Antoinette Brim
(You got me) begging like Billie

I’ll attend       your wedding             this summer      in a yellow sundress
bare shouldered       with my slipped-out-of sandals tied
by their satin ribbon ankle straps            slung over one shoulder
my freshly manicured toes            nuzzling the newly cut lawn            

your summer wedding     set to the coo of captive doves        color washed
in lilac and lavender    me in a lemon yellow sundress        its meringue skirts
outstretched         catching breeze; there will be so much you want to say to me
but there won’t be time      not this time

Hush now, don’t explain

Funny how some things     you can see afar off     a train wreck you can’t avoid
So, you give yourself to it         open up to         the crash and bang of it
feel yourself             roll with it             wondering all the time             if this time
you’ll live through it

And you know that I love you
And when love endures,
right and wrong don’t matter
I’m so completely yours

But Baby, its only spring time now                       butterflies are yet cocooned
tadpoles are still swimming in their big frog dreams                Baby, everything
has a season              ain’t time yet             for no yellow sundress

Try to hear folks chatter
And I know you cheat
Right or wrong don’t matter
When you with me, Sweet

Your kisses    refresh me          like Big Mama’s sun tea
set out to steep in the window box                    strange how  it
seems all the sugar settles at the bottom                     sometimes
when you get to the end    it tastes too sweet

Hush now don’t explain
What is there to gain

Your sleepy hand draped lazy ‘cross my thigh
seems right in morning light

Just say you’ll remain
Rising sun don’t mean nothing     it rises every morning                     let it rise
on you here          tomorrow        and the next day       and the day after that

Just say you’ll remain

No need to          grope for apologies       grope for lies

And you know that I love you
And when love endures,
right and wrong don’t matter
I’m so completely yours

I hear folks chatter
And I know you cheat
Right or wrong don’t matter
When you with me, Sweet

Hush now, don’t explain
Just say you’ll remain

My life’s your love
Don’t explain

Antoinette Brim is the author of Icarus in Love (Main Street Rag, 2013) and Psalm of the Sunflower (Willow Books, 2009). Her work has appeared in journals including Tidal Basin Review, 95Notes, and Southern Women’s Review, as well as the anthologies Villanelles (Everyman’s Library, 2012), edited by Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali; Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander (FreedomSeed Press, 2013), edited by Ewuare X. Osayande; Alice Walker: Critical Insights (Salem Press, 2012), edited by Nagueyalti Warren; 44 on 44: Forty-Four African American Writers on the 44th President of the United States (Third World Press, 2011), edited by Lita Hooper, Sonia Sanchez, and Michael Simanga; Not A Muse: The Inner Lives of Women, a World Poetry Anthology (Haven Books, 2010), edited by Kate Rogers and Viki Holmes; and Just Like A Girl: A Manifesta! (GirlChild Press, 2008), edited by Michelle Sewell. Antoinette is a Cave Canem Foundation fellow and a recipient of the Walker Foundation Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

This poem originally appeared in Psalm of the Sunflower.

Song lyrics from “Don’t Explain,” as sung by Billie Holiday,  lyrics by Billie Holiday, music by Arthur Herzog, Jr.

John Medeiros
One Sentence

I learned it all from first grade to fifth when I learned the components of a sentence, when I learned that the beauty of language is that we are all part of that language, that as we study what it means to be a noun, or a verb, or an adjective — all things I will reveal later — we also, simultaneously, as if the universes of emotion and alphabet were suddenly fused into one, we also feel what it means to be a noun, or a verb, or an adjective, and at that moment of fusion, when life becomes the word on paper, I finally come to terms with my life: a sentence, a line of words strung together sometimes with meaning, sometimes without meaning, always containing those things a sentence always seems to contain, like a noun, a common noun at that, like faggot (as in God hates a faggot, but not as in God hates your faggot ways because then I am no longer a noun, but an adjective, and that, you will find, comes much later in life), so instead my life, at this moment, is a noun — sometimes a common noun but then sometimes a proper noun (as in Tommy), or a compound noun (as in twinship), or a collective noun (as in the genes that made us this way), or a possessive noun (as in I am, and I will always be, my brother’s keeper); and only once I am a noun, whether it be a common noun or a proper noun or a collective noun or a possessive noun — something inside me yearns to be, something inside yearns to give the nouns in my life meaning, and it is only when the desire to be burns inside like an ember struggling to stay lit do I suddenly unfold and become a verb — an inactive verb today (to be, as in I am gay), an active verb tomorrow, as in replicate (like carbon copies, or identical twins, or infectious viral particles); and as a verb I will be a variety of tenses, sometimes more than one simultaneously, sometimes just present (I have AIDS), sometimes present continuous (I am trying to tell you I have AIDS), sometimes just past (I tried to tell you I have AIDS), and sometimes future (I will die with this disease); regardless of which, I can be one or I can be all, but I will always be tense, and once I’ve seen myself as noun and verb I will slowly grow into adjective to describe myself and make myself more interesting to you, my audience, so that you will no longer see me as your twin but instead will come to know me as your gay HIV-positive twin, and to the parents who once knew me as their son I will be remembered as their sick son, sick from too much language and too much love, adjectives can do that to a person, and sometimes the adjective I become is multiple in meaning, and so I am split (as in zygote) and split (as in personality) — the adjectives I become can be confusing to a person; the adverb, on the other hand, disassociates itself from the subject and marries itself instead to its action; so, whereas I love, I can now love too deeply, and whereas I cry, I now cry passionately, and when it comes to loving, and when it comes to crying the sentence of my life takes on objects, and when those objects are direct I no longer love too deeply, instead I love you too deeply, and when those objects are indirect I no longer cry passionately, I cry passionately only for you, and so it is, as is the case with most twins, that the components of my life take on meaning and structure, and my life becomes the very sentence I use to describe it; yet like a sentence, as in the string of words full of subject and predicate, my life, too, is another sentence, a prison sentence, as in removed from the outside world, a sentence as in a final verdict, a judgment, a lack of freedom, or a loss of freedom once owned, a life once held in the palm of my hand and then taken away, forever, leaving me with only a series of words never without a verb to follow; otherwise, if I could, I’d be individual or asexual or undetectable: words all by themselves — words, ironically, only befitting a prisoner.

John Medeiros is the author of couplets for a shrinking world (North Star Press, 2012). His work has appeared in Christopher Street,  Evergreen Chronicles, Sport Literate, Gulf Coast, Talking Stick, Willow Springs, as well as in the anthologies Among the Leaves: Queer Male Poets on the Midwestern Experience (Squares & Rebels, 2012),  Poetry City, USA, vol. 2 (Lowbrow Press, 2012), and Gents, Badboys and Barbarians: New Gay Male Poetry (Alison Publications, 1995). He received two Minnesota State Arts Board grants, a Jerome Foundation Grant for Emerging Writers, the Gulf Coast Award for Nonfiction, and the AWP Intro Journals Project Award. John is the curator of Queer Voices, a reading series for queer writers sponsored by Intermedia Arts. He is an immigration attorney living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

This poem originally appeared in Gulf Coast 18.1 (Winter/Spring 2006).

Stephen Mills
An Obituary for My Boyfriend Who Did Not Die from AIDS

In college we raised money for dying faggots
at the “Hope House” to ease the guilt of living.
You went door to door for nickels gathered from frat boys
in towels and togas, afraid AIDS
was only a miscalculated shower away.
And I wrapped the coins in paper tubes,
placed them in our donation envelope marked
with a sincere note about “the fight.”
The day we visited I was glad “the sick” weren’t home.
It felt right that they were “out to the doctor,”
that a polite volunteer with fake nails, a Kentucky accent,
and plastered hair gave us a tour,
pointing out the jagged construction paper cut-outs of family
members they would like to say goodbye to.
Words scribbled in talk bubbles: “I love you,” “I’m sorry,”
and a few “go to hell”s”
It felt right that the kitchen was bare of knives,
contained only paper plates, card tables collapsed
against yellowed walls, and 12 Step pamphlets scattered
the counter next to the stained HIV fact coasters:
1 in 250 have HIV, 1 in 500 know it.
Upstairs, bedroom doors cracked open to reveal
clotted bed sheets next to meds and magazines full of healthy,
toned gay boys denouncing the myths.
In the bathroom, a motivational calendar hung
crookedly, mountain climbers and the word
“Perseverance” claimed the month of May.
But it was beside the closet with the clothes
of the dead that I grabbed your hand imagining you
like them, melting into floorboards like some Queen
from the Village, me cleaning mucus off rugs, cursing
that you get to die first—smearing make-up
on your lesions so we can go out and pretend no one stares
or cleaning your soiled ass after calling you in sick
to work again, and twisting tales to your mother
who likes to pretend I’m a woman on the telephone,
a nurse, a pay-by-the-hour maid, that we both know
you can’t afford. Or making love with all the lights on,
hoping we do it just right, praying to a God we don’t believe in
that the condom will hold, while yearning
for the touch of skin on skin.

Stephen S. Mills is the author of A History of the Unmarried (Sibling Rivalry, 2014) and He Do the Gay Man in Dif­fer­ent Voices (Sib­ling Rivalry Press, 2012), a final­ist for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle and winner of the 2012 Lambda Lit­er­ary Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Anti­och Review, The Gay and Les­bian Review World­wide, PANK, The New York Quar­terly, The Los Ange­les Review, Knock­out, Assara­cus, The Rum­pus, and oth­ers. Stephen won the 2008 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award for his poem entitled “Iranian Boys Hanged for Sodomy, July 2005,” which appeared in the anthology Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 (Gival Press, 2009), edited by Robert L Giron. He lives in New York City.

For more information, visit www.stephensmills.com.

This poem originally appear in The Q Review in 2010.

Donna Minkowitz
Activist Funk

Like many sometime anarchists, funky-minded leftists, and radical democrats, I lost my heart at my first ACT UP meeting. For years I’d resigned myself to working in progressive political groups whose structure had all too little to do with their version of a freer society. Suddenly the AIDS crisis had generated a group that recognized organizational structure as political: there were 400 people in the room and most of them voiced their opinions to the other 399 at some time during the meeting. The entire group decided on every action to be done in ACT UP’s name. For people born in a country where political passivity is imbibed along with mother’s milk, this degree of participation was like eating political spinach.

***

At my first meeting back in 1988, facilitators helped the room focus on specific, agreed-upon topics, but there was also much laughter, spontaneous bursts of chanting, kissing. And weeping: when friends died, no one gave a thought to keeping a stiff upper lip. Activists planning a demonstration actually discussed the need to provide emotional support to fellow ACT UP members who might get upset and scared when they were arrested. (No one with whom I worked politically had ever mentioned emotional support.) Later, at a demonstration, ACT UP took over the street, marching 15 abreast, linking arms street corner to street corner. “Which one of you is the leader?” the police captain asked. “We are all the leader. None of us is the leader,” came the reply. “If you want to talk, you have to talk to all of us.”

***

Donna Minkowitz is the author of Growing Up Golem: How I Survived My Mother, Brooklyn, and Some Really Bad Dates (Riverdale Avenue Books, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, and Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters with the Right Taught Me About Sex, God, and Fury (Free Press, 1998), winner of the 1999 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir. A former feature writer for The Village Voice, she has also written for The New York Times Book Review, Salon, The Nation, and Ms., among others. She is currently the restaurant critic for Gay City News in New York.

This piece is excerpted from “ACT UP at a Crossroads,” which appeared in The Village Voice, June 5, 1990, and was reprinted in We are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics (Routledge, 1997), edited by Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan.

Debora Lidov
Rounds

Baby Boy with necrotizing enterocolitis three inches viable gut. Baby of maternal diabetes, maternal fever, maternal utox, maternal HIV. Baby of domestic violence. Baby Boy they were trying for a girl this time. Baby Girl they were hoping for a boy. Baby the father’s Indo-Caribbean side will not accept your blackness. Baby intubated, brain dead on arrival, mother seized and expired prior to induction. Baby born with one arm one leg external bladder but two perfect lungs and excellent heart breathing easy. Triplet A, born at 1,200 grams, home in 12 weeks; Triplet B born at 1,400 grams home in 12 weeks; Triplet C born at 800 grams never leaves never off the vent, on and off the oscillator high-frequency vent. Baby X of ambiguous genitalia. Baby, she whispers in recovery-room trance, of revenge rape, baby, she says to the aide in Creole, of gang rape, baby of incest, one nurse notes to another in the hall about the baby. Baby with fused lids get ready to see, baby on new baby trache get ready to breathe, failed kidney baby recover your function, baby, filter and excrete, arrhythmia baby steady whenever you’re ready your baby baby baby baby beat.

Debora Lidov is the author of Trance, forthcoming this month from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Ars Medica, Cut Throat, Five Points, Salamander, upstreet, and The Threepenny Review. Debora is a medical social worker and lives in Brooklyn.

This poem originally appeared in Tarpaulin Sky.

Tom Capelonga
In Disco Credemus

“Go out dancing tonight, my dear, and go home with someone, and if the love doesn’t last beyond the morning, then know I love you.”
—Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

You and I will never dance
at the Saint or Studio 54

but we’re at our best laughing
in our private discotheque.

Dim all the lights sweet honey
‘cause tonight it’s you and me—

chairpersons of the committee against
poor dance floor etiquette

assembled to surrender limbs and hips
to Dionysius and chant from

the canon of Donna and Abba
passed down to us from

Christopher Street and our
Bronx-or-Brooklyn mothers.

We dance beneath burdens
lighter than theirs—

our mothers have seen to it
and the ghosts of clones and pier-queens

teach us liberation’s limits
with a virus at the margins.

(Is there not a share of grief in us
for those who disappeared too soon?

What friends we could have made
among the angels at the Everard.)

Still heaven knows the city takes its tithe
in spilled drinks and lines at the door

in biting words from boys born elsewhere
and tears and rust and bullshit pouring

forth onto hot sidewalks.
Our cackling is a cool rinse

on dirty hands and faces
as we soar above our grievances

on melodies like hymns,
burning herbs to please the gods

and to mark a thousandth lifetime
together — a pair of queens dancing,

unafraid to show the soft parts
underneath their steel, bound by vows

to guard this temple where
disco never died.

Tom Capelonga is a 27 year-old native of New York City. His poems have appeared in FourTwoNine Magazine and Podium. He lives in Manhattan.

This poem is not previously published.

David Groff
Fire Island Song

It would be nice if you weren’t dead,
you with your hair and skin flame-red
and your way of getting me in bed.
It would be nice if you weren’t dead.

It’s not time’s fault or even fate’s,
though this second claim demands debate:
Too many dead to live, you nearly said.
You savored dread.
You liked where it led.

You let death happen with your
drinks and drugs, your tour
of all the high points of despair.
You were a living cigarette.
You blistered and burned down. You let
me down. This grates.
This isn’t fair,

I say, walking your beach beside myself,
your windy wispy ghost a stealth
seagull full of shit and caw.
You’re also wind. You fuck me raw.

You like where I’m led.
You wanted me to die, you almost said.
The sunset is a scraped-skin red.
I would be nice if you weren’t dead.

David Groff is the author of Clay (Trio House, 2013) and Theory of Devolution (Illinois, 2002), selected by Mark Doty for the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle. With Jim Elledge he coedited Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (University of Wisconsin, 2012). With Philip Clark he coedited Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson, 2010). With Richard Berman he coedited Whitman’s Men: Walt Whitman’s Calamus Poems Celebrated by Contemporary Photographers (Universe, 1996). He completed the book The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood for its author, the late Robin Hardy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999; Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2002). David’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He teaches in the MFA creative writing program of the City College of New York.

For more information, visit www.davidgroff.com

This poem appeared in Clay and is reprinted by kind permission of Trio House Press. It originally appeared on The Awl on March 14, 2013.

Elizabeth Alexander
When

In the early nineteen-eighties, the black men
were divine, spoke French, had read everything,
made filet mignon with green peppercorn sauce,
listened artfully to boyfriend troubles,
operatically declaimed boyfriend troubles,
had been to Bamako and Bahia,
knew how to clear bad humours from a house,
had been to Baldwin’s villa in St. Paul,
drank espresso with Soyinka and Senghor,
kissed hello on both cheeks, quoted Baraka’s
“Black Art”: “Fuck poems / and they are useful,”
tore up the disco dance floor, were gold-lit,
photographed well, did not smoke, said “Ciao,”

then all the men’s faces were spotted.

Elizabeth Alexander is the author of the memoir Light of the World (Grand Central Publishing, 2015) Her five books of poems include: The Venus Hottentot (University Press of Virginia, 1990; reissued by Graywolf, 2004), Body of Life (Tia Chucha, 1996), Antebellum Dream Book (Graywolf, 2001), American Sublime (Graywolf, 2005), which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and was one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year; and her first young adult collection (co-authored with Marilyn Nelson), Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color (Front Street, 2007), winner of the Connecticut Book Award. Her essay collections include The Black Interior (Graywolf, 2004) and Power and Possibility (University of Michigan, 2007). Her play, “Diva Studies,” was produced at the Yale School of Drama. In 2009, she composed and delivered “Praise Song for the Day” for the inauguration of President Barack Obama. Dr. Alexander has been awarded numerous prizes, fellowships, and other honors. She is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the inaugural Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale.

For more information, visit elizabethalexander.net

This poem originally appeared in American Sublime and is reprinted with the kind permission of Graywolf Press.

Photo: Solomon Ghebreyesus

Jericho Brown
Heartland

This is the book of three
Diseases. Close it, and you’re caught
Running from my life, nearer its end now
That you’ve come so far for a man
Sick in his blood, left lung, and mind.
I think of him mornings
I wake panting like a runner after
His best time. He sweats. He stops
Facing what burned. The house
That graced this open lot was
A red brick. Children played there—
Two boys, their father actually
Came home. Mama cooked
As if she had a right to
The fire in her hands, to the bread I ate
Before I saw doctors who help me
Fool you into believing
I do anything other than the human thing.
We breathe until we don’t.
Every last word is contagious.

Jericho Brown is the author of The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle (and a finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry). His first collection, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Jericho has received the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland. He is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Emory University and lives in Atlanta.

This poem originally appeared in The New Testament and is reprinted with the kind permission of Copper Canyon Press.

www.jerichobrown.com

Robert Siek
Haunted Homo

Gold Bond powder all over the bathroom,
dusting cologne bottles and the Q-tips container
in typical cut-outs from haunted-house furnishings,
dropped cocaine spread airborne on a triple sneeze.
This is late night and early morning, treating rashes,
a red raw groin area; it’s time to fuck the dermatologist,
allow him fifteen minutes past the surface. He’s one of us,
cocksucker and proud of it, in his white medical drag,
all clean-cut and effeminate wearing glasses and penny loafers.
He’s seen the goods when I opened my robe—wine-colored
and out of a plastic bag, the tie fell off; I held it closed.
These things on paper, wrinkled beneath naked.
Legs folded, a secretary in a miniskirt, no drunk
celebrity exiting a front seat. Wishing upon
the brightest lamp, fastened to the wall,
attached to a crane. Please not bites,
bed bugs in the mattress, this city
under attack, these villains hidden
in clothing, couches, even computers.
Let Roscoe the Beagle sniff them out for you.
My fourth HIV test since March, tomorrow afternoon,
that load jerked out over my face, a phlegm-ball-sized
gob on my fresh chapped lip; ghost droppings drip clear,
ectoplasm licked quick or the second time that rough trade
tried to fuck bare, first messing, then entering, slid inside,
a wet centipede shot through a crack in wood paneling.
By candlelight I told him, “Just don’t come in my ass.”
A prescription for a cream with a steroid in it,
and something else to eliminate jock itch,
a wicked case; he’s suggesting powder
for hot days dampening underwear,
half-hour runs on treadmills, multiple squirts
of lube mixing with sweat, friction, loose muscles,
pubic stubble rug-burning my inner thighs, low hangers
smothering my spread crack, séances in the bedroom,
imagined invaders digesting life beneath clean sheets.
Gold Bond clouds when slapped in special places,
fog-forms fall like spirits crossing over, circles
of white on a black dirty towel, hard-to-see
swirls caught by the fan take off
past the window screen, the no’s,
the yes’s, the aging all over me.
Footprints in it,
just another faggot.

Robert Siek is the author of Purpose and Devil Piss (Sibling Rivalry, 2013) and the chapbook Clubbed Kid (New School, 2002). His poems have appeared in journals including Assaracus, Chelsea Station, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, The Good Men Project, The Nervous Breakdown, Mary, Painted Bride Quarterly, and VACZINE, as well as the anthology Between: New Gay Poetry. He lives in Brooklyn and works as a production editor at a large publishing house in Manhattan.

This poem originally appeared in Purpose and Devil Piss and is reprinted with kind permission of Sibling Rivalry Press.