Benjamin Garcia
Spine

After Frida Kahlo’s The Broken Column

My backbone is my stem,
my head the bud, brain-pink
layered petals, a whirlpool’s rictus
tugs the sepal skull to bloom—
break, bedazzle, bumble my innards
outward. A god/flower/girl said:
if a flower opens, it means I want you
to try to slam me shut—good luck!

Benjamin Garcia is a CantoMundo fellow who received his MFA from Cornell University. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in: Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review Online, As/Us, West Branch Wired, PANK, and The Collagist. He works for a non-profit as a Community Health Specialist providing HIV/HCV/STD prevention education and testing to higher risk communities throughout the Finger Lakes region of New York State.

This poem appeared in PANK.

R. Zamora Linmark
Split-Second Serenity

This afternoon I read about the time
Tim was admitted to Ward G-9 for AIDS
complications. Former lovers,
magazine editors, and writers
with drag aliases also dropped by,
as themselves or as apparitions.
But every night, at around six,
his lover Chris arrived to coax Tim
into finishing his meal, weep in
Tim’s embrace, until the last second
of visiting hours. Most time, though,
Tim was alone, building a poem
that wouldn’t, couldn’t, stop growing,
as if it had a memory of its own,
tricked itself into believing that
staying unfinished meant more
time to disappear—an inverted
Scheherazade, you could say,
except we all know remembering
is tied to forgetting and cruelty.

Suddenly, I forgot where in Tim’s
unending poem—if he were already
buried by an avalanche of love
or comparing the size of death
with someone from Marseilles—but
everything around me grew calm,
a split-second serenity
that required full submission.
And I, powerless and superstitious
to such visitation, started weeping.
For the life of me, I couldn’t stop,
because Jorge was suddenly back
in full drag regalia en route to Tour Eiffel
before training it south to Rome for
a surprise splash à la Anita Ekberg
at the Trevi fountain. He dragged
along a suitcase of cocktails, rubbing
alcohol, Betadine swabs, a Styrofoam
cooler for the bags of IV antibiotics
I once watched him inject through a PIC
line above his heart. Then Stephen
chimed in, said, “Let’s happy hour.
Hula’s in half hour. Will shower now.”

His lover William, our girlfriend Lisa,
and I got there first, ordered the
Sunday special: highball glass of
piña colada garnished with pineapple
wedge and, for the sakura effect,
a floating pink parasol toothpick.
We waited the length of three slow
rounds, took turns speaking to Stephen’s
answering machine, until worry
drove us speeding to his condo.
There, we found him, standing
and shivering under the shower
for god knows how long, in a daze,
recalling nothing, everything falling,
water after water after water.

R. Zamora Linmark is the author of The Evolution of a Sigh and Drive-By Vigils published by Hanging Loose Press. He’s also published the novels Leche (Coffee House Press) and Rolling the R’s (Kaya Press). Forthcoming are These Books Belong to Ken Z, a Young Adult novel from Delacorte Press/Random House, and the poetry collection Pop Verity. Born in Manila and raised in Honolulu, he divides his writing time between Manila and Honolulu.

Oz Hardwick
Murmuration

Even hummingbirds are heavier than air,
their weight measured in sincerity,
their wings husks of forgetfulness.

I don’t want to acknowledge their falling,
their downward dance to feathers
stuffed into pillows on a dull brass bed,

so, instead, I will call into question
the wider relations between components:
bed, sky, all uncertain moments.

The murmuration shifts course.
What is it about? What can we learn?

Oz Hardwick‘s latest poetry collection is The Ringmaster’s Apprentice (Valley Press, 2014), and he is co-author, with Amina Alyal, of the Saboteur-shortlisted Close as Second Skins (IDP, 2015). Oz is Professor of English at Leeds Trinity University, and has written extensively on misericords and animal iconography in the Middle Ages under the name Paul Hardwick.

Jason Schneiderman
Rapture

There’s a movie about a woman who can’t love God.

It’s a terrible movie. Low budget. Poorly acted.

It’s clumsy and obvious, but I used to watch it over and over

because it had something I needed. A woman, who,

visited by God, cannot love him. Her husband is dead,

her daughter too, both murdered, not senselessly,

but by a man they had tried to help, a man who took

revenge for something that was his own fault. Life,

in the movie, is a test. Life is a test, that in her suffering,

she has passed, except that in having suffered, she cannot

love God, and is refused, by her own honesty, from

the Kingdom of heaven. What the movie says is that life

is not a test. What the movie says is that even if life

is a designed to be a test, that we cannot help but love it

so much that it is everything, and we are right

to love our lives in such a way that we could even refuse heaven,

if it meant giving up on what we have here. It has been

years since I watched that movie, and I think perhaps

it’s because now, at the end of every day, I get to lie down

next to you, and that as long as your arm holds me firm

as I enter the country of sleep, I will never have to choose

between you and heaven.

Marion Ettlinger

Jason Schneiderman is the author of Primary Source, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press; Striking Surface, winner of the Richard Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press; and Sublimation Point, A Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books. His poetry and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House, among others. Jason has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2004 and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in 2011. He is Poetry Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review, and Associate Editor at Painted Bride Quarterly.  Jason Schneiderman is an Associate Professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York.

This poem is not previously published.

Michael Broder
What Would Sylvia Have Done?

Daddy, you can fuck me up the ass,
but don’t expect me to lick your balls after.
How many poems can I write about the penetrated male anus?
One for each sphincter, maybe—
Two anal sphincters, the external, which is voluntary,
and the internal, which is involuntary,
controlling the exit of feces from the body;
also the entrance of fingers, fists, penises, dildos, butt plugs
and nozzles for anal douching. But there are other sphincters—
pupillary sphincter (in the iris of the eye);
sphincter orbicularis oculi (muscle around the eye);
upper and lower esophageal sphincters
(and…we’re back to fucking);
cardiac sphincter, atop the stomach,
keeping gastric acid from out of your throat;
pyloric sphincter (bottom of the stomach);
ileocecal sphincter (where small intestine meets large intestine,
liminal space between digestion and poop);
Oddi’s sphincter, named for Ruggero Oddi (1864–1913), Italian,
also know as Glisson’s sphincter,
named for Francis Glisson (1599–1677), British physician,
keeping bile and gall in their proper places;
sphincter urethrae, which keeps you from pissing your pants
(and also capable of being fucked, a kink known as “sounding”);
precapillary sphincters, wee microscopic bloodgates;
and finally the preputial sphincter of the foreskin
(may its memory be for a blessing).
I like to think that any sphincter can be fucked; in some
cases, maybe we just haven’t figured out how—yet.

Michael Broder is the author of Drug and Disease Free (Indolent Books, 2016) and This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Assaracus, BLOOM, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, OCHO, Painted Bride Quarterly, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians 2; My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them; Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose and Art on HIV/AIDS; Divining Divas: 50 Gay Men on Their Muses; and Multilingual Anthology: The Americas Poetry Festival of New York 2015. Michael is the founding publisher of  Indolent Books and the founding editor of The HIV Here and Now Project. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and a backyard colony of stray and feral cats.

This poem appeared in Inklette.

Luis Lopez-Maldonado
A Cock-Filled Emptiness

I am illegal snake slithering like satan.
I am Fire&Ice Trojan™ condom.
I am the birds bees bullets babies.
I am overcooked underlooked stolen steak.
I am punched and fucked manhole cream-pie.
I am crystal rosaries hanging from brown necks.
I am mini-mí replica of my mother.
I’m a half-smashed rabbit duck skunk against gravel.
I’m a dose of muscle relaxers down thick throats.
I’m a bitch-ass faggot puto brownnoser poser.
I’m a fruit salad con limón y sal.
I’m a round rude moon raging floating above water.
I’m a Catholic Priest slut cake blooming slave.
I’m a brown stain on white wall.
I wants to die wants to cry wants to fly… away.

Luis Lopez-Maldonado is a Xicano poet born and raised in Orange County, CA. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California Riverside, majoring in Creative Writing and Dance. His work has been seen in The American Poetry Review, Cloudbank, The Packinghouse Review, Off Channel, and Spillway, among many others. He also earned a Master of Arts degree in Dance from Florida State University. He is currently a candidate for the Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame.

Bob Carr
G.R.I.D.

Come into me unsheathed
strand, little death hood
between boy and man.

Simmer in the warm lining
of my ass. Dance as I play
percussion on the empty
case of your clarinet,

beat that burns
the blonde of loved arms
to nub, the singeing stink
of your match.

Come over me, decade
of brownouts as I plunge
fingers into a rib cage
and split myself to you.

Come around me, clustering
of little boy smells, raging stain
dripping absence of color
from a bag on a pole.

Come, come to me
in the startled brow
of a lover who called me
his only one,

the small voice saying
the sarcoma on his arm
is a birthmark I’ve forgotten.

Bob Carr is the author of “Amaranth”, a chapbook published in 2016 by Indolent Books. In his writing life, Bob is currently working with Michael Broder as co-editor on the HH&N print anthology. Recent work by Bob appears in the Bellevue Literary Review, Kettle Blue Review, New Verse News, Radius Literary Magazine, Pretty Owl Poetry, White Stag Journal, The Good Men Project and other publications. He lives with his husband Stephen in Malden, Massachusetts, and serves as Deputy Director for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. His poetry, book reviews, and upcoming events can be found at robertcarr.org

John Findura
Portrait: News Broadcast, 1985, w/Me Shaking

I was ten the first time I heard
About AIDS and how there was
No cure and how if you
Had it you were going to die
And my ten year-old self
Was sure that I would then
Get this disease because the news
Broadcasts don’t lie and there
I was shaking that I was going
To get an incurable disease
At ten years-old and die obviously
Not understanding anything about
What it really was only that it
Was a death sentence for everyone
And it was going to spread through
The country by blood and this sounded
So bad so horrible that I shook
Myself to sleep that night
But now I think not of how silly
I was because I wasn’t silly at all
I was scared and sure but now
At forty I am more frustrated
That it has been thirty years
And there is a ten year-old somewhere
Who is just as scared as I was
Because there is still no cure
And there are still people dying
And sometimes it seems as if
The most that I can do is write
A poem saying that it’s okay
To be young and scared because
When there are this many of us
You don’t have to be alone

John Findura is the author of the poetry collection Submerged (ELJ, 2018). He holds an MFA from The New School as well as a degree in psychotherapy. His poetry and criticism appear in numerous journals including Verse, Fourteen Hills, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Forklift, Ohio, Sixth Finch, Prelude, and Rain Taxi. A guest blogger for The Best American Poetry, he lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife and daughters.

Darius Stewart
Communally Bound

In the early Sunday morning drowse of the Travis County Jail, paired off, handcuffed, each to another & shuffling in our over-sized flip-flops, we make our way to court, waiting for the judge to appear in his choir robe, yawning & wringing his eyes of sleep between reading, one by one, the charges we each face. I’m handcuffed to a man who’s light-skinned—redbone we’d call him in the projects—who insists on scratching his balls each time the judge pauses to allow Spanish translators to repeat charges the non-English speaking are facing, whether or not the court should contact the Mexican consulate, & so forth, & it seems redbone has made a game of this—at once enticing & irritating—like so many men I’ve met outside these court room walls. He might as well be any one of them, except the tattooed tear below his right eye suggests he’s not one given to sentimentality— a perpetual crier—but he’s a murderer—yes, that’s what the tear means—& I wonder what circumstances brought him to such depths of human frailty—to kill a man & have forever stamped on his face the night it all went down—a drive-by shooting, a knife wedged between someone’s heart & lungs somewhere in a black alley, the possibilities are endless—& I shake my head, chuckle, knowing the crimes he’s committed far supersede the drunk-driving charges he’s now facing, & no one’s the wiser save those who can read symbols on a man’s face & know he’s completed a rite of passage, a bar mitzvah of the ghetto variety, though how does my second-degree felony drug charge stack against his crimes, I wonder—me, who prefers Pinot Gris to malt liquor, me who sautés & brines, writes the moon into a story of unrequited love, me who witnesses tufts of pubic hair wiring their way upward each time he scratches himself, pondering if it could ever work out between us. Or is it the bond of incarceration that binds us as we are wrist-bound to one another, as if we are indeed a portrait of perfect compatibility—his Eliza Doolittle to my Professor Higgins. Though of course, this is mere fantasy, synapses snapped in the brain preventing mind’s access to rational thought—though in bearing this, seeds of regret blossom in my throat & I’m choked with grief knowing this is the end of our courtship, & I must touch everywhere but where our wrists are communally bound, kiss his lips, that lone tear, awaken him from the life that leads to this place.

Darius Stewart is the author of three chapbooks: The Terribly Beautiful (2006), Sotto Voce (2008), each of which was an Editor’s Choice Selection in the Main Street Rag Poetry Chapbook Series, and The Ghost the Night Becomes (2014), winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Prize. He earned an M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers, where he was a James A. Michener Fellow in poetry, and lives in Knoxville, TN with his dog Philip J. “Fry.”

This poem appeared in storySouth.

Risa Denenberg
Twenty years of dead

— J (1956-1993)

There’s not a lot of love that isn’t brutal, but we

had our East Village dives that didn’t open for Sunday
liquid-brunch until 1 pm and Monday nights at the G&L
community center where all the boys were cruising and
you hung out with me anyway, and

your pâté, your miraculous leg of lamb, your
hundred layers of filo, and

your ten plagues, the infusions that didn’t kill
the germ that killed you, and how

after I met your parents, and
after I found the shoebox of postcards of martyred Saints
and slush pile of short stories you wrote in college,

I read your journals.

I should never have read your journals. Your love
was hilarious and full of grand gestures and
caution tossed, and

Christ how we could talk smart and fast like 2 Jews do,
I could meet up with you after an AA meeting, count
on you to say good god girl, you need a drink, because

you knew you were going to die and you could say
things so brainsick as after I die, I want you to burn
my body in the street and eat my flesh.

Risa Denenberg is the author of Whirlwind @ Lesbos (Headmistress Press, 2016), In My Exam Room (The Lives You Touch Publications, 2014) and blinded by clouds (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014) She is a nurse practitioner working in HIV/AIDS care and end-of-life care. Risa is a moderator at The Gazebo, an online poetry board; reviews poetry for the American Journal of Nursing; and is an editor at Headmistress Press, a publisher of lesbian poetry. She lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington State.

This poem originally appeared in Spry Literary Journal.