David Acosta
Two Poems

Threnody

Anonymously winter releases its dead
And we who survive another day
Must bear the blame for those
Who failed to linger.

If they could speak,
They would bewail in echoes of ice
Their truncated lives,
Their perennial hunger and thirst
For the dead are always hungry
Thirsty to be among the living.

How to explain it all?
Only to record their loss
With a blind and fierce tenderness.
How death came early and without warning
Entered our bedrooms
Tarnishing forever the tenderest
Of moments.
We did not know
And in the face of this
I will maintain our innocence.

But today
A man I love lies dying.
How to reconcile such loss?
The labored breathing in the dark;
The broken smile. And his heart,
The only thing this illness couldn’t take
Now a timid animal of dusk.

Only this is certain
Before dawn he will fly like a shadow,
Fly like birds frightened into air.
Just now he is asking for water
Already, the thirst has begun.

Requiem

When solitude
Digs its way into the ground
Tooth and nail,
I
Unable to sleep, rise
A skeletal structure
Of darkness and fog.

Tomorrow
I will abandon this skin,
Inherit absence in its place
That other country
Where flesh is a stubborn memory
Arduously maintained,
With a frenzy of questions.

These days
Our bodies have become
Organs of mourning
We make love
Unaware that we do so
With gestures we’ve learned
From the dying.

David Acosta’s work has appeared in Mayrea, The Evergreen Chronicles, The Americas Review, and the anthologies: American Poetry Confronts the 1990s (Black Tie Press, 1990), The Limits of Silence (Asterion Press, 1991), Poesida (Ollantay Press, 1995), and Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of Latin American Poetry in The United States (University of Washington Press, 1998). He is also included as a contributor to the first anthology of Latino LGBT history in the United States and Puerto Rico, Queer Brown Voices (University of Texas Press, 2015). David lives in Philadelphia, where he is the Artistic Director of Casa de Duende, and arts organization dedicated to producing socially relevant exhibits and performances linking artists and communities at the local, national, and international level.

These poems are not previously published.

Luke Stromberg
Two Poems

Rube
Tom, you used to stink of cigarettes.
I’d find you, feet up, smoking in your chair
when I got home from work. The Phillies on.
We’d grunt—if that—for a hello. No need
for anything more formal between brothers.
You loved TV, baseball, and Marlboros.
You were the laziest person I knew.
And now you’re as gone as Harry Kalas.

But even then your blood was poison, your body
plotting its betrayal with the virus
that, much too soon, would open up the gate
for Death’s indifferent agents to slip through.
And I feel like a rube. I always thought
the Marlboros would be what did you in.

Visiting Hours

I’ll admit I stayed away.
We all know it. I prayed.
Sure, I prayed, but stayed away
From you, the shade of what you were.
No one wants to see his brother
That way: shrunken and afraid
Behind a hospital tray. I tried
But couldn’t handle it.
I stayed away. Hid from it.
I was afraid. I thought
I might delay what would happen.
The fast approaching day.

What’s there to say? You hit
Some tender spot. You lay there,
Half the weight you used to weigh.
I stayed away. I didn’t want to hear
The way your voice was all unmade.
I couldn’t stand to think of it.
We played blackjack. You’d hardly
Say a word. I shouldn’t have been that way,
But how could I convey my love?
You lifted your lids only half-way
To watch the nurse carry
The get-well bouquet away from you.

Luke Stromberg’s work has appeared in The New Criterion, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Hopkins Review, and other journals. He lives in Upper Darby, Pa., and works as an adjunct English instructor at Eastern University and Cabrini College.

“Rube” appeared in Shot Glass Journal; “Visiting Hours” appeared in Think Journal.

Vince Gotera
Letter to Islas from San Antonio

— for Arturo Islas, d. 15 February 1991

Arturo:
Flying from Dallas to San Antonio,
the jet bucked like a Mexican bronc through air,
heavy and insolent. To my left, the business tycoon,
super-professional in her Gucci pinstripe suit,
and the cowboy veterinarian from Amarillo,
ten-gallon hat, silver and turquoise buckle
on his belt, talked of allergies and poultry.
We broke through layer after layer of clouds,
the fuselage creaking, then leveled onto a new world

I could paint you in old clichés: wisps of
spun sugar at the state fair or mounded
cotton balls . . . but no, Arturo, it really
was something new. The veterinarian,
even the business tycoon, gasped in awe.
The sun dancing in and out of clouds
was the jewelled eye of Quetzalcoatl,
serpent god with rainbow wings flying
like a pterodactyl. Below, through shreds of vapor
frozen in curlicue shapes, a distant ground
of clouds, brown with haze like uncarded wool.
The promised land, the ancient land: Aztlan.

Arturo, those afternoons we “talked Lit”
in your office at Stanford Quad—how Hawthorne’s Zenobia
drowned in black water, rigor mortis
clenching her hands into claws, a suicide’s revenge
—I’ve somehow mixed that image up with your death.
A weird Byronic impulse wants in me
to see your HIV-emaciated
body bucking against Zenobia’s claws:
she is la llorona, the water witch
dragging infants into the black lake,
her hair stringy and lank like seaweed, fingernails
of jagged ice hooked into the body.

Today is Good Friday, 5 A.M., Arturo.
Cathedral statues draped in purple sackcloth,
incense, the candle with five red nails,
hooded penitentes flailing their backs
till blood flows free in red runnels—
you and I share this imprint, our childhood
marked by the dark and sanguine blood of Spain.
Today, here in San Antonio, your native
Texas, they will celebrate El Pasion de Cristo,
erect a proxy savior on a lumberyard cross.
Just like in Cutud, Philippines, where they use
iron nails, hammered in open palms.
You and me, Arturo: marked by the Spanish
Inquisitor’s fiery brand, our black blood.

I want you free, Arturo, from all that black.
I want you in those clouds with Quetzalcoatl,
clean sunlight arcing through your bones.
The wind stroking your gray hair, purging
the plague out of your limbs, out of your blood.
I want you to dance in that sky and buckle like fire,
like Hopkins’s windhover gashing its breast gold
and vermilion, sparks like fiery tongues raining
on a brown world far below.
Best,
Vince

Vince Gotera is the author of Dragonfly (Pecan Grove Press, 1994), Ghost Wars (Final Thursday Press, 2003), Fighting Kite (Pecan Grove Press, 2007), and the forthcoming Pacific Crossing. His sonnet “What Matters”  won first place in the rhyming poetry division of the 84th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition in 2015. Vince serves as editor of the North American Review. He teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Northern Iowa.

This poem appeared in The Guadalupe Review.

Daniel Y. Harris
Two Poems

Pansexual 1917

Eddy’s bi, attracted to derision, mosexu in Pitman Shorthand:
an abugida in the language of Swampy Cree. Vowels, abjads,
or the absent optional fulfills an equal. Pick an either/or type.
How pan is bi? Or equate, but not exclu. Grees of both. PanS
is as PanSex. Ceed poly, or eed oly, rejects a binary fem/hem.
We cater to this ophos as if our mastered isexu were erosexu.
Give it up for Eddy “Polquee” Daemon, punk roflex of dark
n-ders. His bitch is an ox-ual—a certain Ames Obia Bianga,
cut part femme fatale, ladyboy and greased hunk. At Nogra,
in the Back Bay, they party with a penile plethysmograph.
They toke on the strain of gauge and down inflatable cuffs.
This film stimuli of phallometry and vagines of a silk labia,
consort the fall. Curve pathols little hotties. Eddy and Ames
are etehom, cuming tasy and bated by the lure of an ariab.

Rarity 88

A gene called Transgene is injected in his offspring
because his genetic codes are similar to genetically
modified mice. Don’t mince the alphabets of skin
with the rarefied squealings of an inversed passion.
The statutes of rare father a lethal raider of a now,
or soon to be inarticulate selfhood, collects public
opinion like a simple need to collect. Into an early
stage mouse embryo refuses to leave. Mayed heat
is humid, is the novel to exeunt our rat. 88 rarities
give the errata slip the slip. Sunrise is at 5:20 AM.
The HIV Index is as low as two transgenic Eddys
never seen in this approach. Hardly rare: ardly re
nor aar ar to the dusted amputee. Scarcity’s lack.
Fetch antibacterial soap. Alternatives are scrubbed.

Daniel Y. Harris is the author of The Underworld of Lesser Degrees (NYQ Books, 2015), Esophagus Writ (with Rupert M. Loydell, The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2014), Hyperlinks of Anxiety (Cervena Barva Press, 2013), The New Arcana (with John Amen, New York Quarterly Books, 2012), Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue (with Adam Shechter, Cervena Barva Press, 2010; picked by The Jewish Forward as one of the 5 most important Jewish poetry books of 2010) and Unio Mystica (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2009). Some of his poetry, experimental writing, art, and essays have been published in BlazeVOX, Denver Quarterly, E·ratio, European Judaism, Exquisite Corpse, Milk Magazine, The New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, The Other Voices International Project, In Posse Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Salzburg Review, Stride and Tarpaulin Sky. He holds an M.Div from The University of Chicago and is the Editor-in-Chief of X-Peri.

These poems are not previously published.

James Walton
Palliative Care

I’ll sponge you with that moon
when the years shape my hands,
to close over the impossible
landscapes of everything we are.
The flecks of wattle gossamer
where my cheek rested,
as I listened to the Niagara rush
laughing through your belly
in those prehistoric days.
You dyed your hair jacaranda
then pomegranate, enough to confuse
the light plaiting between
the salvaged Beardsley glass panes.
Cellophane days in hidden crinkles
art nouveau flickering leaves,
tessellate our lives in Roman ways
of stones and glassy jewels.
Throw out the failing medicines
those prescriptions of what’s not,
let’s lay beneath the wax plant,
listen to the bees dream of honeycomb.

James Diaz
Amnesic Mnemosyne

This penchant for disaster
turning into the lung
and shattering home
the missing link
of morning after
and tug the wheel hard
here comes the sharp turn
the liver and the fable of spots,
my mother, your mother,
hurry, the road is closing,
city and sky collapsing
red or darker red
or color blind
forgiveness
eclipsing alternative routes home
the acorns turned into diamonds
turned into the long neck of Oswego swans
shudder to think
palm and sweat of the brow
you are more blessed than you can possibly know
I cannot hold this light for you
day is, night is not
an indefinable brokenness
as regrettable as when God divided the firmament
and put pain into the hills
presence into the skin, flicker, flare, staring east
releasing the arrow
the sacrament is a cracked lip
and bruised knees the insignia of a mismanaged love
no more words, you have too many already
the amnesia opens, here, I open, we are both so open
anything could enter us now.

James Diaz, an activist and author, lives in upstate New York. His work has appeared in Ditch, Chronogram, Cheap Pop Lit, Foliate Oak, The Voices Project, Pismire, Epigraph, My Favorite Bullet, and Collective Exile. He is the founding editor of the literary arts magazine Anti-Heroin Chic.

This poem is not previously published.

Lenny DellaRocca
All These Tarnished and Glittering Things

Crush out all sentiment
—Nietzsche

Look at these small belongings from that other world when the four of us
were here. Little things with giant shadows: Fleur de lis seal stamp among
debris in the wake of a tired guardian angel who abandoned you, Frankie.
I have your letters, a red wax calligraphed F on your envelopes. The

unpainted elephant Michael made in shop lifts its trunk to moments under
the feet of family in long dresses, uncles pulling on pipes savoring the aperitifs
of pears and Gallo wine at picnics and anniversaries of the dead. Tip-of-my-tongue
Italian words hide in old afternoons of butterscotch and dust move like

shadow across starfish in ten feet of water. In my other hand the demitasse
grandfather sipped in a kitchen window that framed willows, back yard failing
my eyes now, incandescent playtime tricking birds with dice, Frankie, remember?
This white stone John gave me, said he found it in a cold river when

he lived in North Carolina with a girl he had to Baker Act, who had him
arrested, takes its place in a pine shadow box where I keep fallen stars still
ticking with light. The shadow box came to me from an old friend.
Her hands have touched these wooden squares, little homes of morning and

evening on my wall. You remember Marlene. She stole a married woman from
her kids and husband, who after coming home from a fire, found her head
between the legs of his wife. I can still smell Marlene’s hands sticky with
bergamot like I can smell Michael’s perfume on his black leather jacket

slashed on the back by a knife. The Outlaws were at the El Toro that night.
He decided to brave their world wearing mascara and a peach scarf.
This is a Polaroid of him in the infirmary at Riker’s Island. How can
anyone so emaciated flourish such handwriting? He found the Lord in a

five-by-eight cell. Here is a vial of costume gems I took from a drawer
that smelled of violets. Grandmother Rose strung them together with fake
pearls. Once I spilled a handful of emeralds on her bureau and they scattered
in the mirror like so many glittering beads of sweat. John found coins

and lire in a cookie tin under a floorboard in that room. Grandfather was
a night watchman then would come home with a wheel barrow of broken
things some of which still sparkled. Didn’t he give you a busted watch?
Remember this swizzle stick? Dropped by an in-law tugging her black

stockings like Bettie Page on a bear-skin rug. Rumors in the ice cubes.
We hid behind the Christmas tree, the high angel winking at us. I think
about nights the four of us sat with Aunt Rosalyn talking country music
and German shepherds. Her uncle survived Auschwitz, she said, and then

we played movie stars: CG for Clark Gable, BD for Bette Davis. I have a
snapshot of you, Aunt Roz and John taken the day before the car wreck.
They said you would not come out of the coma. Your face disfigured the
rest of your life, one leg swollen twice the size of the other. All the little

white pills in the world could not take away the pain until too many did.
And this photograph, you and John mouthing an aria from Tosca, laughing
at Caruso silent now, the 78 a scratched black hole. Frankie, John is petrified
to leave his apartment. I’m afraid he is going to give me something too big,

something that takes up space but time cannot touch. I’m afraid to tell you
why Crazy is here slathering the calves of my legs with wicked scent, purring
like baseball cards in the spokes of a slow moving bike. Maybe you know
why, maybe Celia leans over your shoulder as you listen to my thoughts,

sees what you see, what I take from this cauldron with a lid of gargoyles
and toads, this odd collection of things you might find in a junk store window
dense with ruined, redolent and grave stories. Is there a junk store in Heaven?
Are your perfect hands able to feel the finery of wings too large for infants?

Beneath campaign pins, an empty bottle of lavender, two silver dollars from
the eighteen nineties and a thimble Aunt Clara used while sewing skirts for my
mother when she was a girl, I found this old poem I wrote for Helena on the day
she died. Did you give your copy to God? It was not found in the room you

rented, the one with burnt curtains and pencil sketches of Edith Piaf.
I gave John your keyboard and sheet music of La Vie En Rose. He said your
place smelled of gas, but there was no mention of it in the police report.
They questioned your young friend and let him go. John is convinced the kid

gave you more than you could take, lit out from your bed after you closed your
eyes. I do not believe in an afterlife, Frankie. I do not want these terrible
things staggering about inside me like toy soldiers with bugles and bayonets.
I am in a back yard now, not the one grandfather worked each summer up to his

knees in milkweed and praying mantis, a new yard of lazy trees that sweep along
a wooden fence so far back you cannot see what lies beyond it. I never told you
the dream I had when I was a child. I think it was a dream. A lady hovers a
few feet in the air, barefoot above a row of ripe strawberries. She looks like

the statue of Mary in the grotto of rose bushes under the bay window of my
mother’s house, birds dance on her porcelain head and hands which she holds
out to someone, always on the verge of saying something. The woman in the dream
did speak. It was the day I started scribbling loops and zigzags.

Hear that? That is the sound of shovel hitting stone deep in the ground,
black dirt piled up high smoking with summer ghosts, a few bees murmuring code.
The apricots are turning colors. It is time, Frankie, for the kind of evening
that remembers nothing.

Lenny DellaRocca is the author of The Sleep Talker (Night Ballet Press, 2015) and Blood and Gypsies (Anaphora Literary Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, 2River View, Chiron Review, Albatross, Poetrybay, and other journals. Lenny is founder of Interview With a Poet and the South Florida Poetry Journal, both at interviewwithapoet.com.

This poem is not previously published.

Three Poems by Lynn White

Sunshine and Shadows

There are black clouds lingering over me.
Casting shadows.
Even though
there’s a big red sun above
shinning down on me.
Warming my face.
Caressing me.
reminding me of other sunshine days
when the rays beamed more sweetly.

The clouds make today too close,
too hot,
yesterday too far away.
And the rays are stabbing me sharply.
Hurting me.
No longer warm and sweet
but hot and sour.
Piercing me.
Cutting me like icy splinters.
Because there’s cold there as well,
coming from somewhere.

This sun is too bright for me to see clearly,
too red and swollen,
like my eyes feel now.
Heavy.
Black with shadows.
So I’m waiting for the rain to fall.
Fall away.
Drop by drop until they’re empty and cold.
And I’m waiting for more cold days to come.

And I’m waiting for the empty clouds to pass
and the sun to shine again
and warm me
if it can.

The Company of Butterflies

In the company of butterflies
I can whistle up the wind
and fly
without boundaries.
Flutter by
and then rest
in the sunshine
and drink
sweet nectar
and dream
and dream.

In the company of butterflies
I can whistle up the wind
and soar
over fragile rainbows.
Then stop
in a fusion
of colour
to taste the gold
at the end
of my flight
of fancy.

In the company of butterflies
I am boundless.

In The End

In the end
I’ll be like you.
Dust with
flakes of skin and bone
wrapped in long hair.
Teeth chattering
With no voice.
No sense of taste
or smell.
No reason.
In the end
we’ll be invisible,
impenetrable,
anonymous,
figments.
But then, we always were
you and I,
we always were.

Lynn White’s poem “A Rose For Gaza” was shortlisted for the Theatre Cloud War Poetry for Today competition in 2014 and has since appeared in several journals and anthologies. Poems have recently appeared in anthologies including To Hold A Moment Still: Best of Harbinger Asylum 2012-14 (Create Space, 2014), edited by Dustin Pickering and Z. M. Wise; We Are Poetry: An Anthology of Love Poems (Create Space, 2015), edited by Stacey Savage; Reclaiming Our Voices (Community Arts Ink, 2015), edited by Carla Christopher-Waid, T.L. Christopher-Waid, and Kate Harmon; The Border Crossed Us: An Anthology to End Apartheid (Vagabond Press, 2016), edited by Mark Lipman; Civilized Beasts (Weasel Press, 2015), edited by Laura Govednik; Alice In Wonderland Anthology (Silver Birch Press, 2015), edited by Melanie Villines; and others. Lynn lives in north Wales.

“Sunshine and Shadows” appeared in Aubade; “The Company of Butterflies” appeared in The Dawntreader; and “In The End” appeared in In-flight.

Nalini Priyadarshni
Untitled

You are a world
that existed long before I was born
flourishing unseen between agony and apathy
until your veins of gold distract me
entice me to explore
the raging cataclysm beneath my flesh

I fall in step with nonchalant stories
you illustrated my limbs with
each time we sit together
working each detail with deft strokes and bold colours
and they come alive to tell tales of times yet to come

We speak of this and that as you discard my old tattoos
and replace them with deep reds and peacock blues
but never once bring ourselves to talk about sandglass
that sits in silence midst us, holding us for a ransom
I memorize iris of your eyes and beer on your breath
let my skin stretch a bit to make room for more souvenirs.

Ever a nebula across centuries
we wait to collapse
I meditate on now and here
you conjure new worlds into existence.

Nalini Priyadarshni is the author of the poetry collection Doppelgänger In My House, forthcoming in 2016. Her work has appeared in Up the Staircase Weekly, eFiction India, Mad Swirl, Camel Saloon, Lipstickparty mag, Tanka Undertow, Locution Mag, Earl of Plaid, In-flight, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies including I Am Woman (FCM Publishing, 2013), developed by the I Am Woman campaign led by Victoria Watson. Nalini lives in India with her husband and two children.

This poem is not previously published.

Michael Mackin O’Mara
from Friends and Lovers

1
Douglas Austin Kendall 1957-1993

I can’t remember how or when we met
I know it was in college and I remember you
in a couple of decades in at least three or four towns
we were the weed smoking, shroom brewing, long hairs
canoeing the Hillsborough, Ochlockonee, and Loxahatchee
slam dancing clubs that were desperately chasing anarchy

you main-lined Richard Hell & Polly Styrene & Giant Ants from Space,
and found the too-much-for-my-mirror girl who dubbed you Doug-lette
and preferred her brew poured over our heads to drinking it
we came from Planet Claire while we cruised the hills of Tally
a murder of us in your Dad’s discarded Newport Coupe

in time we lost both Sly and Onka, the only time I saw you cry
and donned the three button suit of Monday through Friday 9 to 5
you led me by the rope around my throat
back from the unnatural disasters of my quaking mind

that night you asked what happens when we die
that’s easy, I said, the universe cradles our atoms forever, apologizing
for the rippling cause and effect we’ll never comprehend

you leave me the cold sun’s pink breath on the still water
gray that steeps as deeply into river as into sky

Michael Mackin O’Mara lives and works in West Palm Beach, Florida. He studied creative writing at the University of South Florida under Hans and Ilse Juergensen, who were the first to publish his work (in the journal Gryphon). Recent work has appeared in the journal Silver Birch Press. Michael is a long time member of the Beach Road Poetry workshop and has performed his poetry at various venues in Florida with his workshop mates.

This poem is not previously published.