Ron Searls
Elegy for John B—

The count begins at eight hundred.

You stood upon my December porch,
It seems but three years ago.
The sun was bright with morning;
Camellias white and crimson gleamed;
Upon our door lay a wreathe you wove.
In top hat, morning suit, tails,
You could have stepped from a page of Dickens
As you met each guest with a carol clear.
O angel tenor, how you loved the song!
But I cannot hear it.
Is it cold time which battens up my ear?
Or do I only listen for the ghost
Of my own Christmas, my past?

The count is now six hundred.

Two summers ago, you dwelled with us,
My three children and my gardens
Were your care—all thrived
Within your hands—it was a time
Of violets, of water and of glee.
My son remembers how together
You two worked the plants in that
Garden which is gone.
We spoke of holly, azaleas, jade,
Phlox, ferns—I recall the
Meal you made even for me.
But I was wary, and like some
Secret vampire, squinted for
Signs of blood.
They did not know.

The count is now four hundred.

I saw you that last time, only a year ago,
As you worked once more, the garden.
I watched you with hidden eyes, peeking
From behind eyelids of guilt
Upon your wizening frame, as the sweat
Sheened your skin, as you gleaned
In the afternoon.
I noticed: As you moved,
Your muscles moved too clearly;
You were like some northern god
Whose magic armor had been tricked away
By a scheme of Loki;
You stood naked on a planet I dared not reach,
Etched by alien fire.
How could we both be on this one earth?

The count is now two hundred.

In the evening gloom I look
Out to the lamp post, by the water-oak.
You dressed it in jasmine, which only
Now has bloomed, belated gift,
So sweet, the florets pressed to my face
Summon dreams of Arabian nights—antique perfumes—
I breathe for you.

O that I were a Prospero, and my Ariel art
Command the raging tempest of disease
To speed you to an isle as full of song and sweet,
Forever, as this moment that you grew for me.
But my futile numbers cannot awake:
You sleep in the coma god’s arms,
Protected with implacable grace.

The count is zero.

Moonbeams alone alight—
I hear you son, my brother, my love:
The whip-poor-will
Voices requiem in the thickets of the night;
The funeral owl is your spirit’s flight;
Away it lofts, drifts, soars,
Leaves:—
This earthen, leaden, clotted heart,
Which longs, O, which longs,
For my lost, my John of flowers,
My forlorn, my John of songs.

Author’s Note: This poem was written in 1995, on the day John died. He was 26 years old. John’s partner was a friend of my wife’s. John was a florist and had a beautiful tenor voice. We had known he had AIDs for over three years and had hired him to look after our kids and take care of our gardens, until he was no longer able to work. The count mentioned in the poem is the John’s T-cell count.

Ron Searls’s poetry has appeared in The Lyric Magazine and has been been distributed to friends and acquaintances in a private edition. A recently retired software engineer, his last project was as co-founder of Nanigans, Inc., an adtech startup. Before he retired, he remembered that he hadn’t graduated from MIT, re-enrolled, and finished with the class of 2015.

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Bernadette Crawford
Two Poems

Winter in July

Ice
under blue skies

The women in the office
wrap themselves in chunky knits

A careless glance freezes my voice
You are lost inside your too-big cardy

You know I know but
shake your head

press your finger to your lips
We speak no words

Later that year
we scatter blood red petals on your coffin

Three Paper Clips

The digital clock in the waiting room
marks time with a loud click
16:35 on an atypical Friday afternoon and I’m not focused
on the life cycle of stick insects in an out-of-date National Geographic

Waiting for the doctor to finish her phone call
I’m faceless as the digital clock on the wall
Fried chicken with salad she sings into the mouth piece
Usual Friday night delight and I’m focused

on three paper clips clinging to a globe-shaped magnet on her desk
The doctor finishes her call and smiles
with so much empathy I already know the answer
Wish I wasn’t here, but there, eating fried chicken with salad

I long for the sameness of Friday wine, friends and you
I’m clinging to life’s magnet with three paper clips
Would you like me to call someone she smiles
with so much empathy I already know the answer

16:55 when I call to tell you what I already knew
Faceless clicks clock my life in twenty minutes
Clips slip out of focus
And my stick insect life cycles by on cue

Bernadette Crawford serves on the editorial board of the poetry magazine Skylight 47. This year she won first prize in the Poetry Ireland/Trocaire competition and her work has been published in several journals. She taught for many years in Lesotho and later worked on the Irish bilateral aid program in Zambia and Tanzania. She lives in County Galway, Ireland.

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Casey Charles
Salt Brothers on the Coast of East Africa

The sea comes sideways to Saadani, northeast from India.
All day she rakes grains from red pools into white mounds.
The men shoulder sacks down the levy, salt ready for Dar.

Sometimes three bags her brothers stacked on their backs.
Sinews spent. Midnights they rolled over in bunks, mating.
Until their tongues turned white, lungs filled with fluid.

In the dorm built by the Delhi company, she cannot breathe.
Instead she treads the shore at sundown, bucking headwinds,
Her cheeks bleached by grief and white caps,

streaks dried to a film across her wasted face.
Her brothers buried under the shallows, in silt,
under muddied waters that keep the fish away,

keep the ache alive in her stomach,
waves breaking over and over in rows.
This sea never quiet in her old slave town.

Its loud hush a curse, a gift.
Against its din, she can weep
unheard. She can scream,

“Why has this sickness come to us?”
Her neck bent to broken shells, burned by the sun,
foreman who watches her every move.

She hates these plastic bags, these empty bottles.
This useless stuff. Her sores. Their wave from the sandbar.
White noise of laughing brothers.

Casey Charles is the author of The Sharon Kowalski Case: Lesbian and Gay Rights on Trial (University Press of Kansas, 2003) and a collection of essays, Critical Queer Studies: Law, Film, and Fiction in Contemporary America (Routledge, 2012). He is also the author of the poetry chapbooks Controlled Burn (Pudding House, 2007) and Blood Work (Seven Kitchens Press, 2012), as well as the novel The Trials of Christopher Mann (Regal Crest, 2013). His novel The Monkey Cages and Zicatela, a poetry collection, are forthcoming in 2018. Charles is an English professor at the University of Montana in Missoula.

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Norman Belanger
Clean

Are you clean? My Grndr date asks me.

I pretend not to know what he means.
Are you disease free? He asks.

(It says on my profile “POZ”
My status is no secret
But who reads anymore?)

He’s cute, too young, his name is Kenny

When I tell him

His pretty eyes look everywhere but at me

When I tell him

He looks for an escape

He forgets we’d planned to walk along the river
To look at the newly turned leaves.
He forgets we had plans

He thanks me for the latte, leaves his raisin scone untouched

“I gotta go” he says—
And he’s gone.

He doesn’t even look back as he walks away.

It’s been too long, to feel like this

To feel what?

Dirty?
Unclean?
Diseased?

It’s been too long a road.

These young kids of now were not there then

Those early days, those terrible days

When I was his age
younger even
cuter even

When people died of the plague
When we were fags
When we Acted Up

They were not there

When Robert died, he was the first
When Joe lingered in hospice
When Everett hung on like a ghost, a shadow

They were not there

When so many died, died young,
died angry,
died scared

And we who were left behind were young,
and angry,
and scared

Back then I would have said, if I could have said:

Take care of me
Hold me
Love me…

(Can it be a generation has no idea what we went through?
Can it be that we forgot ourselves?
Can it be that we may need to act up again, be angry again?)

For now, I’m not angry

Not even sad.

Just tired.

It’s been too long a road.
to feel so alone as I go
out in the air that is cold

out into the air that is clean.

Norman Belanger is a nurse in the field of HIV care and also POZ since 1999. His work has appeared in A&U, Red Fez, Sick Lit, and Penmen Review, among other publications.

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Rodney Terich Leonard
Carnal In A Time of PrEP

#

M4M—
lights low on my knees or ass up
vgl/ddf white, 29, gym body
sane & safeub2HIV-negative
as of yesterday 10/08/15
love to down & mount BBC
total anonymous here
prefer DL daddy types
cock pic gets reply

#

October’s
beyond didanosine
or videx®
stavudine
or zerit®
zidovudine
or retrovir®
we come to
tenofovir/emtricitabine
or truvada®
i’m on PrEP

#

Silver Schwinn leaning against the wall
heels & cheeks glad on a stool
i pipe
we don’t kiss
i bite neck
i think i hear
more afraid of desire than dying
i up my grunt
the buzzer read Canup
never saw his face

Rodney Terich Leonard is the founder of the Harlem Artists Salon which showcases writers, scholars, musicians and visual artists at various career levels. His work has appeared in The Red River Review, Margie, The Huffington Post, Callaloo, The New York Times, and The Village Voice, as well as in the anthology For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Still Not Enough: Coming of Age, Coming Out, and Coming Home (Magnus Books, 2012), edited by Keith Boykin, and other publications. A resident of New York City, he holds degrees from New School University and NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

If you want to support the mission and work of HIV Here & Now, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

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Jasper Wirtshafter
Love letter to the negative space

of our queer elders.
An entire generation
of martyrs, known
only for their death rattles
only ashes, hazmat suit
funerals full of empty
seats, friends
already in the ground.

They refused to bury you
with dignity; our culture
is built from your bones.

Now, we take pills and forget
our ancestor’s names. Who
is left to teach us our history?

I hope to build a future
of anything but granite
and sand. I hope our children
remember us as more
than martyrs.

Jasper Wirtshafter is a trans spoken word poet from Athens Ohio. His work has been appeared in A Quiet Courage and is forthcoming in the journal Drunk in a Midnight Choir and in the anthology Not My President anthology (Thoughtcrime Press) and elsewhere. He performed with F Word Performers, a queer feminist art collective, for four years. He hold a BA from the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College and is currently studying for a Master of Public Affairs degree at the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

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Marjorie Moorhead
Starlight in My Pocket

A song I’m learning says, “Catch a falling star.”
It says, “put in your pocket.” A clue:
keep it there for when needed, when things look blue.

Keep it, for when troubles start growing,
creating a fright.
The song says, “and they just might.”

Troubles are easy to forget without trying,
the lyrics say: all that’s needed, “a pocketful of starlight.”
Who’s got starlight?! Will it help when I’m crying?

I keep a rock from the beach in my pocket.
Smooth, to rub. Silky soft surface.
Dissipates worry. Works; don’t knock it.

Smoothed by the sea, not a scratch or scar.
Is it my “starlight”? Gives comfort;
like music, while driving the car.

Trees whizz by. I sing out, at the top of my lungs
releasing anxiety; things that have stung.
Not kept in reserve “for a rainy day,”

this orb, too, in my pocket, helps worries fall away.
An everyday tool. With me while I cruise,
in car, or on foot, singing the blues.

Editor’s Note: Here’s a link to the 1957 hit recording by Perry Como.

Marjorie Moorhead is a mother, sister, wife, daughter, and AIDS Survivor living in New England, navigating the positive life since the late 1980s. It has been quite a transformation. Marjorie’s poetry will appear in the Opening Windows Fourth Friday Poets collection published by Hobblebush Press in 2018. Her poem “Wandering the Anthropocene” was chosen for inclusion in a 2018 book of climate poems that will benefit the Environmental Justice Foundation.

Irene Borger
1992

day-off, free tickets
someone’s misguided idea
of a good time

Fourteen young dancers have come to Universal Studios. Eleven are orphans. In the next hour, we will pass a shoot-out at the old corral, a sea monster attack, a fake earthquake in a fake subway station and an exploding bridge. I’m there to write their story.

Before the war, the company director, (soft inward eyes), danced the great monkey parts at the palace. Then he hiked through the mountains for three cold months, buried gold costumes under banyan trees, lost all eight sisters and both parents, escaped the Khmer Rouge. After the war he found the hand stitched fabrics eaten by white ants.

piece by piece by piece,
he stitches the company
back together

I sit on the open-air bus between the translator and the director. Is it true that eighty percent of the artists were murdered? Closer to ninety, the translator says. Our bus crosses the vibrating bridge set to explode. There are gunshots, fake gunshots. The translator, a dancer who years before was trained to glide serenely, covers her face. The youngest dancer, who played Sita last night, and her grandmother, one of three soloists to survive the war, huddle together in the seat in front of me.

In the morning, I will sit with my friend who is dying, (my friend who once danced), and describe how the grandmother, the King’s favorite, held both my hands as we waited on line for hot dogs. I will read him stories from the program, tell him how the hero draws a magic circle around Sita to prevent evil from touching her, and stop before I get to the part where the protective spell is broken. I do not want the protective spell to be broken.

His eyes will be closed by then (he is tired, my friend who is dying) but he’ll open them and smile when I tell him that

in the old days,
dancers were thought to be
signifiers of happiness.

Irene Borger is the editor of From A Burning House: The AIDS Project Los Angeles Writers Workshop Collection (Washington Square Press, 1996), which developed from the writing program Borger founded as an artist-in-residence at AIDS Project Los Angeles. The audio version of From a Burning House (Simon & Schuster Audio, 1996) was nominated for a Grammy in the spoken word category and installed at the Whitney Museum. Borger currently serves as the director of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, an unrestricted prize of $75,000 given annually to five risk-taking mid-career artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theatre and the visual arts. She edited The Force of Curiosity (CalArts, 1999), a book of interviews with twenty recipients of the Alpert Award marking the program’s fifth anniversary. Borger teaches on-going writing workshops in Los Angeles and the Bay Area and at Rancho la Puerta in Tecate, BC. For information on training workshops for writers wishing to start community-based writing programs, and on the use of stories from Burning House for public readings, please contact Borger via email: iborger@alpertawards.org.

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Joseph Dorazio
Two Poems

Sanguinary

He wished he had died
from AIDS in his prime
—not survival guilt,
his place on the quilt;
on lucky days the Aztecs
plucked ripe young men,
their unzipped chests
sustained a sun, while
Quetzalcoatl lubed in blood
got fucked.

Moving Day

Moving is like dying—
only you get to live;

I’ve spent half my life
moving.

I knew some men
who had full-blown AIDS,

they sold their 401(k)s,
and reversed their mortgages:

all packed-up and ready to go,
just as the new drugs came out.

The mess of unpacking—
maybe this time I won’t stack the cups

carefully in the cupboard,
or fold my clothes neatly in a drawer—

maybe I’ll just leave everything in boxes.

Joseph Dorazio is the author of No Small Effort (Aldrich Press, 2015), As Is (iUniverse, 2013), and
Remains to Be Seen (iUniverse, 2013). His poems have appeared in The Worcester Review, The Southampton Review; New Plains Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day run-up to World AIDS Day 2017 via our SUBMITTABLE site.

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John Whittier Treat
Smallpox First Came to the Pacific Northwest in 1770

—In homage to Thom Gunn’s poem, “To a Friend in Time of Trouble”

It finds it has lost itself upon

The smooth red body of a young madrone,

I built my home long ago among the madrona trees

From which it turns toward the other varying shades

On the brown hillside where light grows and fades,

My home is on a brown hillside not everyone can climb

And feels the healing start, and still returns,

My window’s view of Mount Rainier reminds me

I came from elsewhere, whole

Riding its own repose, and learns, and learns.

Your names, at first a few and then many, are lost to me now

John Whittier Treat is the author of the novel The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House (Big Table Publishing Company, 2015), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. His short stories have appeared in the journal Jonathan and in the anthology QDA: Queer Disability Anthology (Squares and Rebels, 2015), edited by Raymond Luczak. Originally from New Haven, he now lives in Seattle. For more information visit johntreat.com.

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