Dispatches

Forbes and Martha

By SARAH CARSON

A yellow moon shines over the dark silhouttes of trees.

Genessee County, Michigan

On the night hike through what Wikipedia calls the picturesque 383-acres of the For-Mar Nature Preserve and Arboretum, a man in ISO rated cold-weather cargo pants plays barred owl calls from YouTube, then recruits a kid with a headlamp to hold a Bluetooth speaker to a dogwood tree. I imagine the owls shake their heads in their hollow, that somewhere else in the dark of fallen branches, salamanders yawn, a doe wishes her fawn would settle.

Forbes and Martha
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Brace Cove

By JOEANN HART

The ocean's waves hitting rocks on a shoreline.

Photos courtesy of author.

Gloucester, Massachusetts

It was mid-winter, so I timed my afternoon walk to end before the early night. Heading to the beach, I crossed a sea-battered causeway that dropped off to the salty Atlantic on one side, and the fresh water of Niles Pond on the other, ending at Brace Cove. Formed by two boat-breaking arms of intertidal granite, waves were still crashing into the cove from a recent storm. Migratory seabirds struggled to fly in the crosswinds. Added to the elemental roar of water was the steady screech of stones grinding in the surf, too rough a day even for the resident seals. As I stepped down from the causeway and onto the beach, I saw a man with binoculars around his neck. He was talking on the phone and there was a large, motionless shape at his feet. 

Brace Cove
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Genealogies

By LILY LUCAS HODGES

A golden object, shaped like a window with open shutters, sits atop a reddish wood table. The object is busy with delicate engravings: a cross; simple human forms, some adorning heart icons on their chests; water droplets; and palpitating lines. To the right is a container of prayer candles.

Photo courtesy of author.

San Francisco, CA

Gold is all you notice at first. A triptych dressed in shiny monochrome. The center of it is just above eyesight, so you’re left looking up at of Keith Haring’s altar, Life of Christ, an imposing piece, big enough to hold most of your gaze and envelop your mind. Haring made the original cast in 1990 and it’s considered his final work. Grace Cathedral in San Francisco acquired this edition in 1995 for its Interfaith AIDS Memorial Chapel.

Grace Cathedral is an imposing, Gothic-styled church presiding over Nob Hill. Even though I call San Francisco home, I sauntered in after Sunday mass like a tourist, and made my way to the chapel, a corner carved out of the back of the church. I started visiting this chapel after my Uncle Barry died. Barry wasn’t my blood uncle, but I only knew him as Uncle Barry, our babysitter, the artist, a gay man. Growing up queer myself, Uncle Barry was more my uncle than my mom’s brother—straight, conservative, 2,000 miles away—queerness lending itself to question family ties.

My Uncle Barry told me once that a university hospital wanted him to join a study of gay men who were exposed to HIV but never contracted it. How had he survived the epidemic? I chalked it up to the vaguely mystical powers that surrounded him. He was a dog whisperer. He said watches stopped on his wrist. He was born on St. Patrick’s Day. These quirks were enough for my sister and me to believe he was a leprechaun.

Since I was a kid, I’d known about Uncle Barry’s time in New York City. I’d heard the name John Paul. But it wasn’t until I was older and had read Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On that I realized what it meant that John Paul had died from AIDS, just as Shilts had, and Haring had, and so many others.

I came to Haring’s altar not for a memory, but to chase a ghost. When Uncle Barry died, I inherited his stuff, where I found John Paul, a Greek American from Nebraska with kind eyes, in a photo, staring back at me. Ancestors, one generation removed, flung through the storm. I came for a man I never knew but who meant the world to a person I loved.

A dark, mushroom-shaped sculpture sits in a church nave, elevated on a short pedestal. A vertical banner is partially visible behind it. The banner is royal blue and quilted with a shield-shaped patch, with two rectangular patches nested inside and brandished with names: "David" and "Ricky"

Photo courtesy of author.

The altar is cast in bronze but finished with gold leaf. It absorbs light and reflects it back with a glow. There’s no foreground or background to the piece. It’s not about depth, but energy, seeped in Haring’s characteristic style—outlined figures and expressive lines. At the top of the center panel is the Christ figure, a multiarmed body with a cross over its head. Drops fall from the body onto a crowd of outlined figures clamoring below, shouting, pleading. Angels circulate above, but they could be falling or rising or both, the duality of giving and taking, of life and death.

As Keith Haring’s friend Sam Havadtoy, who was present at the altar’s creation, remembers: “When Keith finished, as he stepped back and gazed at this work, he said, ‘Man, this is really heavy.’ When he stopped, he was exhausted, and it was the first time I realized how frail he had become. He was completely out of breath. He said, ‘When I’m working, I’m fine, but as soon as I stop, it hits me.’” Haring would pass away from complications from AIDS a few weeks later.

How do we deal with heaviness? It’s the gesticulating crowd that holds my attention. The sum of their frenetic energy, captured by a plethora of lines, almost frantic, all packed together from the left-most edge to the right. They demand your gaze. There are so many figures in the crowd, there were so many who lost their lives, and so many more who lost their friends, lovers, siblings, coworkers. I feel my own tears grow thinking about the sheer volume of loss.

#

There are donation stands in the room with rows of votives on them. I count eleven flames before stepping back to take a seat on the bench. Eleven souls remembered so far this morning. I realize I am no longer alone. A woman hovers over the stand. The chapel is small, and I feel self-conscious in the presence of her intimate moment. I look down at my cusped hands. Through the corner of my eye, I see she’s moved to the other side of the triptych. She spends a second there and then leaves. When I look up, I notice there’s a new light. Another soul remembered. Then, no, I see another, there’s two. How many light just one candle? If you lost one friend to AIDS, one loved one, would it be rare if there weren’t more?

A memorial quilt hanging vertically on a wall, made up of patches running two wide and four long. Some are minimally decorated, like a tombstone, while others are adorned with photo collages. One patch memorializes 21 lives alone, each represented by a candle labeled with initials and birth and death dates.

Photo courtesy of author.

Sitting in an interfaith chapel puts you into a spiritual sea of beliefs. I turn to death. A common one is that the soul doesn’t die. I was raised to believe in a finality to time on this world. The soul moves on elsewhere. But that’s just one view. Another is reincarnation. John Paul died about a month after I was born. Close timing. Had I missed the chance to inherit John Paul’s soul? Did another queer person born after me get it? What if many of my generation are living out a second chance for all those who passed away from AIDS—the artists, the churchgoers, the hustlers, the teachers, the partiers, the business owners, the actors, the designers, the activists and non-activists alike. A whole vibrant, textually complex force gone within a decade, inherited by another.
 

An organ bellows and fills the entire cathedral with a thick presence. It’s a familiar and uplifting tune, but I can’t quite put my finger on the name of it. I don’t attend mass. I only know the Christmas standards. But the sound is pleasant, and I don’t mind it. I look at my watch and realize the fifteen minutes I thought I’d spend had turned into an hour. As I walk out, I pass the baptismal font and peer in at the copper basin. I was baptized here in 1989, the year John Paul died, the year that AIDS cases in the United States surpassed 100,000. I don’t know if Uncle Barry was there at my baptism, if he had returned to San Francisco by then or if he was still trying to make sense of his life after John Paul’s death. At the height of an epidemic, how many others had to attend baptisms after a funeral?

I take one last look at the chapel, at Haring’s altar. Two women have just entered. It’s around 1:00 p.m. on a Sunday and if they look closely, they’ll see fourteen candles lit.

 

Lily Lucas Hodges (they/all) is a historian who’s written at the intersection of queerness and Catholicism for The Washington Post, TIME, and elsewhere. This is their first published piece of creative nonfiction. They are currently finishing a memoir on their gay uncles that questions LGBTQ+ generational archives.

Genealogies
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In Diamondville: Five Poems

By LAKE ANGELA

Black and white picture of four family members

Courtesy of Marilyn Kreger

 

Diamondville, Pennsylvania

Meryl: In Diamondville II

Quiet Uncle Peck was just five when the older kids
set him on fire. This was one hundred years ago,
and Grandpa told me the story. The closest hospital
to Diamondville sent him home, saying there was
nothing more they could do. Grandmother Verna took care
of him, anointing his wounds with devotion, rotating
his torso and arms, helping him walk again.

In Diamondville: Five Poems
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Ho’omana’o

By EDWARD LEES

A volcano

Photos by author.

Lahaina, Maui

When I was young, my parents
took me to Pompeii.
I remember the grouped bodies in the museum
of people who had tried to shelter.

Ho’omana’o
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Para-

 
Image of a wooded mountain range with gray clouds in the sky and green grass below.

Photo courtesy of author.

Cherokee, NC and Phoenix, AZ

 

As a child, I watched horror movie after horror movie. An attempt to make myself brave or to make others think I was. And now, I fear I’m manipulative because how much can a person really change. Bones and weight and cartilage can only be altered to certain degrees.

When it comes to film, body horror disturbs me the most. Things that happen to a person’s body without their permission. And sometimes they don’t notice until their bodies are so acted upon that they are grotesque, twisted, so completely othered with pain they are no longer sovereign, but colonized by something outside of themselves.

Para-
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From Sieve: A Preliminary Draft and a Ruin

By HILDEGARD HANSEN 

picture of a rusting door


Catalonia

The sea has moved inland.  Below the rectory on the hill, the fields and villages under the fog.  In the first blue of the morning.  The bell tower of the church in Lladó surfaces through it.  It is a few minutes away by car.  In Lladó the fog hangs in the streets, close to the ground.  Each building in isolation within it.  The old church, the locked doors: wood doors open onto metal doors that are molting their skin.  The keyhole the size of an eye.

From Sieve: A Preliminary Draft and a Ruin
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Salamisim

By CHARISSE BALDORIA

A sepia-tone image showing a young girl with a ribbon in her hair smiling next to a piano, one hand affectionately resting on the edge of the lid. The wall above is adorned with elephants.

Photo courtesy of author.


Manila, Philippines

In the lanai’s half-light, a softened sun to my left and amber on the keys, I played the piano for my father who did not know the names of notes. I-bitin mo, he said in Tagalog, shrouded in incandescent glow as I shifted from one chord to the next, a nine-year-old on the cusp of competition learning how to cadence. And so, I slowed into suspension, this bitin near the end of the phrase—and all stakes hung in the balance like the last inhale of a life or the final somersault before the thunder of disappointment or applause.

Salamisim
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Saturday

By HANNAH JANSEN 

Rockport, ME


Saturday                                                                                                

At the laundromat the whir of machines,
whorled & busy, the pleasure & difficulty

of stillness     Waiting, sockless, I aspire to be
the cross-legged woman reading a magazine,

Saturday
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