Michael Carosone
This Is How You Teach AIDS Literature

This is how you teach AIDS literature
to a freshman seminar class
at New Jersey City University

You cry on the train
as you choose which AIDS poems to teach
the commute from Manhattan to Jersey City is a long one
so you cry a lot

You cry in the classroom
as you screen AIDS documentaries and films
it’s a three-hour class
so you cry a lot

You cry on your ride back home
as you read your students’ response papers and essays
you assign something each week
so you cry a lot

Even before the semester begins
as you prepare what to teach
you cry for days

And after the semester ends
as you read the thank-you emails from your students
you cry for hours

And throughout the semester
while you sleep and dream
you cry each night
as you think about what the world would be like
if Paul and Vito were still alive

So this is how you teach AIDS literature
you cry
and you cry
and you cry

Michael Carosone is the editor, with Joseph LoGiudice, of the anthology Our Naked Lives: Essays from Gay Italian American Men (Bordighera Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in Gay City Volume 1, Gay City Volume 2, Gay City Volume 3, Avanti Popolo: Italian-American Writers Sail Beyond Columbus, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Out of Sequence: The Sonnets Remixed, The Good Men Project, Positive Lite, and New Verse News. His essays have appeared in in White Crane, Strangers to These Shores, and various anthologies. His articles have appeared in Gay City News and The Huffington Post. He was awarded the Editors’ Poetry Prize for his work in Gay City Volume 2. He lives in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan with his partner, Joseph LoGiudice. For more information on Michael, please visit michaelcarosone.net.

This poem originally appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Vol. 21, Issue 4 (July/August 2014).

Sophie Cabot Black
Among the Divided Lilies

(ICU Waiting Room, New York 1984)

I
Too late, I saw the body;
I compared. Either unlucky
Or clumsy with desire it lies
Wheeled along the wall, ready
To be sent for. An arrow
Elaborates the way out. Some angel
Stayed only as long as the life
Was solvable. Not so much
Waiting as listening, not so much
Witness as spy, I sit on blue
Upholstery and read the pamphlet
Again. Key points have been marked with
Stars: honesty, night sweats, patches that look
Like bruises. Such is the new precision.

II
One by one the houses
Close their doors: too risky.
I hold nothing against this holiness
But the snake of an old wound.
Whatever sickness exists
Is now in the hands of others:
Confirmed and public. There is the noise
Of people who hear nothing
But the latest results as they walk
Back into their life. And what is
Leftover survives the long reproach
Of new blood laddering through veins—
It becomes a wise wound, a chalk circle,
Bulls-eye. Oasis, a place where gathering begins.

III
How simply the cathedral turns
Inside out: here’s the steeple
But no door through which
The body comfortably fits.
Those left behind are busy
Guarding immunity
In a locked chest. They believe this
As their lifework. Be careful what you do
Unto others, gloves and masks upon
Entering. Cover the head, kneel
In the aisle, never with a short skirt
Or shoulders bared. Remove jewelry
And watch for blood, any sign of blood.
It is a river that refuses to be easy.

IV
The face of the doctor
Learns to turn into a field
Of gray rock. It has seen too much:
No more shame in hesitating
Against what disappears. Yet his hands
Of repair continue their science
And he will send the white
Messenger with a tricky blur
Of either paradise or grief
To the bone. Stiff plastic curtains
Groan back into place and weary
Promises drip toward random dread. Do not
Move fast. Do not let yourself grow angry.
If you stay still long enough someone will find you.

V
A day will happen
When I can no longer visit;
From nowhere I will wake up
Finished with vigilance
And go through each room
To make sure each face
Does not look like mine.
Against these blank walls,
Among the divided lilies,
Beside the high-fidelity
Television, I will stop asking
The question and head down
The illuminated stairs, making a way back
To Arrivals and the suddenness of traffic.

Sophie Cabot Black is the author of three poetry collections. The Misunderstanding of Nature (Graywolf, 1994) received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. The Descent (Graywolf, 2004) received the 2005 Connecticut Book Award and was subsequently chosen as a hot pick on MSNBC’s program Topic A With Tina Brown. The Exchange (Graywolf, 2013) was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Sophie has received the Grolier Poetry Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s John Masefield Memorial Award as well as fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. She lives in New York City and Wilton, Connecticut, and teaches at Columbia University.

This poem originally appeared in The Misunderstanding of Nature and is reprinted with the kind permission of Graywolf Press.

Guillermo Filice Castro
Little Door

“…In praise of the anus because it’s the one truly universal sexual organ.”
—Paul B. Preciado

“Just the tip” he cooed

*
Ass is funny but not for play

Oh please what did I know?

*
Boy of twenty-five on top
of me aged thirteen

doctor to my patient in need of “vaccine”

*
(In the beginning
the clothes stayed on)

*
My experience on the matter? Mother inserting
the first of what seemed
a string of suppositories

as she held me
spread-eagled across her knees

You might say I took a bullet for her

*
It’s not macho to touch another man

Men wait outside the door
till the womanly cry is gone

Oh please

*
(In the beginning
was fire
nothing but fire
nothing but)

*
Hairiness peeked through a vertical
rip in his boxers
my hand swatted at the waistband
(a fetching shade of chartreuse)

We both let out a whimper

*
The boy idled for a beat and pushed

*
I had circled him on my bike
and blurted

“Would you allow me
to see your thing?”

He stopped so did my heart

*
At the park a sign warned
“The grass is recovering
after a major event”

*
(Here lies the hole
he force-fed a bit
without the benefit of saliva)

*
After fetching butter
from the fridge
he began to chant

Door needs grease!
Door needs grease!

*
Henceforth I’d be known
as “Little Door”

*
Later on the bus
the misheard announcement
Exit through the weird door

*
(The beginning
was the hinge)

*
How to exit anyone’s bed?
As you would enter them:

Tipping on grace

Guillermo Filice Castro is the author of Agua, Fuego (Finishing Line, 2015). His poems have appeared in Assaracus, Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, Court Green, The Bellevue Literary Review, Ducts, LaFovea, Quarterly West, and more, as well as in the anthologies Rabbit Ears (New York Quarterly Press, 2015), Flicker and Spark (Lowbrow, 2013), Divining Divas (Lethe, 2012), My Diva (University of Wisconsin, 2009), Saints of Hysteria (Soft Skull, 2007), and others. His translations of poems by Olga Orozco, in collaboration with Ron Drummond, appear in Guernica, Terra Incognita, U.S. Latino Review, and Visions. His manuscript was a finalist for the 2012 Andrés Montoya Prize. He received the 2013 Emerge-Surface-Be fellowship from the Poetry Project. Guillermo lives in New York City.

This poem originally appeared in Court Green #10 (2013).

Michael Montlack
Black Book

At the end of the 80s,
he threw away his phone book;
everyone in it was dead.

Now strolling Christopher Street
to brunch and therapy,
he gazes into familiar doorwells,
remembering leaning figures, handlebar mustaches
curling, like fingers through denim belt loops:
those five o’clock shadows in the shadows.

He’s 66, paunchy and gray
but they still wink at him from the grave:
cool invitations
to the piers, the truckyard,
back to their place.

Crossing the cobblestones,
he’s still too stunned to be amazed
by all those faded one-nighters
lined up and waiting
for him to come.

Michael Montlack is the author of Cool Limbo (NYQ Books, 2011) and the editor of My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), a finalist for the 2010 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Anthology. His work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Barrow Street, Mudfish, The Cortland Review and Assaracus, among other journals and anthologies. He lives and teaches in New York City and has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ucross, Lambda Literary Foundation, and Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus in Germany.

This poem appeared previously in the journal A&U: Art & Understanding and the anthology Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 (Gival Press, 2009), edited by Robert L. Giron.

Charlie Bondhus
Bird

Wild birds fly into a man’s home;
the resident will soon depart.
—Jia Yi

The last Sunday in autumn brings snow
which sticks only to the cars, spreading

a cataract-thin scrim across the windshields.
From beneath lumped covers, you claim to hear it

beating the window,
sounding, you say

like hummingbird wings,
slowed to a heartbeat.

Your voice mimics the wind,
emphasizing sibilance and plosive, tripping

over the slight demands
of nasals and fricatives.

The rambling sheets and strewn pillows
conceal you, suggesting an unpersoned bed,

something to haunt me
as I cook breakfast.

Head on paws, Akiba watches
me pouring the orange juice, brewing coffee,

cracking eggs and frying bacon
in the black pan, where the brightly-colored

yolks seem to be stating the glib truism
that there is beauty in death.

When you enter the kitchen,
your cheek is marked

with a small, purple half-moon.
My breath becomes like the tearing of paper.

You stopped taking them, I say.
You sigh, and in so doing, present

an illusion of mastery,
the bruise-colored shape

shrinking, growing, twisting
as if beholden

to the puppetry
of the living body.

I’m sure there’ll be a poem, you deflect,
parceling your bitterness,

but what rhymes with sarcoma?
We sit, angry men sharing a meal,

our eyes circling the dusty
centerpiece, the golden toast,

the condiments gleaming
in their cut-glass bowls, when

suddenly, there’s a bird,
one of the small, brown ones

(a sparrow?) skipping tentatively
across the smooth laminate.

How did it get in?
Akiba does not bark.

More interested than threatened
he approaches, sniffs. The bird flutters

from floor to countertop, seemingly
the least concerned

of the four living beings in the room.
It pecks a crumb, regards us

with one black, convex eye
then coasts from countertop

to kitchen sink. The flue,
I blurt, cold last night.

You stand, give chase, waving
your hands as if casting a spell, and

now Akiba begins to bark.
I watch you, dog, and bird bolt

in a haphazard parade
through the living room

and out to the foyer, where you open
the door, letting in snowflakes,

until our visitor disappears
into the gray-white morning.

The dog sits on the carpet beside you,
in the spot worn thin

by years of booted feet.
Leaving the door open,

you stand, peering
at the moist, dying grass,

the frost-tipped bushes,
the bundled and low-slung sky,

while over your shoulder I spy
in the shadow of the pine,

some four-legged, purple mass,
limping and feral,

sniffing the earth, scavenging
the last scraps of autumn.

Charlie Bondhus is the author of All the Heat We Could Carry (2013), winner the 2013 Main Street Rag Award and the Publishing Triangle’s 2014 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work appears in numerous journals, including Poetry, The Gay & Lesbian Review, CounterPunch, The Alabama Literary Review, and Midwest Quarterly. He is the poetry editor at The Good Men Project.

Jason Schneiderman
Crown

I
God loves an expiration date
and lord knows we’ve got ours —

except that you’re winning — Late
in the game, like those flowers

we thought I’d killed, but came
back with water; one last lame

leaf holding out hope. I want to believe
that you will live because to grieve

is not my lot, but I know
that it has nothing to do with me

and that just as Orpheus lost Eurydice,
God could make me watch you go.

Tell me, love, whom to thank for protease inhibitors.
Nothing rhymes with protease inhibitors.

II
Nothing rhymes with protease inhibitors?
And we thought I’d unlearned self pity,
That the gentle jigsaw contours
of our interlocking bodies,
had smoothed out the wrinkles of my psyche.
No such luck. Old habits are hardy
And your love can’t fix me.
But there I am, back to pity.

Love, I’m not a huge fan of honesty,
because the truth is always
a problem—I’ve believed in a way
and I’ve believed in facts, and nothing.
And here’s a fact, that’s useless and true:
I was fourteen years old when he was fucking you.

III, 1990
I’m fourteen years old and he’s fucking you.
You’re in love enough to take it raw, and I’m
still wearing t-shirts over turtle-necks. It’s true
that the nature of tragedies is to happen at the time
you least expect it. Like Oedipus when he killed
his father, or the way you forget to pay a bill
and you get into debt. The day was good
but the results are bad. The sex was good,
right? He had a big cock, right? Tony
had a big cock and he didn’t love you and he said
he was negative and you believed him, and he’s dead,
and even if I could get back to 1990
and say, wait, please, just wait for me, I’m coming,
it wouldn’t have made a difference. There was nothing
I could do. Nothing.

IV
There was nothing I could do. Nothing.
And so what? Who am I to complain,
I, who missed the worst, who can bring
no greater complaint than that I can
never love you skin to skin. I have never
seen anyone die, only hazily remember
cops covering gay prides parades with
gloves and masks. I was nine and a half
when Ryan White went back to class.
I’ve never lived without this as a fear;
never not known better. Love, it’s over
and it’s not—I will make your past my past,
and my fight. Just you remember this part:
Until the day you die, I get your heart.

V
When you die, I get your heart
Because I need a piece of you
That’s the way it was when you
Were alive—not a memory or a photograph
But a part that I can hold
In a box, that I can keep in the bed
And hold while I sleep.
Love, I love all of you—
The cobblestone of your acne scarred back,
The ring of stomach fat you hate,
There is nothing I can’t embrace,
Nothing I won’t miss or remember.
All things come to those who wait:
God loves an expiration date.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of Sublimation Point (2004), a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books, and Striking Surface (2010), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press. His poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House, among other journals and anthologies. Jason has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2004, and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in 2011. He is poetry editor of the Bellevue Literary Review and associate editor at Painted Bride Quarterly. Jason is an assistant professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York.

This poem appeared in Sublimation Point (Four Way, 2004) and is reprinted with permission of Four Way Books. © 2004. All rights reserved.

Phillis Levin
What the Intern Saw

I
He saw a face swollen beyond ugliness
Of one who just a year ago
Was Adonis
Practicing routines of rapture:

A boy who could appear
To dodge the touch of time,
Immortal or immune—
A patient in a gown,
Almost gone.

II
In the beautiful school of medicine
He read about human suffering,
An unendurable drama
Until the screen of anaesthesia
And penicillin’s manna.

But now, in myriad sheets
Of storefront glass refracting evening’s
Razor blue, in a land of the freely
Estranged from the dead, he meets
That face and fear seizes his body.

III
His feet have carried him to bed.
He thinks he must be getting old
To so revise
His nature and his plan.

He shuts his eyes
And in his sleep he sees a gleaming bar,
The shore of pain.
It isn’t far.
People live there.

Phillis Levin is the author of Temples and Fields (The University of Georgia Press, 1988), The Afterimage (Copper Beech Press, 1995), Mercury (Penguin, 2001), and May Day (Penguin, 2008). She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet (2001). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Grand Street, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Nation, Agni, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Literary Imagination, The Kenyon Review, PN Review, and Poetry London, among other journals and anthologies. Phillis’s poems were included in The Best American Poetry in the 1989, 1998, and 2009 editions. She is professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Hofstra University. Her fifth collection, Mr. Memory & Other Poems, is forthcoming from Penguin in spring 2016.

This poem appeared in Temples and Fields (1988) and is reprinted with the permission of The University of Georgia Press.

Photo: Sheila McKinnon

Patrick Donnelly
Consummatum Est

With the certainty theologians claim
for the salvation worked by Christ—
effects not yet seen,
but the end not in doubt—
some women look back and know
the exact moment they conceived.

He brought me home from the baths
and fed me takeout Chinese. I remember
succulent little bits of egg in rice,
creamy sherbet right out of the carton.
Yes—certainly I felt it—and broke
into a sweat, the exact moment
the charge leapt from him to me.

Was it two years later his best friend called—
could I use his clothes, his shoes, his king-size bed?

Patrick Donnelly is the author of The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press) and Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012). With Stephen D. Miller, Donnelly is co-translator of the 141 Japanese poems in The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013). In 2013, Donnelly received a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program award to fund a 3-month residency in Japan during 2014. Donnelly lives in South Deerfield, Massachusetts with his spouse Stephen D. Miller.

www.patrickdonnellypoems.com

This poem originally appeared in The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003).

Jennifer Michael Hecht
Two At A Time

Remember the first house you can remember,
how the stairway hung from nowhere,
unconnected to the floor from which you were
bounding away and floating free from the landing
to which you were flinging yourself, the torque of your perfect legs
projecting you towards your room or the room
you shared; what if you knew now
what went through your mind, not all the time
of your childhood, but just then,
just a script
of your mind while on those stairs, each time, what thoughts
would therein be recorded beyond a steady refrain of
two-at-a-time, two-at-a-time? What will you wonder
thirty years from now when all of this has the same unconnectedness,
when the office where you work will hang
in the air of memory without hinges,
without crosswalks, what litany of concern, what
delicate structure of related thoughts
will you wish you could recall, could reassemble,
thirty years from now,
when all the cars today on Broadway
are vintage cars, and we, the populace of the present,
glow out our individual and collective ignorance
of some particular future event, the innocence of which
makes us shimmer when photographed as if, if you
could only speak to us, we could grant you some wish,
and whisper what it was to live before.

Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet, intellectual historian, and commentator. She has three books of poetry, including her recent Who Said (Copper Canyon, 2013) and four books of history and philosophy, including the bestseller, Doubt (HarperOne, 2004), a history of unbelief; and most recently Stay (Yale, 2013), a history of suicide and an argument against it. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, Poetry, and The New Yorker.

This poem originally appeared in The Next Ancient World (Tupelo, 2001)

Daniel Nester

Four poems from God Save My Queen II

One Vision

One joy one rock one fight one song one noun one shirt one it one shove one skin one him one breath one beard one cat one purr one goose one step one Concorde one Viking one Hickman one bloodstream one cancer one monkey one German.

One chest steam one hairline one beef stew one buck tooth one mustache one bedside one mansion one front gate one year off one jumpsuit one cokehead one koi pond one dance move one joyride one hand held one rota one gay plague.

One anthem one godsend one gasp one black bag one vision.

Who Wants To Live Forever

July 1986. Before Queen’s concert at Budapest’s Nepstadion, Freddie hosts Roger’s 37th birthday in his presidential suite. A flaming cake with drummer boy figurine on top. Laughs, claps. [VO:] And interview-shy Mercury faces the Hungarian cameras.

Reporter: “So is this zee beginning of your friendship weez Budapest? Weel eet last long—as long as Queen weel last?” Freddie stops smiling, mumbles to Phoebe off-mike, sways his champagne flute. He doesn’t want to talk. He points his cigarette.

“If I’m still alive, I will come back.” Freddie trips over cables, returns to the party.

Forever

In the Live at Wembley Stadium DVD from 1986, Freddie mentions onstage that, contrary to reports, “a certain band called Queen” is not breaking up. “They’re talking outta here,” he says, pointing to his ass. “We’ll be together until we fucking well die.”

In the DVD commentary from 2003, Brian says there was another level to what he was saying that’s all too clear now. This dying bit was going to happen sooner rather than later. How did he keep his secret so long? Five years?

The colors of Freddie’s stage outfit pop onstage, utterly nonsexual for the first time.

Made In Heaven

So many debates over Freddie’s estate. According to David Minns and David Evans, it was £8,649,940, excluding publishing money. That was supposedly less than expected. And then there was Freddie’s house, the people in it.

Jim Hutton, Joe Fanelli, and “Phoebe” Freestone, the working rota of Freddie’s caretakers in his last years, were all evicted from Garden Lodge three months after the funeral to make way for Mary Austin, Freddie’s former girlfriend, as sole occupant.

“Never had one garden seen so much dying.”

Note: The last line comes from a passage in a 1997 biography of Freddie Mercury. “It was a lovely, bright sunny day [in 1979] and the garden shrubs, including the camellia bushes, were in full bloom. Kenny [Everett] … shot mad zany footage of us, acting out a silly take-off of Greta Garbo playing the dying Margaret Gautier in La Dame aux Camellias [actually Camille (George Cukor, 1936)]. Never had one garden seen so much dying. Or, so we might have been forgiven then for thinking. Now, as I write, only half of our number that happy afternoon are still, to my knowledge, alive. We are indeed a shrinking band of witnesses.”—Freddie Mercury: The Real Life (Antaeus, 1997), David Evans and David Minns, p. 176.

Daniel Nester is the author most recently of Shader: 99 Notes on Car Washes, Making Out in Church, Grief, and Other Unlearnable Subjects (99: The Press, 2015). Previous books include How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull, 2010), God Save My Queen I and II (Soft Skull, 2003 and 2004), and The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2014), which he edited. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Morning News, The Rumpus, Best American Poetry, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, and Now Write! Nonfiction. He is an associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York.

These poems originally appeared in God Save My Queen II (Soft Skull, 2004).