Randall Horton
the new love

new love wearing logical rouge lipstick, conceptually & very positive, sashays: illogical would be too ignorant a testimonial when strolling stiletto heel pumps against the grain of traffic. an illusion, is art, magicians never predict what’s under the skirt: make-believe tina turner legs. an optical illusion: under a chandelier of bright moon, winos howl perfectly at night, the peter can’t see straight phallic tendencies or won’t nobody challenge hocus pocus power or the new in love, traditionally. men & women do not blur boundaries. to overrule wall paper painted blue little boy loving pink learned pugilism. to survive who you calling sissy ass muthafucka new love dotted eyes. amazed at the I in he she or them, few understand the muscle of I am like code switching down logan circle could be a runway.

Randall Horton is  the author of Pitch Dark Anarchy (Triquarterly, 2013), The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street (Main Street Rag, 2009), and The Definition of Place (Main Street Rag, 2006). With M L Hunter and Becky Thompson, he edited the anthology Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora (Third World Press, 2007). His creative and critical work has appeared in Callaloo, Sou’wester, Caduceus, New Haven Review, and The Offending Adam, among other journals, and in the anthology Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose and Art on HIV/AIDS (Third World Press, 2010), edited by Kelly Norman Ellis and ML Hunter. Randall is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea González Poetry Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow. Randall is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Haven.

This poem appeared in the anthology Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose and Art on HIV/AIDS (Third World Press, 2010), edited by Kelly Norman Ellis and ML Hunter.

Liam O’Brien

L. Sullivan

Parrot sounds. His room was full of them,
great cages. Mirrors, photographs, and Lou
so little in his clothes. I could be there.
He said, Tuberculosis of the blood.
There’s power. Somebody has to open
their big mouth, he said, and did. So, history.
A slight man getting slighter: there is power.
A working, wrecking power—he sat to answer
the worst questions, and wasn’t so good at it,
but he held up. It held him, killed him. Lou,
I’m scared, I’m waiting. The crimson macac sings:
Would you be free from your burden? Take it in.
There’s power in the blood. I fear I’m down
now by the railyard. Sound of the brakes like bells.

Salt Sheet

There’s a wound in me, wound up in me, expert
like a corkscrew unscrewed. And the cork is kept.
Press a palm over it—help, there’s a wound in me—
no, three. No, more. No, here is a ship at sea
and she sinks. She was the enemy. So the borer—
the boy with his brace & auger—he swims over
to the Golden Vanity. Entreaty. Captains,
can’t trust them far from land. And so he ends—
the boy—I’m drifting with the tide. They stitch
him in his hammock—it was so fair and wide.
How many holes got the enemy? How many
left to plug, crew bailing, boys tiring in the tide?
Fight’s over, brace & auger. Wrap me in my salt sheet.
What deserves disease will get it, or has already.

Liam O’Brien grew up on a small island outside Seattle. In 2012, he graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, where he received the Stanley and Evelyn Lipkin Prize for Poetry and the Nancy Lynn Schwartz Prize for Fiction. His work can be found in print in Unsaid Magazine, and online at The Offending Adam, Blackbird VCU, Buffalo Almanack, and Industrial Lunch. He is currently pursuing his MFA at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and is one of the editors of Vetch: A Magazine of Trans Poetry and Poetics.

“Salt Sheet” appeared on PBS Newshour Poetry. “L. Sullivan” is not previously published.