Danez Smith
praise, after

in my most recent future, I am young & beautiful & dead, the bones undressing themselves, the body turned to an idea of the body. or let’s say there is a cure & the parades that follow & I live to see my children & the oceans grow bigger, see my mother lowered into & become the earth. I hope I bury my mother. don’t make her deal with the business of dressing me. It’s been so long since the last time & may she never again. but that’s not what this poem is for. I’m want to talk about blunts & boys, how both burn my lips so, how they call the wings to my shoulders. I want to talk about the impossible impossible of God or the smell of good rain or how joy is the black girl who made me soft collards & peppered fish before she took me into the room & showed me my name. I don’t want to talk about the virus, so to hell with the virus. to hell with blood. to hell with yesterday & the settled dust. to hell with shame & loathing & shame & madness & shame & shame & shame & shame. I’m not ashamed of all my mouth has turned into a river of pearls, for my body & all the false gods worshipped here. my body a godless church, holy for no reason beyond itself. let the bloodcurse be the old testament & each day I am still alive be the new. if there is no savior, I’ll do it myself, I’ll forgive myself of my sins. I forgive. I forgive. I forgive. I forgive. I live. I live.

Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the chapbook hands on ya knees (Penmanship books, 2013). He received a 2014 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from Poetry Magazine & The Poetry Foundation as well as fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, Cave Canem, VONA, & elsewhere. Danez won the 2014 Reading Series Contest sponsored by The Paris-American and was featured in The Academy of American Poets’ Emerging Poets Series by Patricia Smith. Danez is a founding member of the multi-genre, multicultural Dark Noise Collective. His work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kinfolks & elsewhere.

This poem originally appeared in Assaracus, Issue 16.

Joseph Osmundson
from Capsid, A Love Song

I. Fusion

Membranes meet, my outside and yours. My cell is an ocean, a wide fluid mosaic; your particle, a weather balloon, round, packed with thorns and spikes. You bounce off me, the two of us still distinct, the two of us still separate. Our membranes aren’t enough, mine and yours; we need to find each other. A receptor. A mate.

Membranes repel, but you know that. It takes work to make two things into one, to dump your contents into my ocean. Your proteins meet mine, charges matching, fitting like a glove. Then everything starts to change. You change. Fusion requires work.

But you do the work, don’t you? Swing yourself open, stick your thorns and spikes into me for good. One spike, gp120, unfurls another, gp41. You pull us close, membranes touching, your outside and my outside closer now and closer now, and finally you are more than bound. We are two halves, almost one. You wait, you wait. Our membranes shimmer into onto another. My ocean, your balloon, and I am open to you, I am open and wider and wider, the work is done, all downhill from here.

And you release it, your ordered capsid, your self-assembled self. You release it into me.

Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer from rural Washington State. His writing has been published on Gawker, Salon, The Rumpus, and The Feminist Wire, where he is an Associate Editor, among other publications. He has taught Biochemistry and Biophysics at Vassar College and The New School, and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Cancer Biology at New York University. Find him on Twitter @reluctantlyjoe or at josephosmundson.com.

This piece originally appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, March 23rd, 2015.

Eileen R. Tabios
My Neighbor
(1996, New York City)

In the narrow elevator we shared
his friend wore a baseball cap with oversized brim
and held a bouquet of orange-spotted lilies
as a shield between us.
I smiled at the waxy blooms, fragrant
and opulent amidst courtiers of gnarled tree limbs and grass
preening like tall models in velvet coats.

Yet,
his friend couldn’t help himself—
like a cabdriver with his first ride
after hours of searching empty streets
he lifted his face to speak.
Tremulously, he offered over their perfume,
“They are lovely, aren’t they?”

I responded with a direct look into his eyes
where irises cracked to illuminate
the luster of emerald veins seeking their way to surface.
Then, not hiding the slide of my gaze
from one dime-shaped, pitted mark to another,
I replied, holding my breath
in prayer against saying the wrong thing,
“Yes … and rare. I’ve never seen such flowers like these.”

His grin pushed away the gloom
of a spent light bulb
hovering in the dimness we shared.
After the doors opened to his destination,
I enjoyed the slight swagger in his steps,
the loss of trepidation there.

I hoped
he would speak of me
to his friend, become a stranger to me
after neighborly greetings in elevator rides long ago.
I hoped he would speak
of the admirer nearby
who understood the importance of a gift
unforgettable because it can never be
replicated.

Eileen R. Tabios has authored collections of poetry, essays, fiction and experimental (auto)biographies. She has also edited or conceptualized ten anthologies of poetry and fiction. Her 2015 books include the biography AGAINST MISANTHROPY: A Life in Poetry and two poetry collections, I FORGOT LIGHT BURNS and INVENT(ST)ORY: Selected List Poems and New. More information is available at eileenrtabios.com.

This poem originally appeared in Golden Apple Press and the chapbook After the Egyptians Determined The Shape of the World is a Circle (Pometaphysics Publishing, Maryland, 1996).

Steven Cordova
Does It Hurt to Have “It”? 

A few days into my last trip home
and my mother steadies her gaze
on whatever it is she has in hand—
a kitchen utensil, a balled-up tissue.

“Does it hurt to have it?” she sniffs,
“it” of course referring to that certain
latter-day deficiency of the immune
system which the rest of us toss off

with an acronym. In the moment,
however, I am foolish and I don’t realize
just how deep the questions cuts,
so I breathe my heaviest sigh

of big-city condescension and say,
“No, mother. Of course not.”
A few days into my last trip home
and if only I could convince my mother

I’m all right, then maybe, just this once,
I’d tell the woman the truth: confess to having
other things, things which hurt more. And maybe,
just this once, we’d get philosophical, my mother

and I, and we’d postulate that having survived survival,
we only get more survival to have to survive.

Steven Cordova is the author of the poetry collection Long Distance (Bilingual University Press, 2010). He won the 2012 International Reginald Shepherd Memorial Poetry Prize and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

This poem originally appeared in Knockout Literary Magazine Issue 5, Fall 2014.

Risa Denenberg
Three Poems for Jon Marshall Greenberg (1956-1993)

Rummaging the Sacristy

So many candles — white fat columns,
red 7-day burners in tall glass jars
illuminating Christian martyrs, ornate
miniature picture frames sheathing
holy men; a rosary garden; a statue

of Laughing Buddha.

And here is Shiva — god of death
with four arms, moon hair, a third eye—
who drank a draught of poison from the sea
to save the world from harm.

The mirthful Buddha left no writings.
Shiva could not swallow
all the body fluids you drowned in.

I should never have read your journals.

Last Rites

Unconscious, he had a large following.
Three days he lay in the state called coma,
as dog-tired mourners passed in and out
of the room. He gestured towards heaven

and grabbed at his catheter while friends
came and went, eating Thai takeout
and chattering carelessly.

The woman who was soon to become
my ex-lover was solemnly watching our life
shatter around that hospital bed.

When his parents entered the room,
we had already finished the first
of several bottles of scotch, as he lay
in the state of the just-dead.

Angels and Pigeons

At first he heard angels
in the mornings when pigeons stirred,
purling and flapping in the air shaft.

Later there were two crypts.
He had a foot in each.

Cryptosporidium—
a waterborne protozoon
spread by rimming, a stolen pleasure,
and then, years of diarrhea.
A phrase that deserves repeating,
to sink in entirely—he suffered
profuse diarrhea for years.

The only salve
was soothing the voracious appetite
left in its wake.
Eating became a sacrament.

Cryptococcus—
a fungus that breeds on offal
tossed 
on the street. Swallowed by pigeons,
released in droppings, mingled with dirt
that settles in air shafts, risen as fairy-dust
when wings flutter.

Inhaled fungus entered his lungs, surged
through bloodstream, settled in brain.
I’m losing this battle to pigeons, he said.

When the headaches came, the sign
was two fingers tapping aside his temple.
The symptom was projectile vomiting,
and later, seizures.

The remedy was dreadful. For months,
there were spinal taps every week.
Then one morning he said,
I haven’t heard angels all week.

Risa Denenberg is the author of Whirlwind @ Lesbos (Headmistress Press, 2016), In My Exam Room (The Lives You Touch Publications, 2014) and blinded by clouds (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014) She is a nurse practitioner working in HIV/AIDS care and end-of-life care. Risa is a moderator at The Gazebo, an online poetry board; reviews poetry for the American Journal of Nursing; and is an editor at Headmistress Press, a publisher of lesbian poetry. She lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington State.

These poems originally appeared in Mudlark Flash No. 11 (2001).

Joan Larkin
In Your Side-Railed Bed, Faces

brushed late nights on paper,
mouth-knots, dark inkwash eyes

staring into the abyss.
World taped to the wall

of your next-to-last room.
After they moved you, no

more making. Your face swollen
and no sign you saw me

wearing the fright mask.
Grief, or my face under it.

Joan Larkin’s most recent collection is Blue Hanuman (Hanging Loose Press, 2014). Her book My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2007) received the Publishing Triangle’s 2008 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Larkin is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer in Residence at Smith College. Recent honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship.

This poem originally appeared in the collection Blue Hanuman (Hanging Loose Press, 2014).

L. Lamar Wilson
Family Reunion, 1993

When I am asked whose tears these are, I always blame the moon.—Lucille Clifton

I give my cousin my hand & think
of the year before, how he’d held me aloft,

his bicep pulsing against the weight
of my bones & adoration. Can I get it

by touching him? I wonder but don’t speak,
don’t let go until his slick flesh kisses

the commode, then trace curlicues & stars
into my stucco canvas amid his grunts & sighs,

stare at the moon I’ve made there as full of itself
as the one that had shone on us at the reunion,

our mothers in orbit around us in their own groove
with Frankie Beverly. I’m flying! I had beamed

at myself, gilded in his tooth: the only
shimmering thing in this dark, damp silence.

L. Lamar Wilson is author of Sacrilegion (2013), winner of the Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series and finalist for the Thom Gunn Poetry Award, and co-author of Prime: Poetry and Conversation (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014), with the Phantastique Five. His poems and scholarly essays have appeared in African American Review, Black Gay Genius (2014), Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, jubilat, Muzzle, Obsidian, The 100 Best African American Poems (2010), Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (2015), Rattle, Vinyl and elsewhere. Lamar, a visiting assistant professor at Davidson College, holds a BS in newspaper journalism from Florida A&M University and an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Tech and is completing a doctorate in African American and multiethnic American poetics at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

This poem appeared in Sacrilegion.

Sarah Sarai
Practical

Let me tell you about my friend
Sanderson. Well he’s dead,
but what’re you gonna do – the first ones died
in that Rapture of malfunctioned immunity.
My early dead read histories of women
his last six months.

You know how it is when you stand still in
Spring because a breeze is
teasing the green of light from trees?
Sarah. Sanderson said to me.
I admit I get real emotional. Sarah.
Let the weather support you.

What is it about white people?
A chunk missing here and there.
Don’t run your panties through
a hand-crank wringer.
Delicates need a special cycle and
color is just a metaphor.

In the great Pacific Northwest, sky
is every type of blanket shaken over you
every two hours. Sanderson,
in the way of the dead, goes on retreats
there in the still early stage of whatever-
itisthatcomesnextwhichoughtnottobesuch-
afocusofmine as that here and now, this this,
their perfumed spring, those bills, gunshots,
a certificate of appreciation gotten kinda dusty
in its dime store frame – all enough diverting.

Oh yeah, did I mention?
He also said I don’t understand

why all the women don’t kill all the men.

So it took years for me to figure it out.
Of course I’m damaged and needing more from
my icon of grace on what to allow to support me.

Sarah Sarai

Sarah Sarai lives in New York. Her poems have been published in Ascent, Yew, Thrush, Boston Review, Posit, PANK, and others. Her collection, The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX), is available from Small Press Distribution.

This poem appeared in Main Street Rag in Spring 2008.

Merrill Cole
How the Nightingales Lost Their Hands

I was going to tell you the story of a friend who died, but he was not my friend. He
wanted to write it in such a way that the grief was your own, your hand wiping his
forehead with the soiled handkerchief, your tears the real ones.

He was terrified the lost message was not truly lost, a nightmare refusing to fade at the
moment of waking. It was as if he had become human.

You were telling him a story about how the nightingales lost their hands. You said, peace
is only the silence between statues. I said, no, peace is the flag of surrender, the place
where they buried their dead.

It’s not fair to say he found them. You always knew what they were hiding, but you had
to let someone else say it. Quite dirty, but you could see through.

The open windows, bright as oblivion. There was nothing more to cry about. He was
going to tell you the story of the day I lost my voice. I felt no grief, because the
nightmare ended.

It was as if you had died, your humanity the real one. There was nothing more to write
about. I wanted to hold him, but I found I had no hands.

Merrill Cole teaches literature, queer studies, and creative writing at Western Illinois University.

The poem appeared in Poetic Diversity, vol. 10, no. 1 (April 2013).

Julene T. Weaver
Sexual Revolution

In the mirror
it is the body she remembers
sexy as S and I and N
it is the fucking she remembers
full fledged
hot and bothered
screaming orgasms
S and I and N
that will never
come again

In the mirror
the body is constrained
now   scared
there is no more
free love no more
S and I and N
free as the ‘60s
love revolution and
this is s and a and d
that reflects back
in her mirror

This body of love
that remembers
twisting hips
Amazon breasts
easy as S and I and N
into stray palms

The price paid
twofold in this new
world after the free
reign fledged orgasms
we remember   changed
world   condoms
AIDS all a sign of
the future that came

Julene Tripp Weaver is the author of No Father Can Save Her (Plain View Press) and the chapbook An AIDS Case Manager Wails Her Blues (Finishing Line Press). A former New Yorker, Julene now lives in Seattle where she is a psychotherapist. 
@trippweavepoet | www.julenetrippweaver.com

This poem was previously published in Gertrude 14 and in Ghost Town Poetry Anthology, Volume 2, 2004 – 2014.