D. Gilson
Movie Going

The week I move to Washington,
my mother emails me an article:

“Nation’s Capital Now Capital of HIV Infection.”
Be careful, she says, I love you,

and Kevin says he can’t live with rejection
so he sleeps around. Chases

bugs and snorts lines of coke
and texts: I let Matt fuck me bareback.

Over brunch, Dupont Circle, we’re talking 1981.
What a bummer, Wet Hot American

Summer, Nancy Reagan just says no.
What the fuck did we know

then? Larry Kramer asks. It was summer,
1981, two men dead in Los Angeles

from rare lung infections. Then five. True story:
summer before senior year, Andrew wrecked

his Ford Explorer when I gave him road
head on the way to see 8 Mile.

At twenty-nine, I’m still alive and waiting
at the clinic for Kevin to get his results.

He’s negative again, thank god,
and, The problem with some men, I tell Will,

is that they’ll never win, and he reminds me,
The only thing these men have in common is you.

Bummer. What I’m trying to say: Kevin
and I are lucky men. Not bitten but leaving

the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Clinic with a
5:15 showing of American Pie to catch.

D. Gilson is the author of I Will Say This Exactly One Time: Essays (Sibling Rivalry, 2015); Crush with Will Stockton (Punctum Books, 2014); Brit Lit (Sibling Rivalry, 2013); and Catch & Release (2012), winner of the Robin Becker Prize. He is Assistant Professor of English at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and his work has appeared in Threepenny Review, PANK, The Indiana Review, The Rumpus, and as a notable essay in Best American Essays.

Stacy Nigliazzo
Aubade

Take these sunken eyes and learn to see.
—Paul McCartney

One of my first patients was a man
with advanced AIDS.

He was admitted with altered mental status
and a fever.

As I leaned over to check his colostomy site,
he smiled and touched my breast,

saying he loved me.

His partner quickly pulled his hand away
and apologized. By this time,

the patient was singing Blackbird
and waving his arms like a symphony conductor.

His partner and I continued the song
until he fell asleep.

Stacy R. Nigliazzo is the author of Scissored Moon (Press 53, 2013), named Book of the Year by the American Journal of Nursing. It was also listed as a finalist for the Julie Suk Poetry Prize (Jacar Press) and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book Award for Poetry/Bob Bush Award. She is co-editor of Red Sky, an anthology addressing the global epidemic of violence against women (Sable Books). srnigliazzo.com

Raymond Luczak
Visiting St. Vincent’s Hospital (1990)

I will continue to pretend. My heart
still brakes for you in the elevator
as I stare out, nonchalantly apart.
I must continue to pretend. My heart
droops like grapes. What would a cultivator
do with those alarming lines on your chart?
Your pulse has weakened, a timid blip.
The machines keep you alive while I seethe,
trapped effectively against one more flip.
So I continue to pretend. Your heart
gasps. I palpitate when you try to breathe.
It’s become damn hard to fake smiles. My heart
can’t bear new stents inserted while you sleep.
I’m learning again what it means to weep.

Raymond Luczak‘s play Snooty won first place in the New York Deaf Theater’s 1990 Samuel Edwards Deaf Playwrights Competition, and his essay “Notes of a Deaf Gay Writer” was a cover story in Christopher Street magazine. He edited Eyes of Desire: A Deaf Gay & Lesbian Reader (Alyson Books, 1993), which won two Lambda Literary Award nominations (Best Lesbian and Gay Anthology, and Best Small Press Book). In 2005, he relocated to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he continues to write, edit, and publish.

Stephen Mills
Last Night Out

Let’s say you like to wear t-shirts
with the word “sissy” printed in hot
pink letters across the chest. Say you
kiss other boys on the dance floor
while hoards of sweaty men grind
against each other as if this is their last

chance for human contact—the end
of the world—and maybe it is.
Let’s say you also drink too much
rum, purposely bump into strangers,
make new friends. One tells you
he’s positive, pointing to the AIDS

awareness bracelet you wear everyday
as a symbol that you care, even though
you’ve never known anyone
with the virus. Now faced
with this man, all you can do is smile
because your head is spinning

and the shiny confetti is beginning
to fall from the ceiling like rain
that never gets you wet. Let’s say
you aren’t sure you heard him correctly,
his lips moved, but the words bumped
into the music before entering your ears,

and you don’t want to make a mistake,
say something stupid, and besides you
aren’t planning to sleep with him,
so it doesn’t really matter, except
that he could be dying and you feel
you should comfort him—

but you hate yourself for thinking that,
for assuming his death is approaching
faster than your own, which could come
now on the dance floor, a heart attack at 25.
Or some homophobe with a bomb,
or maybe a club fire where everyone

tramples each other trying to escape the blaze
like that temple in India where someone
started a rumor of a fight and everyone
scrambled down the mountain, killing
hundreds. And you wonder what sound
bodies make succumbing to the pressure—

perhaps it’s the same sound bodies make
spinning on the dance floor, arms around
each other, mouths on ears whispering
all the ways the night could end,
which reminds you of this club
that, after tonight, will close forever.

They’ll take a wrecking ball to the walls,
erase every memory you have of drinking
here, of falling in love over and over again
while the bartenders in their brightly colored
shirts swirled drinks into your open mouth,
and how just when you thought you couldn’t

take it, the heat of bodies next to bodies,
that blast of ice cold air would burst
from the ceiling, covering everyone
in freezing fog and for a second you
could stand there, in the middle of hundreds
of dancing boys, and not even see

the one right in front of you with his hand
in your pants. Let’s say it scares you
to think how quickly it all fades away—
that in a month no one will be talking
of this place that right now feels so alive,
and by next year you won’t remember

how it feels to stand in this space, feel
the vibration of the music, the hands
on your ass, or your lips locking with the sexy
boy you love. And by next year the man
you just met might be sick, and then he
too will close up for good,

and you won’t remember his name,
or face, or the way he grabbed your hand,
pointed to your bracelet, and said thank you
over and over again, and all you could do
was nod and scream over the thumping
bass: you’re welcome.

Stephen S. Mills is the author of A History of the Unmarried (Sibling Rivalry, 2014) and He Do the Gay Man in Dif­fer­ent Voices (Sib­ling Rivalry Press, 2012), a final­ist for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle and winner of the 2012 Lambda Lit­er­ary Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Anti­och Review, The Gay and Les­bian Review World­wide, PANK, The New York Quar­terly, The Los Ange­les Review, Knock­out, Assara­cus, The Rum­pus, and oth­ers. Stephen won the 2008 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award for his poem entitled “Iranian Boys Hanged for Sodomy, July 2005,” which appeared in the anthology Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 (Gival Press, 2009), edited by Robert L Giron. He lives in New York City. stephensmills.com.

This poem appeared in Quarterly West.

Roxanne Hoffman
Once Bitten

It’s been written, though never proved
that once bitten, by one less than thrice removed
from the source of the venom ― the plumed serpent rattling ―
that each night, thereafter, your soul alights upon black crepe wings.

You hear the hyena’s laughter howling insidious within your ear,
and though your flesh may crawl, goose-bumped with fear,
you’ll seek another bite to assuage the first bite’s sting
though you know in your heart of hearts it will only bring

you closer closer to the very deadly devil you dread,
but there’s hunger gnawing at your gut that must be fed,
a tumultuous torrent of anguish that never wanes
with no bedrock or floodgates so solid as to keep it contained.

So each night you cry out demanding relief,
seek that exalted moment no matter how brief,
drawn to an elusive elixir to salve your wound,
but once it’s relished, you’re forever tainted, forever ruined.

It’s been said, but never been proved
that once fed upon, by one more than twice removed
that the craving can be conquered and the heartache endured
if your love for a woman is steadfast and hers self-assured.

If for three days and a fortnight she stays true at your side
the blood lust within you may completely subside,
but if she succumbs, falls prey to your peril,
you’ll run with the wolf pack, invoke savagery feral.

Roxanne Hoffman is the founding publisher of Poets Wear Prada. Her poems have appeared in Amaze, Best Poem, Champagne Shivers, Danse Macabre, Hospital Drive, Lucid Rhythms, Mirror Dance, Nomad’s Choir, Red River Review, Shaking Like a Mountain, Word Slaw, and others journals, as well as in numerous anthologies and performances.

This poem appeared in The Riverside Poetry Workshop; SNM Dark Poetry; Dark Gothic Resurrected; Scarlet Literary Magazine; and Stolen Moments.

Merrill Cole
Warm Brother

Around my head the ghost face rolls,
unsteady halo, stolen gold,
radioactive discharge
burning off, all I could never
bring myself to bless. Lopsided man,

can you say or guess what fig leafs
your cold nakedness, the half-life
of quarter-loves, shadow figures
against the wall—all man, or
maybe doll? Who cannot touch

himself, whose pleading seems record
of an instrument that scrapes off crust
of sentiment, that wind-up talk:
I want to swallow you, I will
peel away your wings. The wet grin

slides into my undefended
mouth. Staccato laughter rings out:
hot spit flying into emptiness,
biohazard semen and piss.
This upbeat ballad played backwards,

phantom twin, an automaton
bruising out the numbers again,
x-ray trespass, you cannot see,
curse lipped in the mirror, warmer
brother—ultraviolet—almost me.

Merrill Cole is Professor of English at Western Illinois University and the Advisor for the newly established interdisciplinary undergraduate Minor in Queer Studies. He is the author of The Other Orpheus: A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality, as well as numerous essays and poems. A recent Fulbright scholar in Berlin, Germany, he translated Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste’s 1923 Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy. Merrill has been HIV+ since 1989. He lives in rural Illinois with his husband, Rick Ponce, and three cats.

Matthew Cook
An Appetite for Distances

Let’s talk about dawn,
hardly

a state,

though foggy territory
without coffee.
To understand this feeling
is to see part
of the rock in the palm

hiding the bruise it leaves.
The morning air
shines slick as china saucers.

Location is a relationship,
an appetite
for distances. Someone

plays a saxophone
in the parking structure.
The music takes risks,
its art so breathless
commuters grab for air
in wake of departing trains.

The music ends in lullaby—
Soft, now, the windows must
be dreaming. Let them finish.

Matthew Cook’s poems have appeared in Muzzle, HocTok, Assaracus, Penumbra, The Squaw Valley Review, Cactus Heart, and Howlarium, among others. He was awarded the Stewart Prize for his creative writing while earning his BA in Literature and Writing at the University of California, San Diego. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was both a Maytag Fellow and an Alberta Kelly Fellow in poetry. Matthew works as a researcher and lives in Eugene, Oregon. Please find him at matthew-cook.org

James Langdon
The Night Thor Brought News of Uncle Bruce’s AIDS to Howell Hollow

Thunderous booms stiffened my back
and brought coherence
to my underdeveloped piss brain,
as rapid-fire lightening stalks
lit up the back forty every quarter second
for at least the first half-minute
I glanced out my bedroom window
onto the rolling false Earth.

I stammered out of bed to see
if my grandparents would survive this
catastrophic act,
which, by now has surely claimed the lives
of numerous chickens and cattle.
My soft white heels flattened
warped linoleum with each fluid
skate towards the kitchen, as Thor’s
angry storm ceased, prevailing
a bottomless silence,
broken by unbridled weeping. Slowly,
I superseded the doorway plane,
when a crushing reality
bubbled my line of sight,
sobbing grandmother, clinched to telephone receiver,
pillared by my grandfather’s
cast iron vulnerability.

Grandpa glanced
me back to my room.
I goose-stepped dispassionately to my bed,
where the universe and I
fell back into sleep,
immediately.

James Langdon is a poet living in Bloomington, Indiana. He writes, “In 1986, my uncle called our sheltered, rural community from San Francisco to reveal that he had AIDS and was in the terminal stages. This was still during the time when AIDS had not been adequately researched, and homosexuality was overall unaccepted, especially in our community. I was a child when my grandparents received the news, but I remember it very vividly. The entire experience, the disease, seemed like a myth so far removed from our safe little community. The impact to our family, however, was very, very real.”

Levi Mericle
Redemption

How we remember, what we remember,
and why we remember form the most personal map of our individuality.
—Christina Baldwin

Forgive me Father,
but I am not a dying age.
not a lopsided heart cage you pretend to enter.

Where all you’ll find here is barbed wire
the rotted stench of heartbreak-meat
a dusty eulogy that was never read.

But instead you’ll find the polished gleam of another
the intoxicating embrace of a soulmate.
A masterpiece ending to the story written by the stars.

Forgive me Mother,
but I am not a postdated check
or a reserved royalty.

a loveless egg-sack the hen abandoned
a token black hand you shake but know is dirtied
a chuckle in your frogged throat by the mere mention of my affliction.

No, I am a welcomed tourist in the land of embrace.
A carpenter with sculpted words and enduring tools a mother would be proud of.

Forgive me Brother,
but I am not a cobblestone staircase.
an ancient walk-place you have to bear.

it’s a troubled trod for you isn’t it brother?
A beckoned, godless terrain your feet must endure
a callused journey you’ll never want to take again.

But I am pillow-cased yellow brick road.
a foundation,
a pathway that will lead you home.

Forgive me Sister,
but I am not a lost cause with a simple clause
a freckle nosed brother you cherished once in a daydream.

I was never par for your course.
Always coarse in a smoothened jester of compassion
hollowed in ways I never understood until now.

Forgiveness must be earned.

And I am not graphite in a lead-penciled world.

I will write my signature
among every other on earth
in the book eternity will remember–

in a book eternity will read.

Levi J. Mericle is a poet/spoken-word artist, lyricist and fiction writer from Tucumcari, New Mexico. Currently he is associated with the New Mexico State Poetry Society and gives readings from his work. His work has appeared in multiple anthologies and can be seen in many lit magazines and journals from over half a dozen countries such as Black Heart Magazine, Mused, Flash Fiction Magazine, eFiction India, Awakenings Review, University of Madrid’s literary magazine and more. He is an advocate for the anti bullying movement as well as an advocate for the LGBTQ community.

Miguel Murphy
Status

Because the storms, white emissions, emissaries
of spring come spilling

winter too—
He looked

into my face
as if leaning into a mirror

he could not
drink. Please—

Your bone structure is superb.
Your heart is haute couture.

The plague has petals handsomer than yours.

As if pleasure had a counterfeit.

As if there were a way to protect yourself
against a vast night slicked inside another

human body. Heart, seed,
tearful silence,

thirst. His face darkening
the gulf in him,

like the truth—
the blood test.

Green moon, cupped shadow.
Skin, my bright cloak.

When he told me, he didn’t
know, what could he say—

That wet, ugly glean. His face,
shining like a thirst,

shining in the desert
of contemporary men, like me.
Younger, healthier and eager.

Miguel Murphy is the author of Detainee and A Book Called Rats, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. He lives in Los Angeles where he teaches at Santa Monica College.