In this issue, we feature finalists in the 2021 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award.
art by Mark Yale Harris,
poetry by Jendi Reiter,
poetry by Robert Cataldo,
poetry by Eugene O'Connor,
poetry by Bryan R. Monte,
poetry by J Brooke,
poetry by Braden Hofeling,
poetry by Vivian Imperiale,
poetry by Olivia Elle and
poetry by Saralyn Caine
Mark Yale Harris
Crush
Medium: In glass and in bronze
Dimensions: 11"x14.5"x3.5"
Copyright © by Mark Yale Harris
Journey
Year 2018
Medium: Alabaster and steel
Dimensions: 27"x7"x14"
Copyright © by Mark Yale Harris
About the Artist
Born in Buffalo, New York, Mark Yale Harris spent his childhood enthralled in a world of drawing and painting. Though honored for his creative endeavors, he was encouraged to pursue a more conventional career. After finding conventional success, the artistic passion that existed just beneath the surface was able to present itself. Harris began sculpting, and has since created an evolving body of work in stone and bronze, now featured in public collections, museums and galleries worldwide, including: Hilton Hotels; Royal Academy of London; Marin MOCA; Four Seasons Hotels and the Open Air Museum - Ube, Japan
Jendi Reiter
when people look at me I want them to think, there's one of those people
I took a certain pleasure in informing the gender clinic that even though their program told me I could not live as a Gay man, it looks like I'm going to die like one.
—Lou Sullivan (1951-91)
Leather, stitches, pills — while you were proudly burning
your short life into hidden histories
like initialed hearts
pen-knifed in an oak,
I was slouching in lace,
every adventure stopped for questioning
at the border of my bleeding age.
Do you want to fuck a boy or be one?
Do you want to be kissed or important?
On a one-question test the lesson
of flying colors is:
loneliness is only legible in the wrong clothes.
But you, too, loved the pony sparkle of diaries
unlocking with a flirtatious click
like high heels tossed on a bedroom floor.
Your passable soprano screams for troubled
boys with dirty guitars didn't stop you
from swaggering, short and bound
for a private victory, into the dancing men's darkness.
I was raised on stories of not being believed —
the one about the switched drink,
two bodies in a car, the girl
who becomes graffiti instead of a woman —
and the only other one, supposed to encourage us
to read Shakespeare and walk on the moon,
as long as we removed the concealing
helmet to be end-of-episode brides.
People die of everything, Lou,
don't let them turn
your brief time to be honest into a disease.
It's a girl thing, to bond over betrayal
by our bodies' dumb delight
as if wounds make us better than the men we wanted.
We're tired of that.
Three decades from your final transition
to spirit, those who cursed you with pious cautions
now plead their pale innocence breathing
casual contagion on the American feast.
Ancestor, carry me, your brother
through this unromantic plague.
Semi-finalist for the 2021 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award. This poem will be included in their forthcoming collection, Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022).
Copyright © 2021 by Jendi Reiter
About the Author
Jendi Reiter is the author of the novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016), the short story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press, 2018), and four poetry books and chapbooks, most recently Bullies in Love (Little Red Tree, 2015). Awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for Poetry, the New Letters Prize for Fiction, the Wag's Revue Poetry Prize, the Bayou Magazine Editor's Prize in Fiction, and two awards from the Poetry Society of America. Two Natures won the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction and was a finalist for the Book Excellence Awards and the Lascaux Prize for Fiction. Reiter is the editor of WinningWriters.com, an online resource site with contests and markets for creative writers.
Robert Cataldo
Erased
for Preston Byrd Lightsey
The zinnias,
lemon yellow,
pumpkin,
vermilion,
gold and lavender,
were bunched together
in tall tomato cans,
equally bright.
Customers admired
your brilliant eye
for effect.
The tomato cans,
regrettably,
were not for sale.
Your shop in ’77,
I’m told,
one of the few,
was a gay-friendly
oasis
for young men on break.
On a wall
in a Provincetown condominium,
you hung a picture
of two men in bed:
shirtless,
one reaches down
to get something on the floor;
the artist’s self-portrait,
miniscule,
foreshortened,
I made out
on the round, shiny surface
of the wooden post.
Not without mischief,
you gave the painting
a telling name:
“Reaching for the K-Y.”
This year
at Christmas
your card didn’t arrive
the first
or second of December,
nor did we hear
your drawling voice
at the other end
of the line;
we grew concerned.
I mailed a card
while Roger.
Googled your name:
Preston Lightsey.
Surprisingly,
a photo,
an obituary came up;
your thick moustache
is now white.
You died a few days before,
we learn later,
with Lewy Body Dementia.
The obituary tells us
things we don’t know,
but things we do:
your thirty years here
in Providence,
the shop,
a Provincetown condo,
lovers and gay friends
have been omitted,
as if a life before dementia
had been erased.
“A celebration of life…,”
no irony here,
“will be held
at a later date.”
Finalist for the 2021 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award.
Copyright © 2021 by Robert Cataldo.
About the Author
Robert Cataldo is the author of four novels and a memoir, whose work has appeared in Bay Windows, Zone, a feminist journal for women and men, Backspace, and the Arlington Literary Journal, among others. His poem "Ancient Find" was published in Gradiva, International Journal of Italian Poetry, 2014. A travel essay of his on visiting the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy's flat in Alexandria, Egypt is being featured currently in Thoughtful Dog. Robert lives in Providence with his partner of forty-three years.
Eugene O'Connor
Gerard Manley Hopkins's Nightfall Fancies
Tonight, as the sun dips below
the city’s cramped horizon,
setting its smog on fire,
I, at the end of another tiring day,
run chalk-coated fingers
through my thinning hair.
I survey my barren room
with its narrow bed,
basin and pitcher, a small mirror
to regard my haggard face—
so unlike that rascal Wilde’s silk trappings,
his fine suite at the Ritz,
indulging his taste in rent boys—shit smutch
on the satin sheets, smears of lubricant.
I’ll sleep as always alone in bed,
where I might dream myself of stout farmhands,
that blacksmith’s muscled arms
and sometimes (mea culpa) have a wank.
Or else, for a laugh, fancy myself
a curly-headed Ganymede who snares the eye of Jove
(king of gods and he wants me!)
and is borne aloft to heaven
to serve him wine on a golden salver—
red wine to moisten my dry mouth
and soothe me into sleep before light rises
on another day in class to endure
my students’ mocking laughter, their execrable Latin,
me expostulating with my skinny arms
and running narrow fingers
through my chalk-raked hair.
Finalist for the 2021 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award.
Copyright © 2021 by Eugene O'Connor.
About the Author
Eugene O'Connor is a poet and writer who lives with his husband in Columbus, Ohio. In 2017 he retired from his position as Editor in Classics and Medieval Studies at The Ohio State University Press. His scholarly publications include an English translation, with introduction and notes, of the Renaissance humanist Antonio Beccadelli's Hermaphroditus. His poems and translations have appeared in both print and online journals and collections, including The Classical Bulletin, The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, The Comstock Review, Mead, Poetry Pacific, Pudding Magazine, and Roman Poets of the Early Empire (Penguin). His essay on the queerness of Gerard Manley Hopkins appears in Victorian Poetry (vol. 58, no. 1, spring 2020). Hopkins's queerness is something that has as yet been too little explored.
Bryan R. Monte
Thin Strips of Latex and Fabric
“Isn’t it too warm to wear that?”
the wheelchair transport driver asks
staring at my surgical face mask,
his still hanging from a radio knob.
“Not as hot as being on a ventilator,”
I say, as his eyes widen
in the rearview mirror
and he quickly puts his on.
I’m relieved his side window isn’t open,
unable to move to avoid an airflow
in the back where I’m bolted
to the floor in my wheelchair.
He reminds me of the men
who complained when I insisted
they put on a condom or leave
during the previous pandemic,
who whined about a loss of feeling,
half of them dead before their 35th,
grateful for those thin strips of latex or fabric
that hopefully will help me see my 65th.
Finalist for the 2021 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award.
Copyright 2021 by Bryan R. Monte.
About the Author
Bryan R. Monte is a writer, editor and anthropologist. He won second place in the 2021 Hippocrates Open Poetry and Medicine Prize Competition. His poetry has appeared in Assaracus, Bay Windows, Friends Journal, Irreantum, Poetry Pacific and the South Florida Poetry Journal as well as in the anthologies Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets (Sundress Publications, 2013), Immigration & Justice For Our Neighbors, (Celery City Press, 2017), Voices from the Fierce Intangible World, (SoFloPoJo Press, 2019), and in the 2021Hippocrates Prize Anthology, (The Hippocrates Press, 2021), and is forthcoming in Without a Doubt: poems illuminating faith, (New York Quarterly Books, 2022). He edits Amsterdam Quarterly.
J Brooke
Self-Portrait at Age 9 as Albert Cashier
You’re likely fuming at me being late phoning to check on you but I’m in a trans conference learning how much I have in common with Albert Cashier Did you never think it odd as a kid I garbed in camouflage carrying a rifle all around our apartment? Cashier enlisted in the army during the civil war, fought for three years until it was over. Your massive steel apartment door guarding perennially buffed marble floors sported your beloved double Medeco locks. Me, on high alert code red sleeping with my bayonet in bed. Did you not think bizarre, me patrolling our home chronically armed? Grenade beneath my pillow, index finger wearing the ring controlling the pin After the war Cashier worked as church janitor, cemetery worker, street lamplighter. Calculating the drop from my 4th story bedroom window repeatedly entertaining jumping not dying, my bed sheet parachute mitigating partial paralysis I’d weigh against my shortened sentence Cashier was allowed to vote after the war though women weren't allowed back then, no one knew Albert dressed his woman’s body as a man to work it out. Hiding perfectly still in my closet, hours zipped within my sleeping bag, elongating breath suspension imagining which door you’d allow Milly remove my body bag through In the end Cashier was buried in his civil war uniform and given full military funeral. If you die before I’m able to phone what would you like to be buried in? Black? dark dirt on cheeks where blush otherwise goes—Dressed as me at nine years you could maybe feel what I felt crawling around POW-style praying allies, liberators, emancipators could appear. Semi-finalist for the 2021 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award. Copyright © 2021 by J Brooke.
About the Author
J Brooke (they/e) won Columbia Journal’s 2020 Womxn’s History Month Nonfiction Award, was a winner of Beyond Words Literary Magazine’s 2020 Dream Challenge, received Honorable Mentions in Craft Literary 2021 Flash Fiction Award and Streetlight Magazine's 2020 Essay Contest, was finalist for North American Review’s 2020 Kurt Vonnegut Prize and the Maine Review's 2021 Embody Award. Publications include Columbia Journal, Harvard Review, Maine Review, Southampton Review, Bangalore Review. Brooke was Nonfiction Editor of Stonecoast Review while receiving an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine.
Braden Hofeling
The Surface You
I am in love with the surface you.
It is not you I truly speak to
but a reflection-
the surface of a pristine pond,
where dark creatures hunt and swim
mere inches below the surface.
You are a fragment trying to be whole,
a single piece masquerading as the entire puzzle-
but I have felt your jagged edges.
No, people have not been kind to you.
You are covered with scars,
your image is a collection of broken things,
shattered expectations and monumental misunderstandings.
While I love the surface you,
the one smiling from the mirror's edge,
I must reach deeper
and pull you from your cage.
The only way to truly see you
is to set your façade shard-ways.
Semi-finalist for the 2021 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award.
Copyright © 2021 by Braden Hofeling.
About the Author
Braden Hofeling is an emerging poet located in Portland, Oregon. He has two self-published collections of poetry with themes of mental health, coming of age, and religion. He is working on a third collection currently.
Vivian Imperiale
AIDS Epidemic Chain of Care
It started with one person
getting sick
and then sicker
until it became obvious
he couldn’t go it alone
so a friend stepped up
and was there through it all
until the end.
Then the friend got sick
and then sicker
until it became obvious
he couldn’t go it alone
so a friend stepped up
and was there through it all
until the end.
Then that friend got sick
and the pattern continued
on and on
and
on and on —
the sick friend
the helper
the sick helper
the next helper…
The initial innocence of thinking
that illness was rare
soon transformed into the realization
that it had a name
and AIDS was a hurricane
that walloped the community
from all directions,
destroying first the structure of lives
and then those lives themselves.
It started with one person
and ended when the hurricane
left nobody I knew in its wake.
Semi-finalist for the 2021 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award.
Copyright © 2021 by Vivian Imperiale.
About the Author
Vivian Imperiale uses poetry to memorialize and honor her closest friend lost to AIDS in 1985. She lives in San Francisco and has been published on websites, in journals and in anthologies.
Olivia Elle
The Gay Experience: F for Faith, F for—
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church,
but some do not believe in us.
They name us trespasser.
They name us sinner.
They command us to repent
as they throw insults in our faces,
bullets in our bodies—as they nail
our souls to the cross.
They abandon us alive,
flames of pain licking at our lungs
and pierced hands, burrowing
into our thoughts until we cannot help but wonder
what if. What if
there is some truth—
Some of us wither under the weight,
lungs raw and aching and oxygen-deprived,
and for whose sake are they crucified?
Others grow stronger;
feeding on fire we turn to rebellion
and revolution as we fight
for the resurrection of the dead
and the acceptance of the world to come.
Our House built crosses within us
long before they reached for nails,
and our God refuses to let us burn.
He teaches love,
He who made us,
so we refuse to concede ours.
We sit in confessionals,
the command to repent
ringing in our memories.
They named us sinner;
they named us trespasser.
But these are not our sins,
and we will not obey.
Semi-finalist for the 2021 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award.
Copyright © 2021 by Olivia Elle.
About the Author
Olivia Elle (she/her) currently lives in Virginia. She graduated from Emerson College in 2020, and currently attends Johns Hopkins University’s Master’s program. In 2015, she self-published her book Tales of a Navy Brat: An Anthology, and has since published her short stories “Obsidian” and “A Dragon’s Guide to the Many Uses of Ovens” in Generic. She has worked as an editor and copyeditor for multiple literary magazines and presses, including Generic and Emerson’s Undergraduate Students for Publishing.
Saralyn Caine
Softer Petals
Between my legs I feel his swell
and I hear yes, this is normal,
invite him in, be the soil for his seed…
I anticipate the kiss of his ivy leaf,
but it cannot compare
to the softer petals of my youth—
those roses and irises,
lilies and marigolds
that delighted and rested
on my silken ground in auras
of sweet pea and strawberry fields.
Hers
is a pussy willow bud
I long to pluck
and place upon my cheek.
Fingers tingle
like the tip of a fox’s tail
tickling, teasing garden flesh.
I wish he’d let me explore
the wilderness a while
longer, before potting me
in this greenhouse he built
to keep out the wild
evening primrose.
I am left blank and barren
by the lack of her lips
and
by the lack of his swell.
Semi-finalist for the 2021 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award.
Copyright © 2021 by Saralyn Caine.
About the Author
Saralyn Caine is a biromantic feminist masquerading as a conventional wife (but not mother). While she loves both men and women, she loves words more. She has been published in various college literary magazines and The Poet’s Haven Digest. Her debut poetry collection, Magic & Mayhem, is available on Amazon.