

This bench was once a tree.
The curved, sap-filled trunk
planed to ruler-straight lumber,
measured, cut, hammered.

Bruised clover and grass,
pebbles and brick dust underfoot,
two white birches sway
over and around me.

In twenty years of constant death
I’ve only seen one man die.

Sydney

looked eighty, was forty-six when
he gasped for his last taste of air.

One clawed hand raked the sweaty sheet.
I held the other.

Unseeing eyes flitted.
Young and stupid, I was eager

for large experiences, I waited
to hear “the death rattle.”

I knew I would write about you.
And for twenty years I couldn’t.

Today, older than you were then,
I still can’t describe

the Sydney-shaped hole
you punched in the world.

Steve Turtell is the author of Heroes and Householders (Orchard House, 2009), reissued in 2012 in an expanded second edition. His 2001 chapbook, Letter to Frank O’Hara, won the Rebound Chapbook Prize given by Seven Kitchens Press and was reissued with an introduction by Joan Larkin in 2011. He is currently at work on Fifty Jobs in Fifty Years, and Peter Hujar: Invisible Master. Steve lives in New  York City. You can follow him on Twitter as @rdturtle and friend him on facebook.

This poem appeared in Heroes and Householders and Letter to Frank O’Hara.

Photo by John Masterson.

Nina Bennett
CJ 4321

The third time CJ
came in for an HIV test
it was positive. I paced
my office like a caged animal,
prepared to deliver his results.
He gasped when I said CJ, your
test is positive. Silent tears traversed
his downy cheeks as he shook his head.
How am I going to tell he whispered,
the next words nearly inaudible,
my mother?

He left, phone numbers for the HIV clinic,
support group, counseling hotline
stuffed in his jean jacket.
I filled out the standardized report.
Gender: male. Age: 22.
Mode of transmission: I searched
for a place to write luck ran out
but health department forms, unlike
election ballots, don’t permit
write-in votes.

That night I eat dinner with my sons;
while they talk about school,
math tests, band practice,
I picture another son
who sits with his mother, stares out
the dining room window at purple finches
and cardinals in a bird feeder,
struggles to begin an impossible conversation.

Delaware native Nina Bennett is the author of Sound Effects (Broadkill Press Key Poetry Series, 2013). Nina has worked in the HIV/AIDS field since the beginning of the epidemic. She was among the first in her state to be certified to perform anonymous HIV counseling and testing. She also served as a buddy, facilitated a support group, and worked as an HIV/AIDS case manager. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Napalm and Novocain, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Houseboat, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Philadelphia Stories, and The Broadkill Review. Awards include 2014 Northern Liberties Review Poetry Prize, second-place in poetry book category from the Delaware Press Association (2014), and a 2012 Best of the Net nomination.

This poem originally appeared in Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose and Art on HIV/AIDS (Third World Press, 2010).

Billy Merrell
3½ Love Sonnets

1
Ben calls and you unfold
from your dream he says
I’m sorry for calling
so early
he says I thought
you should know that
I’m dying but you aren’t
sure if you are truly lucid
so you just sit there
dumb in the dim room
of sleep-going-
to-wake while

he starts crying
you are the first boy

2
he kissed first
morning after
a long night
without sleep first

sober grope so
you can’t save yourself
from feeling
like a first mistake

like a platform
onto which he
crawled up and from
which he has lost

his balance
you bend

3
a paperclip around
your finger he tells you what
he is going to do now drop
out of school quit
his job and move to new
orleans with some man you
have never met after months
without a word from him you
hear his voice
on the answering machine
and it comes at you
twice like the stutter
of a cd skipping
you erase it quickly

3½
realizing you have
let him go
even after he stopped
crying and you said voice
thick with sleep don’t
talk like that it doesn’t mean
you’re dying.

Billy Merrell is the author of Talking in the Dark, a poetry memoir (Scholastic, 2003), and co-editor (with David Levithan) of The Full Spectrum (Knopf, 2006), which received a Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Childrens/Young Adult Literature. He is a contributor to the New York Times-bestselling children’s series Spirit Animals (Scholastic, 2014). Billy lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his husband, the writer Nico Medina.

Philip F. Clark
Roses

I arrived just as they
were making your bed; I thought,
“They’ve moved him,” but no,
you were dead. Someone else
was coming in. Your sisters had left.

As the attendant finished cleaning up
and I was about to turn away,
I noticed on the table, a Red Rose teabag—
and I smiled. Your friend Jim would
always send you a box of them,
and on each tag, like an advent calendar
he’d pasted small pictures of porn under each rose.

Your laugh used to startle the nurses.
I was going to stay in the room, ask
questions but I just left, without a “Why?”

I went home and made my bed. But I lay
there thinking of you, of having just missed you,
of the few minutes of breath I might have saved
had I rushed, or taken the train instead.
And try as I might I could not cry.

Instead I began to laugh, hearing in my head
your words: “Oh lord, darling, look at these!”
And then, your command “Make me some tea!”
Thinking of you, funny ghost, I rose from my bed.
I looked at my life. I took my meds.
“Dear boy, I will,” I said.

Philip F. Clark’s poems and interviews have been published in Assaracus, The Conversant, Lyrelyre, Poetry in Performance, and The Good Men Project, as well as in the anthology Between: New Gay Poetry (Chelsea Station, 2013), edited by Jameson Currier. His poetry reviews and interviews have been published by Lambda Literary. A native New Yorker, he currently lives in the Bronx. He blogs at The Poet’s Grin.

This poem is not previously published.

Perry Brass
Walt Whitman in 1989

Walt Whitman has come down
today to the hospital room;
he rocks back and forth in the crisis;

he says it’s good we haven’t lost
our closeness, and cries
as each one is taken.

He has written many lines
about these years: the disfigurement
of young men and the wars

of hard tongues and closed minds.
The body in pain will bear such nobility,
but words have the edge

of poison when spoken bitterly.
Now he takes a dying man
in his arms and tells him

how deeply flows the River
that takes the old man and his friends
this evening. It is the River

of dusk and lamentation.
“Flow,” Walt says, “dear River,
I will carry this young man

to your bank. I’ll put him myself
on one of your strong, flat boats,
and we’ll sail together all the way
through evening.”

Feb. 28, 1989, Orangeburg, NY

Perry Brass is the author of The Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love (Belhue Press, 2015), King of Angels (Belhue Press, 2012), How to Survive Your Own Gay Life (Belhue Press, 1998), The Manly Art of Seduction (Belhue Press, 1998) and many others. In 1969, he co-edited the newspaper Come Out!, the first publication of the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement, published by the Gay Liberation Front in New York City. In 1972, he co-founded the Gay Men’s Health Project Clinic, the forerunner of the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center. He is a founding coordinator of the Rainbow Book Fair, an annual LGBTQ book fair and literary conference in New York City.

For more information, visit www.perrybrass.com.

This poem originated as part of All The Way Through Evening, a song cycle written by Chris DeBlasio and first performed in 1990, and was subsequently included in The AIDS Quilt Songbook, an ongoing collaborative project.

Steven Riel
What Remains

if there were a way to reach you,
a language to learn: conjunctions,
a subjunctive, a formal & familiar you

if there were a rosary to shinny up,
a way to climb, decade by decade,
mystery by mystery, into the indigo sky

if there were a highway in your direction,
an odometer to gauge the distance between us
like a modern Bethlehem star

if my car radio could chance upon you
singing Streisand songs through the static

if I could sprout antennae,
fizz like a Geiger counter, be launched
like a satellite to track gamma rays
from the black star you may now be

if I could sled downhill on a bright
December afternoon & feel again
your mittened fingers clasping my waist
as we dodge bare oaks,
skid out across the lake–
if the lake were not black gloss,
those runner-scrapes like icy scars

if I could find the chink, simply
tap & hear the hollow
behind the fake door,
then stumble through the tunnel
out of this galactic silence,
into what remains of your light,
I promise you would find me there.

Steven Riel is the author of Fellow Odd Fellow (Trio House, 2014), Postcard from P-town (Seven Kitchens, 2009), The Spirit Can Crest (Amherst Writers and Artists, 2003), and How to Dream (Amherst Writers and Artists, 1992). His poems have appeared in Alexandria Quarterly, Assaracus, OVS Magazine, International Poetry Review, Poetry Porch, SNReview, Evening Street Review, and RFD, among others, and in anthologies including Art & Understanding: Literature from the First Twenty Years of A&U (Black Lawrence Press, 2014), edited by Chael Needle and Diane Goettel; Divining Divas: 50 Gay Men on Their Muses (Lethe Press, 2012), edited by Michael Montlack; Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011), edited by Kevin Simmonds; Knocking at the Door: Poems about Approaching the Other (Birch Bench Press, 2011), edited by Lisa Sisler and Lea C. Deschenes; and My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them  (Terrace Books, 2009), edited by Michael Montlack. Steve is manager of the Serials Cataloging unit of the Harvard University Library and lives in Natick, Massachusetts.

This poem appeared originally in The Evergreen Chronicles, vol. 12, no. 3, Fall 1997, and was reprinted in The Spirit Can Crest (Amherst Writers & Artists Press, 2003) and Fellow Odd Fellow (Trio House Press, 2014).