Jennifer Lavoie
Between Generations
We read about Borrowed Time
and Metaphors better left unsaid,
of Dancing on the Moon,
isolation,
and Angels in America.
We read because we come from a generation
born at the crossroads.
We read because we do not know,
do not remember,
did not lose friends, family,
lovers.
We try to imagine a world
where friends cannot get medication,
where no help exists,
where a silent government looks on,
where giants fall to Earth
as dreams fail and stars burn
from fevers brought on by sickness,
but cannot.
We stand in the middle,
in the shadows of those lost before us,
and look ahead to the next generation
further separated from the crisis and wonder:
Do they feel invincible?
Jennifer Lavoie is an English teacher and author of four young adult novels with LGBT protagonists including Andy Squared and The First Twenty, published with Bold Strokes Books. She lives in Bristol, Connecticut.
This poem is not previously published.
St. Paul writer Nancy Cook is a Minnesota State Arts Board grantee and the 2015 recipient of the Lillian E Smith writer-in-service award. Last fall she completed a residency on the grounds of the former state mental hospital in Fergus Falls and is currently writing a book of short stories based on the experience. Nancy also runs the Witness Project, a series of free community writing workshops on Minneapolis’s Northside.
I graduated and turned 18 in 1980. I heard about a mysterious disease affecting gay males on NPR going too and from the University a year later. I was very much in love with a beautiful boy named Jeff. We had been together since the summer before my junior year. It was OK. We were together and nothing could hurt us. Until Jeff became ill in the mid 90s and died in 1996—just before the cocktail became available. I was shattered and crawled into a bottle for the rest of the decade. I finally sobered up in 2003. I haven’t really been right since. I haven’t found anyone else. While I am grateful for the years we had together, it broke something inside me to lose him. I am in every way that matters a widower.
Sergio Ortiz is the author of At the Tail End of Dusk (Flutter Press, 2009), Topography of Desire (Ronin Press, 2010), The Sugarcane Harvest (Avantacular Press, 2010), and Wet Stones and Bedbugs in My Mattress (Flutter Press, 2010). A retired educator, poet, and photographer, Sergio
Kenny Fries is the author of The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (Da Capo Press, 2007), which received the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights and Bigotry, and Body, Remember: A Memoir (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), as well as the editor of Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out (Plume, 1997). His books of poems include Anesthesia (The Advocado Press, 1996) and Desert Walking (The Advocado Press, 2000). He received the Gregory Kolovakos Award for AIDS Writing for “The Healing Notebooks.” His forthcoming book, In the Province of the Gods, received the Creative Capital grant for innovative literature. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College.
Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), which was a Small Press Distribution Bestseller, and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Anchor and Plume Press, 2016). Her poetry, fiction, essays, criticism, and translations appear or are forthcoming in AGNI Online, Bellevue Literary Review, The Best of the Raintown Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, The Village Voice, and elsewhere.
J.C. Elkin is the author of World Class: Poems Inspired by the ESL Classroom (Apprentice House, 2014). Her work has appeared in Kestrel, The Delmarva Review, ZoMagazine, and other journals. J.C. is a founder of the Broadneck Writers’ Workshop.
Mark Ward is a poet from Dublin, Ireland. He was the 2015 Poet Laureate for Glitterwolf and his work has appeared in Assaracus, Tincture, The Good Men Project, Off The Rocks, The Wild Ones, Emerge and the anthologies, Out of Sequence: The Sonnets Remixed, The Myriad Carnival and Not Just Another Pretty Face. He has recently completed his first chapbook, How to Live When Life Subtracts, and is currently working on a novel-in-verse called Circumference.
Jason Vanfosson is a doctoral student at Western Michigan University where he researches American boyhood, queerness, and travel in children’s literature. His work has appeared in the Language Arts Journal of Michigan. You can learn more by visiting his website at