Stuart Barnes
I
hardly recognise the trial—twenty-one cycles over the sun—but I know it wasn’t child’s play. ‘Are you—’ ‘Yes, Mum.’ ‘You’ll fucking die of AIDS.’ I apologised—I can only sympathise with the daily rain of brimstone, fire. In artificial air I lay on my side and scrutinised the waverings of your eye—sea-green, curious, terrified—and the contradictory Whys and the cradle-to-grave compliance. Since Friday I’ve quantified kilometres—one thousand five hundred and seventy, precisely—on a diagram, in my mind. ‘This distance requires—’ ‘Pfft.’ Ripely decided. Stupid fruit. My spine’s weak also, yet I’m acquiring the art of ballooning the diaphragm. That terrible final telephone call. ‘I’d love to be in a relationship with somebody like’—which terrorises—‘you’. Crying. Mystified: ‘Are you all right?’ Dryly: ‘Yes, I’m fine, fine, fine.’ ‘Well then, bye, bye, bye,’ you recited. Poof! Fire, water: cardinal, fixed. Our rulers Pluto, Mars; our detriment Venus. How do you survive, bonsai? Why why why won’t you actualise oomph, do you simply ogle lives through that sea-green, curious, terrified eye.
Stuart Barnes was born in Hobart, Tasmania, and educated at Monash University. His first book, Glasshouses (UQP, August 2016), won the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Since 2013 he has lived in Central Queensland and has been poetry editor for Tincture Journal. He tweets as @StuartABarnes.
An earlier version of this poem appeared in Communion.
Jill L. Cooper’s work has appeared in The Raven Chronicles, The Floating Bridge Review, Shark Reef Literary Magazine, Rewire Me, The Rebelle Society, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Silent Applause of Butterflies (Columbia Center for the Arts, 2014), Pontoon (Floating Bridge, 2015), Delirious—A Tribute to Prince (Night Ballet Press, 2016), and I Only Wanted to See You Laughing (Yellow Chair Review, 2016). Jill was the creator and editor of The Yes Book (Exult Road, 2014). She has served as the Executive Director of a Buddhist publishing house and as a consultant to authors and publishers. She lives in southeastern Washington State.
Jason S. Price is a Belize-American writer. His works include several books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a novel. Currently, he serves as a moderator for the Poets Dream online community and supports a mentoring program in New York City.
j.lewis’s poems have appeared in EXPOUND, The Gnarled Oak, Spark, and other journals as well as in a number of anthologies. His poetry collection, a clear day in october, is forthcoming from Empire & Great Jones Little Press.
Melina Gotera sings in the indie folk duo Amelia and Melina, where she co-writes all original material. Her poems have been published in The Best Teen Writing of 2009 and the magazine ETC. Melina teaches art to children at the Hearst Center for the Arts. She lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
Cally Conan-Davies’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, Hopkins Review, Virginia Quarlerly Review, Southwest Review, Harvard Review, Sewanee Review, and other journals in the US, the UK, and Australia. Cally lives in Newport, Oregon.
Rodney Jack was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He served in the United States Navy for six years, and on board the USS Missouri during Operation Desert Storm. He received an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was a Holden Minority Fellow. He was also the recipient of the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry, a GE Foundation Resident Artist of Color at Yaddo, a Fellow at MacDowell, a Peter Mayer Scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference and a Bread Loaf Scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. His work appeared in AGNI, Blackbird, Open City, Ploughshares, and The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine. In the fall of 2007, he returned to Warren Wilson as the Beebe Teaching Fellow. He took his own life on August 6, 2008.
Bree LeMaire worked as an AIDS research nurse for ten years. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Nurse Week, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Optimist: An AIDS Project Los Angeles Publication, and the Inspector Newspaper. Bree lives in San Francisco.
Matty Layne is a political pixie of a poet and MFA Candidate in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University where he teaches composition and rhetoric. His poems on social and environmental justice have appeared or are forthcoming in Rust+Moth, Flyway, The New Verse News, and other journals.
Peter Nickowitz is the author of Cinema Vernacular (Publication Studio, 2014) and Rhetoric and Sexuality: The Poetry of Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). His plays include The Alice Complex; Backgammon at the Louvre; Love, Alters, Everything; and Songs & Statues. Peter was the 2008-2009 Harold Clurman Playwright-in-Residence at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting and was head of the Studio’s Harold Clurman Playwrights Division from 2009-2012. Peter teaches in the Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He lives in in New York City.