THE NEW WORLD

by Barlow Adams


It’s not my birthday
but they bring me cake,
a rainbow bearing my name
with candles like lighthouses
on a multihued shore,
welcoming me to safe harbor.
What a beach,
what a holiday we have discovered,
a paradise prescribed through 
HR interventions, signs saying
love is love, we are all one,
Life Gets Better Together.
We get tomorrow off for the parade.

I face the flames, 
wax runs with my mascara
sizzling like sugar.
Caramelized callousness, 
calls back the heat in my shoulder
where a cluster of circles remembers where
my father used to snuff his Pall Malls.
A fag for a fag, here’s a flag
I claim this land, you scallywag.
And none of these brave explorers of equality,
in business casual and formal apology,
realize that they are not the first to arrive,
that I am not an undiscovered country.

Barlow Adams is the author of two novellas. His poetry has been featured by Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel and Dos Madres Press, and is set to appear later this year in formercactus and Finishing Line Press.

SECOND COMING

by James Bettendorf

Detail of poster for The Young Messiah film.

Imagine Jesus is alive again.
He has to go to school,
it’s the law.
The kids tease him
his hair so long,
Are you a boy or are you a girl? 
He hears the judgments
echo in his head
as he walks home
to build furniture
with his immigrant father
while his mother
takes in wash
so they can eat.

He is smart, hides away
in his teen years, builds
a robot of wood and spare parts
from the appliance junk yard.
He covers it with silk and denim
so it looks like a real person
When his real father says

          IT IS TIME

he substitutes the robot
so he can avoid the pain
and won’t have to roll
the stone again.

He goes on to star
in Hollywood comedies
as a transgender female.

James Bettendorf is a retired math teacher who recently completed a two-year poetry internship at the Loft in Minneapolis  after having taken many classes over the years.  He is a member of the Forward writing group at the Loft.  James has been published in Rockhurst Review, Common Ground Review, Verse Wisconsin and Light Quarterly as well as the last eight volumes of Talking Stick.

SPECTRUM: NOVEMBER 8, 2016

by Deborah Kahan Kolb

The day the red-ones drew the curtains and chose the orange-one
to mind the white oval that had embraced the black-one
nearly three thousand days --- that day

was the day the blue-ones formed
a veined parenthesis to contain the pulsing mass
of the red-ones, spilling sideways,

was the day the red-ones and the blue-ones
never turned to purple and the green-ones
stayed scattered, shoots pushing up to be counted,

was the day the brown-ones huddled and burst, and
waited for the white-ones, the eye-holed pointed ones,
to bear a burning broken cross, its twisted arms akimbo,

was the day the pink-ones, like the blue-one who
missed her grip at the finish, snatched steel from
between their legs and bound themselves each to each,

was the day the tan-ones veiled themselves
into invisibility,

was the day the yellow-ones shifted, and strove
for the exits,

was the day the beige-ones bent double, and breathed
dios mio,

was the day the rainbows clung together, their colors melted
and shriven,

was the day a keening Hallelujah rose up from the teeming streets
and evanesced into the violet sky,

was the day I waited for the raging ones to bring a yellow star
for me.

Deborah Kahan Kolb is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Windows and a Looking Glass (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Poetica, Veils, Halos & Shackles, and Voices Israel. She lives in Bronx, NY. 

THE POPE IS LIKE A REPUBLICAN SENATOR

by James M. Croteau

Apologies are like prayers
without action. Catholic claims
of intrinsically disordered and
contrary to natural law are like
allowing Sig Sauer MCXs and
AR-15s to be purchased with
no restrictions. Sorry's not enough.

James M. Croteau lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with his partner of 31 years, Darryl, and their two Labrador retrievers. Jim grew up gay and Catholic in the U.S. south in the 60’s and 70’s and his writing often reflects that experience. His poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Right Hand Pointing, Queer South: LGBTQ Writers on the American South and Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry among others. His first chapbook will be published by Redbird Chapbooks in 2016. He occasionally blogs about writing at talkingdogsholymen.blogspot.com.

JUNE 12, 2016: WHO COUNTS

by James M. Croteau

New Orleans firefighters in 1973 assisting a patron of the UpStairs Lounge, a gay bar that had been set on fire. Thirty-two people died in the attack. AP Photo via The New York Times, June 13 2016

We skipped Pride to pack
for our annual Maine trip.
We left about 7AM and
on the on-ramp to I-94
we first heard:

at least 20 dead and 42 injured,
another shooting, Orlando,
a nightclub. This will be
our 27th trip  to Ogunquit.
Our first was 31 years ago.

We've never been there with
the right to be married. We
stopped for lunch just past 1 o'clock
at a Panera east of Cleveland.
I walked our dogs. My partner

went to get food. He returned
with 50 dead and 53 injured, and
at a gay bar. I google news from my iPhone--
the largest mass shooting in US history.
I also know it's the largest mass killing

of LGBT people in US history because
only five years ago I learned of the story
of Upstairs Lounge arson in New Orleans
during Pride month 43 years ago. It took
16 minutes to extinguish the fire and 32

of our lives. I turned to Facebook  feeling
my stolen youth raw and inflamed
again. I get reminded of Wounded Knee.
The biggest depends on how and who
defines what.  The army, with the

semi-automatic weapons of 1890,
massacred at least 150, maybe 300
people. I'll be 60 in three months.
It's near 4, and we're at a toll booth
near the outskirts of Buffalo.

James M. Croteau lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with his partner of 31 years, Darryl, and their two Labrador retrievers. Jim grew up gay and Catholic in the U.S. south in the 60s and 70s and his writing often reflects that experience. His poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Right Hand Pointing, Queer South: LGBTQ Writers on the American South and Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry among others. His first chapbook will be published by Redbird Chapbooks in 2016. 

RESPECTING BELIEFS

by F.I. Goldhaber

Ad created by AML

If your beliefs include marginalizing other people
because of their skin color, their religious faith, their gender,
their sexual orientation, their origin, their age;
If your beliefs allow justification for depriving
other people of their civil rights to life, liberty, and
happiness pursuits declared in seventeen seventy-six;
If your beliefs condone slaughter, rape, assault, subjugation,
imprisonment, execution of those you see as "others";
If your beliefs create stigmas to prevent those who appear,
think, love, or speak differently than you from making a living,
feeding their families, buying a home, earning retirement;
If your beliefs allow children to go to bed hungry, the
sick to go bankrupt, the disabled to struggle to survive,
the mentally ill to wander homeless, the store clerks to need
welfare benefits, the elderly to freeze through the winter;
If your beliefs prevent access to reproductive health care
while keeping young people ignorant about the facts of life
and the realities of sexual health, choices, and pleasure;
Then I'm under no obligation to respect your beliefs.
Keep your hate to yourself. Keep it out of our country, state, and
city laws, our schools, parks, stores workplaces, and public restrooms.

As a reporter, editor, business writer, and marketing communications consultant, F.I. Goldhaber produced news stories, feature articles, essays, editorial columns, and reviews for newspapers, corporations, governments, and non-profits in five states. Now, her poems, short stories, novelettes, essays, and reviews appear in paper, electronic, and audio magazines, ezines, newspapers, calendars, and anthologies.

MAKE-BELIEVE QUEEN BEY

by Matty Layne

many a gay have played Beyoncé
for a day. a night really. we drag our-
selves on stage, reach for revenge in
that paper—those ones & fives we tuck
under the seams. tuck, like everything else

between our thighs. down in the bayou,
I wove a weave into my own fair hair,
glued fierceness to my lashes, layered
my face w/ base after a close shave—
that green shimmering beneath my eyes.

how i filled nude hose with rice, tied two
knots for c cups so the boys could cop
a more natural feel—as if they would
know the difference. how i cinched my love
handles w/ a duct-tape corset, squeezed

into red sequin hot pants & stomped those
six-inch stilettos down the steps. Bootylicious.
i knew my audience. how they watched me—
bite by bite—down that pb&j on stage. they
weren’t ready for that jelly. you can’t serve

a crowd what they expect. but i’ll never be
the Queen. my body can’t fill those cups.
i’ll never wipe away the base & still carry
color on my face. no natural ’fro to tuck
beneath a black beret, & i’d never fit into

leather hot pants these days. i can’t afford
the golden rounds of ammo to drape over my
flat-chested fantasy of what it must be like.
but I do know that bullets look so much
better outside of a beautiful black body.


Matty Layne is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University. His queer 'lil ditties on social justice have appeared in or are forthcoming from TheNewVerse.News, This Week in Poetry & The Furious Gazelle.

AFTER THE CONFEDERATE FLAGCAME DOWN

by Margaret DeRitter

“not an uncommon example of humanity in SC: Leroy Smith helps white supremacist to shelter & water as heat bears down.” Image/caption source: @RobGodfrey

I came upon a wedding guest list tucked inside a legal pad. I needed the pad for a workshop: “Racial Issues in the LGBT Community.” But the list? What was I hanging on to—the way Amy once loved me? I know it wasn’t perfect, but what is? Hell, if love required perfection, there’d be no love at all. I was in a mood before I ever walked into that workshop. Then we had to name our preferred pronouns. I wanted to say this and that. I know trans people suffer, but do we really need to make an 80-year-old straight guy with a beard say he, him, his? By the time someone said hetero-normative, I was sick of words. It helped when Lester told us he was there because his gay son died in a car accident. Plain English. Real grief. The next day a newspaper photo caught my eye: black cop guiding sun-baked supremacist up South Carolina stairs toward air-conditioning. The cop looked sure on his feet, the white guy ready to topple onto his swastika. It was the day the Confederate flag came down at the state house. A reporter asked the cop why he thought the photo went wild on the Internet. Love, he said. I think that’s the greatest thing in the world—love. Yes, that, I thought, breaking down at last—for Amy and me, for Lester and his son, for the cop, for the hater, for the whole racist, trans-phobic, hetero-normative world.

Margaret DeRitter lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her dog, Murray. When she’s not walking him in the woods, paddling her kayak or writing poetry, she teaches college journalism classes and does freelance writing and editing. She worked as a full-time journalist for 30 years, including 22 at the Kalamazoo Gazette, Her poetry has appeared in Scarlet Literary Magazine, Melancholy Hyperbole, Midnight Circus and Encore.

JIGGERY-POKERY

by Max Gutmann

Image source: DonkeyHotey

“Jiggery-pokery!

Now it's just SCOTUScare!”

Grumbled Scalia, en-

Raged at his peers.

“Unconstitutional

Somersaults. Applesauce!

Really! What next, people?

Marriage for queers?”

Max Gutmann has contributed to Folly and other publications.

FORMALITY

by Peleg Held

Upon a bench one long sought June
a court has crawled from its cocoon
in a winged deliberation

if water should despise the dam,
if wool should curl out from the lamb,
if wood should burn against the cold,
if youth should pulse beneath the old,
if push should starving come to shove
if those that simply do may love.


Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. He writes poetry, does woodworking and lately, dreams of the summer. pelegheld(at)gmail.com

BEING AM-ISH IN AN OLYMPIAD WORLD

by Krista Genevieve Farris

Image source: LGBTAmish.com

I got a call sometime last summer. He was shunned.
I wasn't allowed to cry, the conversation was never about me
but of his death and her muncha muncha on his segmented life,
the unfurling of her wings and a fighting not to be cliché butterfly fragile flight.

I consumed our youth, chewed on Polaroid bits,
tried to digest as I kicked the covers. Didn't say-
it hurt to swallow jigsawed shots  
it slashed each time I couldn't utter his name.

I gurgled I love you with a bloody throat
bi-sected, di-ssected- am-ish- the shunning- her-of-him
the sister who wears make-up, whose hair curls just so,
the one who tells me what it is to be a woman.

She is not Caitlyn Jenner. I am not a cool Kardashian.
We don't have implants, an airbrush, good lighting or awards.
I didn't hear her called beautiful 10 times today
or a hero when she kept her factory job.

He was. They were. She is.
We are.
I am.


Krista Genevieve Farris lives in Winchester, Virginia with her husband and three sons. Her recent poems, essays and stories can be found in The Literary Bohemian, Right Hand Pointing, Cactus Heart, Shot Glass Journal, The Screech Owl, Brain, Child Magazine, Mamalode, Literary Mama, The Rain, Party and Disaster Society, Indiana Voice, Tribeca Poetry Review and elsewhere.

DON'T CALL IT A COUP, JUST SING TRALALA

by Siham Karami

Egypt: Rape and sexual violence perpetrated by security forces 'surges' under el-Sisi's regime in campaign to 'eliminate public protest' —The Independent (UK), May 19, 2015

Hail to the army! All hail the police!
Stay out of trouble and give us a piece!
Of what, you'll find out—meanwhile, we own the street!
Our weapons are loaded. You're lucky to eat.
To us, you are sugar, and we are the ants.
So get in the station, and pull down your pants!

We round up the students, professors, the doctors,
the girls in hijab, the sons and the daughters,
with Al-Sisi's blessing and superpower bucks,
we barrel-bomb neighborhoods, get free-for-all fucks,
make everyone watch so they'll know in advance
how bad things can get when they pull down their pants!!

No one can touch us! We do as we please!
The law says you're guilty, so crush you like fleas!
We grab you from classes, dispose you at will.
Then parents go looking—their spines feel the chill!
So scream—and we'll charge there's a bomb in your hands—
c'mon little terrorists, pull down your pants!!

We'll fuck you at your place in front of your man.
Your daddy's on death row, so get in the van!
We write up the charges, the judge slams his gavel:
Guilty as charged! Tomorrow the gallows!
The tears of the mourning will only enhance
the pleasure we get when you pull down your pants!!

We're the new god in town. How we barged through the door,
told a Brotherhood bitch to get down on the floor.
She carried her baby and dared to talk back!
So we threw the kid out of the window, like smack!
And we tore off her clothes and we told her to dance
with police stations ringing out: Pull down your pants!!


Siham Karami's recent work is or will be published in such places as The Comstock Review, The Rotary Dial, Möbius, Measure, Unsplendid, and The Raintown Review. She works in the tech industry by day, and spends nights with poetry, owls, and medicinal herbs.

SING A SONG O' MIKE PENCE, A CHILDISH SONG AND DANCE

by D. Brian Craig

Song:

Sing a song of Mike Pence

he claims it's our mistake

to read into this Hoosier law

more than wedding cake.

Dance:

But Governor, yes or no,

will the law allow discrimination?

Could you make this about something else?

May I ask you seven more times?

Origins, Meaning, and Interpretation:

Some infer in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

a prognostication wherein Belch (no accident that) 

tells a clown (nor in that):

"Come on; there is Mike Pence for you: let's have a song."

Some, however, find the name a corruption, or at the very least

too great a price to pay. On this not all folios agree.

Other scholars find parallels in the 21st-century social amusement 

of placing live politicians on a hot plate, 

as a form of entremet (something to be enjoyed between 

servings of cute animal videos).

The recipe most often called for birds

of a uniform feather to be locked in an oven,

or statehouse, from which they would, after a time,

poke their heads out half-baked;

an uproar would ensue, after which they would be returned,

only to emerge finally

singing a different tune

to the great amusement and delight of the electorate.

No corroborative evidence supports either of the above,

though the earliest tradition, in one stanza,

clearly mentions Naughty Boys

from whom little is heard of afterward.

D. Brian Craig is a scientist, engineer, and writer, though not always in that order, nor separately. His writing has appeared most recently in The Pitkin Review and FEBS Letters.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO JOHNNIE

by Robert Farmer

BEREA, Ky. — I WAS raised amid the coal fields of eastern Kentucky, but I was always drawn to nearby Berea. The hamlet, tucked into the lush green hills on the western side of the Appalachians, has a long legacy of equality and free inquiry — among other things, it’s home to Berea College, the first integrated and coeducational college in the South. There are lots of folks like me in Berea, who came here for its professed openness and diversity. But we had a rude shock last week, when the City Council voted 5 to 3 against an ordinance to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The vote illuminates a new reality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans. The equality divide we face is no longer between red and blue states, but between urban and rural America. Even as we celebrate victories like this month’s Supreme Court order on same-sex marriage, the real front in the battle for equality remains the small towns that dot America’s landscape.  --Small Towns, Small Hearts, The Battle for Gay Rights in Rural America, Silas Housecoat, NY Times, October 22, 2014. Image source: Angela Worldtrekker.

Whatver happened to Johnnie
who wouldn’t dress out for high school gym,
loved chatting up the girls,
rode them around
in his blue convertible back in ’48.

Once later when we gathered,
smug from foreign places,
he spoke of wild parties in San Francisco
and looked the part
long before our little mountain town
woke up to the world and The Castro.

I’ve looked everywhere.
We’ve lost him.
He’d be about 83 now.
Probably dead.
Back then they just disappeared
from little towns all across the country.


Robert Farmer is a retired forester who lives in Cleveland, Ohio and occasionally publishes poems in small journals.

BEFORE DAWN IN TEHRAN

by Raul Puzon

           for the painter and the singer

Iran hanged teenagers Ayaz Marhoni and Mahmoud Asgari in 2005 because they were gay.
Image source: ExecutedToday.com

European parliament angers Iran with human rights resolution: Islamic republic dismisses MEP accusations of freedom of speech restrictions and call for executions moratorium.  --The Guardian, April 7, 2014


Why cannot I forget that August mud
gray in the rain, the old revered facade
harsh in the afternoon, the stubborn god?

I still remember your unsaid goodbye,
the orchard’s hush, the throatless bulbul’s sigh,
the sudden air, the angel’s phantom lie.

The pomegranates are crimson now but odd.
If I’ll go first, recall that tulip bud
I gave you when the crescent moon unclad.

With covered eyes and limbs untied, I’ll try
to wilt and sway— together you and I.
In autumn do the soft persimmons die?

Beside you I’ll engrave that earth with blood.
With you I’ll tell the world our last aubade.


Raul Puzon is a human rights and LGBT activist who writes poetry and short fiction.

SEEING THE LIGHT

by Kristina England

On March 7, 1965, a march by civil rights demonstrators was broken up in Selma, Ala., by state troopers and a sheriff's posse.

When Martin Luther King marched,
he had equality in mind.
No line drawn down the middle
on who could cross;
just people walking together
for freedom, for rights.

Women took the same stride
with voting, abortion,
the ability to work
alongside a suited man.

The government, now in foot
with same-sex marriage,
plans to offer survivor benefits
should a partner pass away.

As an assistant professor,
I met a young man who lost
one mother to cancer,
then watched his second mom
lose her bank account in court,
her love deemed illegal, non-existent.

So many people have given their lives
for the truth of their skin
whether color, religion, persuasion.
And, though, a child will apologize
for the silliest of things,
we'll skirt around the word sorry
with laws, holidays, and parades

while the ghosts of our past linger,
waiting to play judge
to the child, woman, man
marching down the street,
exposed, vulnerable,
ready to fall victim
time and time again
to our heavy, unwarranted hands.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her fiction and poetry is published or forthcoming at Gargoyle, New Verse News, The Story Shack, The Quotable, and other magazines. Her first collection of short stories will be published in the 2014 Poet's Haven Author Series.

ON FLAG DAY I THINK BACK TO MY YOUNG STUDENTS SPEAKING

by Jane Herschlag

Photo: Jane Herschlag

                  
               Two planes, each crashed into one tower.
               People got hit by flying pieces of glass and concrete.
               All people care about the dead people and their families.
               We need to make flags.  The blue part stands for liberty.
               They draped a big one on the collapsed building.
               In France they were praying and many countries sang,
               God Bless America.

Despite the terrorists’ actions they see love in the world.
They see the pure, mythical America
as I saw it in childhood, the country that
saved my family from Hitler when others refused.

Our big red-white-and-blue blowing in the breeze—
a dwarfed pride still swells in me despite our lost democracy,
our taint of WMD’s, of Corporations Are People,
of Monsanto’s GMOs, for the first time in the history of the world,
changing the DNA of humans, animals, vegetation,
contaminating organic farms.

As wealth rules, America declines,
ethics fall to the toxic curb, along with the poor.
Betsy Ross what do you think of us now?
Each of your stitches were sewn with hope
and wishes for America’s wisdom.

I can’t even find my thread; it’s hidden
under years of fallen bodies,
corrupt bankers’ viscous lies.
Big Pharma and giant chemical companies
have smeared our red and blue into
our white stripes of virtue.  Our field of blue is dotted,
not by stars, but by lobbyists demands.

I want our flag to mean what it used to mean,
when city colleges were free, after
the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements.
I want my flag to wave for immigrants,
lesbians and gays.  I want again
to be proud of being American.


Jane Herschlag, a former apparel designer, textile designer, teacher, and model home decorator,  has a degree in Apparel Design, a B.A. in Creative Writing, and Women’s Studies from Hunter College.  Her Masters in Creative Writing is from CCNY.  Jane has won numerous writing awards and placed 1st with her  photography/poetry at Richter Assoc. for the Arts in Danbury.  She is an avid poet, photographer, and loves to Stage Homes for selling, refinancing, and simply enjoying.  She has shown at the Danbury Fair Mall, Midtown Café in Danbury, at the historic building—30 Bridge Street in New Milford, at American Pie Restaurant in Sherman.  She combines her passion for the visual and the written by writing ekphrastic poetry, poems inspired by the visual.  She curated readings at the West Side YMCA in NYC for seven years and has run a peer workshop since 1997.  Her Docu-Poetry collection Bully In The Spotlight is published by Pudding House Publications.

PENITENTIAL SEASON OF LENT

by Martha Landman

"Police brutality alleged at Sydney Gay Mardi Gras: Outcry over video showing man being thrown to the ground during arrest." --The Guardian, March 6, 2013


                                "They just slammed his head. There's blood all over the ground."      


I had an epiphany the day before Ash Wednesday:
I drew my tourist card and earned $30m for the state

of New South Wales celebrating equal marriage rights
a thousand police officers proudly parading on my side

for this one day we’ll forfeit the right to see young revellers
manhandled and slammed to the ground, punched in the head

‘cause the cops told us so; during this time of penitence, and
for as long as you love me, we will not film the violence

the blood curdled cries: what have I done wrong?
For as long as we can breathe we’ll talk about

that sound of his head hitting the floor, Delta’s buzz
at the gay parade, the confessions still to be made.


Martha Landman is an Australian poet whose creativity feeds off the news.