Noah Mendez
Negative

ass held high like a big red target
never asked if i’m clean just
grabbed hips and
slipped in like my holes were
made to be filled just like that
so easily with no bloodshed
and no resistance
like a takeover i never
got to prepare for
i am asked if it
feels good
if i
am coming soon
i am never asked if
i feel safe

Noah Mendez is a 17 year old trans man whose poems have appeared in the Rising Phoenix Review and Brouhaha Magazine. Noah was a 2016 Urban Word Poet Finalist and recently received an honorable mention for a poem contest through City College. His work can be found at emergincy.tumblr.com

This poem is not previously published.

Margaret McCarthy
Fever Dream: Sick in a Foreign Country

Desire unfurls
and she finds herself in undiscovered territory.
In her dream she spots its banner in the distance;

dream-like, it beckons her and dream-like, she follows.
Slowly, it waves her to its province, a country
whose weather seems bizarre to her;

she has never felt rain this warm.
It pelts her in brief, violent storms,
soaks her and departs; then

a too-large sun
drugs her with its monumental heat.
She stumbles over the lush, languid vine growing

everywhere, a native type she can’t identify
that casually,
but surely wraps itself around all in its way;

it entwines the whole world to itself.
She reaches for the jewel-like, silken-petaled
bloom it harbors,

it shrinks and withdraws at her touch.
Confusion settles on her like humid air
and a sense of some boundary being lost.

Soon, she begins to feel strange;
she tells herself, Ignore it—
it will pass when you’re acclimated here.

But she is wrong, so wrong.
There is no adjusting to this climate,
the dense, hot-house air

that smothers with the perfume of odd flowers,
this overwhelming vista that withholds itself
while it consumes.

Then, one day, where her heart should be,
she discovers in its place
a bud,

closed, hard and jewel-like.
And then she knows: this landscape grows inside her.
She cannot remember the moment of penetration.

Once she had veins and blood, but now
there is the vine and its stranglehold;
it entwines the whole world to itself.

Infected, exhausted in this uninhabited place,
she sickens.
Her limbs begin to feel heavy,

her whole body feels as if it’s underwater.
Drowning
she cannot drink

eaten up
she cannot eat.
She sleeps and sleeps,

weeps and sweats.
A fever that no water will abate
wastes her,

racks her like the peculiar, maddening storms of this place,
to leave her trembling, strung out and broken off
like a snapped branch.

In her delirium, she is directionless as mercury;
she alternately burns and freezes.
She tries to concentrate.

She draws a map of all that she remembers of this place
and puts this on the wall near her bed;
she studies it and studies—

convinced it will tell her where she is.
But she is lost, so lost.
The map becomes a face, an abstract portrait

with the features of some flawless lover—
the eyes, gems; the skin, a flower;
a picture of every wish

denied.
Obsession frames it, this work of art,
that sees the world only in its own terms.

Priceless, it, too, owns her,
the one picture she can never part with;
her own body a husk by now, her own face a shell.

She refers to it again and again,
this masterpiece.
She waits

and waits for its sphinx-like mouth to speak
she listens and listens

Margaret McCarthy is the author of Notebooks from Mystery School (Finishing Line Press, 2015), a finalist for their New Women’s Voices Award. McCarthy’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines, journals and anthologies including The Pagan Muse:Poems of Ritual and Inspiration (Citadel, 2003), Working Papers in Irish Studies, Gargoyle Magazine, Shaking Like A Mountain, Poetry New Zealand, and California State Poetry Society Quarterly, among others. Margaret works as a photographer in New York City. She publishes an electronic broadside, A Vision and a Verse, combining her imagery and poetry.

This poem appeared in Working Papers in Irish Studies.

Oz Hardwick
Two Poems

Reverberation

Do not flinch from the day’s whisper,
the words on the page, the reverberation
of air. Grip them tight in prickling palms
until your eyes weep flowers.

For there are those who would steal names,
wind dead artists in neat flags
in sterile rooms that none may enter.
Draw your pen from stone. Write the day.

Fall

In a castle open to the stars,
a girl, neither princess nor servant,
sews a coat of leaves, red and gold,
threaded with earthscent, cries of crows.

She can’t remember why, but knows
that, come morning, she will wrap herself close
in its moist rustling, crown her locks with frost,
and step her shadow through chestnut lanes.

Oz Hardwick is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The Ringmaster’s Apprentice (Valley Press, 2014), along with a collaborative volume with Amina Alyal, Close as Second Skins (Indigo Dreams, 2015), which was shortlisted in the Best Collaborative Work category for the 2015 Saboteur Awards. Oz lives in North Yorkshire, UK, where he teaches creative writing at at Leeds Trinity University.

These poems are not previously published.

M. Robin Cook
A Cycle of Memories

All I Did See

All I didn’t see,
all I discovered, speaking
about illness, telling stories
about individuals daring sickness,
about iconic disease, sending
anyone in deep—savage,
arrogant, ineffable, daunting sycophant.
All it did, seething
as I did, shitting
as it did slither,
as it did slough
along its dread, slow,
antisocially insistent damnable sentimental
acuitās, I didn’t see.
And I discovered. See?
He is very
S.I.C.K.

Goodbye Columbus, 1985

After a little while we stopped asking
where so and so went—we knew
that like an empty scabbard, he’d gone coming

from the baths like gas chambers, steaming—
once bright, erotic playgrounds, electric blue—
by odor of the health department, closing.

He’d left in a rush, bottle-stop gleaming,
in a wisp and a while, we knew that he knew
all along. The Watchtower, blue blotches, free reading

today at the clinic! These strange glyphs we’ll be deciphering.
Bring a friend. If there were to be a test, we’d test him, too.
But hurry, we’re not lingering; you’d best be scurrying.

We’ve a long and frigid winter’s longing
for just icily moving, glacier-slow, you
along darling.

Abundance

An entourage of embedded acronyms
adorned the lives inside our rainbow.
At its furthest end there was no gold,
just the icy and cum-drenched, the blood-addled,
copious bounty of AIDS,
always it seemed full blown
in those days—
those early
last days.

M Robin Cook writes: I am a transwoman, 54 years young. I write fiction, poetry, and the occasional essay; I draw and make music. I am interested in doing my small part to de-marginalize my community. We suffer the effects of the eraser; we disappear between the lines. We are always at risk and in need of so much. I love art, and I also believe it can be a critical force for change in the queer/transgender community and in our relationship(s) to the world. A dialog occurs between art, artists, and audiences which can help delimit and codify cultural boundaries. As we produce these works, and as they are recognized as being distinctly queer/trans* artifacts, we empower that move toward culture. It is an exciting time.

These poems are not previously published.

Stephen Zerance
Gun Porno

A shot in my ass, four pills back,
I’ve never wanted a gun so bad—
a gun in my hands,

your gun, my gun, transgression,
clack clack clack—this is fun,
holding my breath

till I pass out, my first
taste of blood, thirteen, a gun
pointed at me, one single shot

rang through the house, the magic
of murder ringing, singing,
calling out your name.

I’m building a mansion
where doors open
to solid walls, with my gun

I sleep in a different
room each night
or I’ll die. I want

to be tougher, spit
in my eye, throw my arm
to a corner, sit spin stop

the ride. I’ll have staircases
to nowhere, decoy
rooms, a roulette parlor

where I speak with the dead.
Who’s next? I’ll catch
love with a gun, play alone

with guns, my gun, your gun, a gun
to give me life, and I’ll bleed money
for a gun to stop the rise.

Stephen Zerance is the author of Caligula’s Playhouse (Mason Jar Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in West Branch, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Assaracus, and Knockout, among other journals, as well as on the websites of Lambda Literary and Split This Rock. He received his MFA from American University, where he received the Myra Sklarew award. Stephen lives in Baltimore, MD.

This poem is not previously published.

James Allen Hall
Reagan Red

National Portrait Gallery
March 12, 2016

Nancy Reagan hangs in her red dress
across from the crowded washrooms,

ensuring no hanky-panky goes down red
in the men’s room, not on her watch,

no nancyboys allowed, though I like to
think of her whiling away in “that shade

of scarlet forever known as Reagan red,”
the smell of unflushed waste enveloping her.

Leaving the gallery, a woman whose life knows
each brick alleyway in D.C. follows me down

the steps, closes in on me at the crosswalk,
takes a sudden swing, misses me. Her eyes

are bloodshot; when I confront her, she hides
one hand behind her, holds the other palm-out:

No offense. This is what living with the Reagans
is like. That red legacy—would that it could die

in me. I’m living with her coursing through
my veins, the reaginic culture of her

nearly undetectable, Reagan+, her breath
hot on the back of my bared neck.

James Allen Hall is the author of Now You’re the Enemy (University of Arkansas Press, 2008), which won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Recent poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Arts and Letters, and Agni. He teaches creative writing and literature at Washington College in Maryland.

This poem is not previously published.

Shakira Croce
Our Song

Empty cars held us
in the pale grey turning
to square lights of the city.
The ambulance driver steps out to smoke,
tapping ashes on Park Avenue.
It came from Desert Storm,
and you keep it still stamped,
colors faded and oblivious
lying next to a half-empty pill box.
You choose the music tonight.
It’s as simple as offering protection
from a line on the rise
in another CDC report failing to remind us
it’s no longer a death sentence.
Sometimes we can forget it all:
put our song on repeat and dance
swinging arms around each other,
hearts beating wildly.
There’s a greater communication
in that movement of the hip,
straighter than a needle
and wider than a lover’s exhale
to reach the need.

Shakira Croce is a writer in Queens, New York. A Georgia native, she studied writing at Sarah Lawrence College and completed a Masters at Pace University. Shakira’s poetry translations have appeared in Babel magazine, and recently her poetry has been featured in the New Ohio Review, PoetsArtists, Tansactions, Ducts.org, and the Red River Review. Shakira currently works as Communications & Public Relations Manager for a not-for-profit health plan, Amida Care, which is New York’s largest special needs health plan for people living with chronic conditions such as HIV/AIDS.

This poem is not previously published.

B.B.P. Hosmillo
In Praise of Renovation

Save the bones to celebrate this earth—we know love as we decay,
chased by flesh that looks for houses to abandon. This means if we’re
poured out on flat terrains like hope and belief, so much the better.
Save the fingernails because they won’t grow anymore, won’t scrape
off the lips in your neck. I want you to have something. Save the sorry
notes, the teeth, a better arrangement till your mouth is filled with me.
If your house’s hard substance, the chosen woods, a skull with hole
for a lover’s eye get burned in seconds, do not cremate me. This is how
desire unveils a scary projection: may you see me, not in spite, but
as the immense peril. Makes you very nervous. Makes you feel alive.

When your frenetic leg slammed my body against the wall, didn’t you
think of a better house? A dwelling our bodies couldn’t tear down
so as not to defeat the purpose of loving in secret. Extent to another
extent to illusion to anything that has a view of the sky for the self
and flowers for the body. This limitation talking about nature, putting
it on the long table of interrogation. We’ve not been given fields of answers
nor been cared for, which puts together what we could easily see: hundreds
of eggs on a nest were broken by acid rain that fell and dissipated on
them. But why are those crownless birds still singing their only song,
rehearsing what makes them good candidates for prophetic extinction?

Are they, like us, with debris and method of renovation on the feet,
wandering through the severity of homeland—not the comprehensive chest
of nature, but what we can identify without it. Then honor our enduring
identification—call this dissent or delirium or danger, but, surely, this has
something we could build our voices upon. Thirst miraculously saying
I killed all of you, I’ve repented so much, Give me something to drink.
An apology like this deserves a river, made viscous by man’s remains,
where you shall find a bent cup, the belly of a pot, my wide-opened mouth.
May deformity bring us a kitchen. May deformity remind us that we can
eat like other animals in this zoo. Am I saying that we are indeed caged?

That our hands are tied even if they’re not? No. I mean somewhere
in our wildness is the urge to be common. Let’s have a romantic dinner
in a restaurant shouldn’t mean Let’s make our own restaurant
in a grayscale room with an open window for the sun to border in dark
reddish light, without people commenting on how weird the sun is.
I get it, the sun sometimes pours out blood, but who are we to be blamed
for something we didn’t make? This is a question that goes back
to the day of creation. The sun behind us, long echoes sketching
a near river with ducks and perhaps blind bears, and I wanted a tree
and you said that’s forbidden here. I still wanted a tree and you asked

Is my seed a tree? I never answered you. I just swallowed what you gave
me generously for I really wanted a tree. Until now I’m waiting for it.
Blessed be this seed inside me. Blessed be this that puts you to my
worship house. Where what’s from you is holy enough not to be present.
Blessed be this present. A double: with and without you. None escapes.

B.B.P. Hosmillo is the founding co-editor of Queer Southeast Asia: A Literary Journal of Transgressive Art and a guest poetry editor at Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Anthologized in Under the Storm: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Poetry (2011) and Bettering American Poetry (2016), he is the author of two forthcoming books, The Essential Ruin and Breed Me: a sentence without a subject (AJAR Press, 2016). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), Palaver Journal, SAND: Berlin’s English Literary Journal, minor literature[s], Transnational Literature, and elsewhere. He received research fellowships/scholarships from The Japan Foundation, Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, and the Republic of Indonesia.

This poem is not previously published.

R. Nemo Hill
The Blanket Was a Blue One

I wouldn’t have recalled the salvaged facts
but for the austere beauty of that cave
in which, together, naked, on our backs,
we’d briefly sheltered from them.
He was brave.
He’d pulled the covers up till we went missing,
then huddling close, he’d sworn, I will protect you.
“Can’t you hear the waves,” he’d whispered.
“Listen—.”
Night’s vow had been, I don’t want to infect you,
but dawn had drawn the bloodstream to the ocean,
and he was right—that outer surf might ruin
this inner stillness with relentless motion.
He knew each passing moment was the true one.
His name was Joel. And the blanket was a blue one.

I’ve kept three sheets of notes near thirty years,
jotted remnants from that morning-after:
whole body wept—was how I quick-sketched tears
which launched that night’s debauch. He’d feared disaster,
and apologized with such abject abandon
his penitence grew carnal, shaved and scarred,
my notes again, impressions, echoes, random,
the more it hurts the more it gets me hard.
He’d courted pain so deep that when it stopped
he had to learn again to go on breathing;
to shoulder once again the load he’d dropped;
to raise, from inhalation’s stripped up-heaving,
this tabernacle of abolished leaving,

this nave his need had conjured, blue, above me,
this tent in which, a child again, he’d prayed:
pull my hair and tell me that you love me.
He’d laughed, then shushed himself at once—.
For they
were quickly closing in now from all sides.
Our threadbare cotton cave leaked tepid light,
casting shadows, turning games to lies,
reducing rescue to one drunken night’s
asylum.
It’s shoe time now. Where are my glasses?
“Did I mention I’m a writer?” he’d said, kneeling
to sign his book, as clouds replaced the ceiling
for his dazed descent from tenement Parnassus.
Perhaps he’d had no name, and had to steal one.
I slept till dusk. The blanket was a real one.

(East Village, New York City—1989)

R. Nemo Hill is the author, with painter Jeanne Hedstrom, of the illustrated novel Pilgrim’s Feather (Quantuck Lane Press, 2002); The Strange Music of Erich Zann (Hippocampus Press, 2004); Prolegomena To An Essay On Satire (Modern Metrics, 2006); When Men Bow Down (Dos Madres Press, 2012 ) and In No Man’s Ear (Dos Madres, 2016). He is editor & publisher of of EXOT BOOKS, about which you can learn more at www.exot.typepad.com/exotbooks.

This poem is not previously published.

Richard Fox
At Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago 2001

I hate your death—
not its foreignness
& not your dying
of it, but the fact
of it—the no-moreness
of you. Your tree’s
still here—occupying
space over the sun-packed
fence next to the broken-
into mausoleum—
its tree-breath
outlasting yours:
the only birch
in Rosehill. You loved
looking at it through
the wavy art glass window
from your perch,
turning tricks as you did
in some rich bastard’s
death museum.

I love being here
when the snow comes,
when everything
gets a lesson in
humility, but I hate
your death. And
I’ve come to talk,
to come here for
the other gay experience—
it’s where Suki’s come at 32

& Frank’s brother
at 27, but most—like you—
just past young
& on the cusp
of becoming interesting.

I’ve come here
between the markers
where you’ve come
into the palimpsest
of earth
(life’s rust body’s rust)
& where words like
fag & AIDS have
also come to rest,
closed tight in your grave.
You lie beneath
Chicago where I’ve come
to live & where life
streams by like
it does on the coasts
& in between,
but once inside either
grave or church,
you must invest
in silence, but
you neither
want it nor possess it:
I must tell it to you
or bring it with me here,
where you no longer
have to self-suffice.
Stranded, I will cry;
stranded again, I will cry.
Grief—like farming—
is bitter work.

But I’ve come to talk,
& now I will let string
& tin can slip between
the clay & gravel,
down into your grave—
old tech telephony—
to catch you up on things
that have happened
since you died
in the fight against
the Plague,
& how we still doff
responsibility
as we flip between
the binaries of
natural cause & genocide
as easily as taking off
our Sunday finery.
It was your kind of fight:

oh, to have lived your
life book-ended by
the span of the Twentieth
Century. Oh my liege,
my queen, my queer,
I would dig you up
with the souvenir
spoon you brought me
from your last trip
to Cancun.
But out of spite,
I want you to break
up through the earth
like a swimmer who breaches
the surface, where
you become an anti-
spadeful, pushing up
from the ground
like you’ve dedicated
a construction site
before the builders
come; before the rabble
come in their over-
extended reach.

I will quilt the patterns
of your long hours’
watch over
the eighty-something
birch tree—rings
uncountable as Saturn’s—
into swaddling
to cover you
against the dearth
of your last days—
the dizzy wig of
your last minutes doffed—
when you were
taken away so some-
one else could birth
in your place.
What did you mean
when you said
My words are meant to mean
or when you said
Bury me in my mother’s wedding gown
as if by then you’d be
thin enough to fit into it?
Of all the raw
deals, explanations
abound: pick one
from the gee & haw
& boo-hooing
above-ground.

I shall miss your tree
& your eye-stare
through the glare-bound
squares of mortuary glass.
My bad eyes,
your rotten luck:
I’ve come here to say
goodbye to all that.

Richard Fox is the author of Swagger & Remorse (Tebot Bach, 2007). He was a 2000 recipient of an Artist Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council. He holds a BFA in Photography from Temple University, Philadelphia and lives in Chicago.

This poem appeared in the anthology Windy City Queer: LBGTQ Dispatches from the Third Coast.