Kent Neal

Conversion Therapy for a Straight Razor

After you left, the bathroom sink

overflowed. A plumber arrived,

dismantled pipes, removed

what had stopped the flow between us —

Our beard clippings dotted the ooze

of two seminal fluids, covering

the promise ring you tossed

before leaving me,

next to the straight razor, dull

in dried blood after having cut through

my abandoned flesh.

With water made holy

from distilled kisses and caresses,

I filled the kitchen sink, immersed

the straight razor several times, rinsing

my dried blood away.

The blade grated against

a whetstone until it gleamed.

With extended blade, I meticulously

trimmed my mustache. Then,

back into its leather case

in the medicine cabinet the razor went.

Maintaining the Line

I care for

an umbilical

lying along

the Atlantic floor,

stretching from

mouths to ears.

Anchors threaten

to break it. Sharks

bite

into its fibers.

Through it all,

I listen in.

Je suis enceinte.

I’m pregnant.

Their voices flow

from Boston

to Bordeaux.

Nous allons nous marier.

We’re getting married.

Their voices,

it absorbs.

Elle a un cancer.

She has cancer.

Their voices,

pulses of light.

Il s’est fait viré.

He got fired.

Their voices,

inhibited by

static and bleeps.

Like each repeater

I monitor along

the phone cable,

each conversation

amplifies the signal

connecting them,

unlike the way

a plastic sack

slumped against

a dumpster,

too dirty to mingle

with garbage—

my clothes

20 years ago.

With siblings silent

as snow fall, without

a winter coat,

our parents pushed me

out into the street,

just steps from the ledge

of a steep plunge

down through the air,

down through the waves

into the depths.

The numbness of

a million icicles

entered me,

then left.

So now, I listen.

Men Like Us

We, men like us, are what

with hips that swish, with

hands that flip, with

lips that lisp, when

kept from fire trucks, when

cut from rugby teams, when

banned from armies?

                                  Exiled

from manly endeavors, we’re asked

what wallpaper matches

these emerald curtains,

if that sauce

needs more salt, if this blouse

goes with those boots.

We, who may seem weak, take

off Truth's ugly clothes, make

up her honest face, take

on the damaged hair, place

on Truth's bare body

its sincere disguise.

Kent Neal, a gay poet, has published three poetry collections: The Compass, the Labyrinth, and the Hourglass (in French, ErosOnyx Editions, 2015), Where Saltwater Mixes With Freshwater (in English and French, Red Moon Press, 2017), and A Ray of Light in the Lion's Eye (in French, French Haiku Association, 2021). He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Originally from Oregon, Kent lives in Lyon, France. His poems have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Broadkill Review, Modern Haiku, and elsewhere. You can find him online at www.kentneal.com

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Candice M. Kelsey

Ekphrastic, On Anxiety, My Golden-Caped Lover

while viewing Klimt’s “The Kiss”

If art is a line around our thoughts as Gustav Klimt declared,

Then what does that mean for my depression & anxiety

Which are nothing if not a heap, or a thrust, of lines?

Can I knot them, sever them, belay or splice them—

Are they coiled too tightly? If art can be a simple geometric

Concept, I wonder what that means for mental health.

Do its lines hug like a Mobius strip, or twist its neck around

A galvanized dock cleat, or string the eaves like holiday lights?

When the glow on the lake signals the sun to call it a day,

Can we motor in toward the dock & toss its lines over

Like C.K. Williams tossed his lines across the page, tongue

Like the lovers in Klimt’s golden mosaic? Self-negativity

& intrusive thoughts like recurring motifs, geometric,

Our consciousness is an obscene embrace called poetry.

For My Daughter on Her 21st Birthday

November 2023

It’s a girl! She’s six pounds

and six ounces measuring nineteen

inches with blood-red lips

her eyes full of hope for the world

Four months after you were born

to our shock and awe

Baghdad fell from a U.S. bombing

campaign and you took

my nipple as Saddam Hussein’s

Ba’athist regime toppled

We are ready to sacrifice our souls

so as not to give up Iraq

we say this so no one will think

America is capable of breaking Iraqis

The month you were conceived

President Bush

declared Iraq one part of

the Evil Axis as our bodies

created yours and war

prepared a million fatalities

America will not permit the world's

most dangerous regimes

to threaten us with the world's

most destructive weapons

Two years into college

you found your voice and quit

the track team knowing it was time

to become authentic

you shocked your father

but I was in awe

She is beautiful, she is small

She don't wanna play basketball

But there's no tellin' what she might do

Georgia Rae sings John Hiatt

A year before we married

in shock and awe

your father and I stood

over a hundred stories high

on the South Tower

in love on Top of the World

If we learn nothing else from this

tragedy we learn that life

is short and there is no time for hate

–wife of Flight 93 pilot, 2002

Tonight you turn twenty-one

and I am toppled

from shock and awe at the Israel-

Hamas war because Daughter

you are living proof of

just how damn easy it is to love

A Tree Falls in the Forest of Men

1992 will leave you worse for wear | you will train for your first triathlon | days will be spent cycling, running, purging | watching Silence of the Lambs in the Oxford Theater will undo you | the scene when she helps him load furniture into his van | this will be the year you break your middle finger helping a stranger untangle the leashes of five dogs from a tree | you will apply to law school & cram eighteen final credits to graduate & ask your professor to stop calling  | your parents finally divorce | your father will refuse to remove his wedding ring | your mother will start an over-fifty singles group at Good Shepherd Church—Betwixters | a fuck you thirty years in the making | your father a lamb to the slaughter | takes in feral cats | places a felled Sycamore tree in his living room just for them | when they chase each other the branches shake as if the soul of the tree | this will be the year loneliness wins | the silence of bark | you will live at home after graduation | intern at a firm downtown | fall in love in the file room | your lover will get Miss Saigon tickets to celebrate your law school acceptance | that night your older brother will say this guy is a loser | you are forbidden to go | stupid you don’t answer the door | your brother will not remember this night | your lover will leave in his old Chevette | you will make a mixtape of break-up songs | in your recurring dream the felled Sycamore sprouts wings | your cry is heard

Because Your Husband’s Shirt is Ironed

is the punchline

of my husband’s assistant coach

meeting me finally

that’s how I knew you were in town

I politely smile

turn to hug my former student

who’s often ostracized for being queer

the lunch crew

misses you, Jacob tells me

I hug him again

to confirm my appreciation for the wrinkles

he causes in the First Presbyterian

private school fabric

while at the Pizza Joint in downtown

Augusta my son orders

a large pie and extra garlic knots

rather than the garden salad

dry no dressing

my daughter chooses

a week before the Homecoming dance

and eight moms start

a text thread to make plans

one mom texts I’m sorry

promises to be more organized next year

I respond let’s remember the dads

don’t have a Homecoming

dance group chat – no response

is the punchline as they iron

out the wrinkle that is me

Back in Los Angeles

a male colleague confesses

he walked out

of the Barbie movie incensed

at how boys were

portrayed claiming the scene

where a guy slaps

Barbie’s ass is unrealistic

he tells us in the faculty lounge

that never happens

and I ask him why I have a decade’s

worth of therapy bills

so later I binge

videos of post-menopausal orcas

protecting their sons and

a 60 Minutes segment

on the British zoologist Lucy Cooke

whose work with sloths

reminds me Darwin was a Victorian

man branding the female

species as a feminine

footnote to the masculine main event

oh how I want to see a man

call the female spotted hyena

passive coy and chaste

see her laugh

in his face after she’s bitten it off

Candice M. Kelsey [she/her] is a poet, educator, activist, and essayist who splits time between Los Angeles, CA, and Augusta, Georgia. A finalist for Best Microfiction 2023, she is the author of six books: one parenting guide, three full length poetry collections, and two chapbooks. Candice is a mentor for incarcerated writers through PEN America and serves as a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review. Please find her at www.candicemkelseypoet.com.

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Grant Chemidlin

After Seeing Queer Teens Holding Hands on the Sidewalk

I remember he tried to kiss me, 

so I blew him. 

Cold cover of snow bank.

Memory, like landscapes, can be 

transformed

with the right conditions.

That robin, wing-crushed, 

on our path back from sledding—

I always saw as lips, 

fragile thing that could have been,

what I wrecked. 

Now, I see it’s shapeless,

spilled blood,

a thrashing, red feeling,

anger—

not with myself,

not the blameless boy,

but that forest, snow-covered, stark 

& unforgiving hour 

that stretched across the afternoon, 

the years—

knee-deep, but blank

as bone.

Our First Turkey

cooked upside down for two hours

before the thought Where are the legs?

finally won & I took it out & you 

palmed the 21-pound bird

with dirty oven mitts.

& didn’t both of us, at some point, feel 

face down & drowning? Years of thinking 

something’s wrong with us? Look—unfolding

in the dining room: our longest table,

mostly women, gays,

a Last Supper scene that would

have gagged even the wisest men.

Wine swirling our faces pink. The laughter

spreading seat to seat

breaks us, breaks down 

our fixed ideas. Turns out—

the turkey’s great. 

Maggie says it’s the juiciest she’s ever had 

& she’s a turkey freak. 

We yell, Cheers! Eat pie. Play a murder mystery 

& when the last friend leaves,

you & I, we fall asleep, 

in our big blue bed, our naked chests, open 

to the sky. 

Grant Chemidlin is a queer poet living in Los Angeles. He is the author of What We Lost in the Swamp (Central Avenue Publishing, 2023), a finalist for the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Recent work has appeared in Palette Poetry, Quarterly West, Tupelo Quarterly, and Atlanta Review, among others.

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