Poem 13 ± World AIDS Day 2017

Ed Madden
Bedside, 1995

—For Sam

you were the first though you were not
the first that is I had known others though
I hadn’t known some only after you knew
us but you didn’t know us you looked around
the white room the bright air your body all
agitation my fella once yours stood at the foot
of your bed and rubbed your feet beneath the sheets
and we talked a bit about your dog your cat your
sister till you calmed that was the last time we saw
you watched him old friend quiet still listening

 

logoEd Madden is the author of Ark (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016), Nest (Salmon Poetry, 2014), My Father’s House (Seven Kitchens Press, 2013), and Prodigal: Variations (Lethe Press, 2011). His poems have appeared in Assaracus, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, James Joyce Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Collective Brightness: LBGTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011), Best Gay Poetry 2008 (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2009), and Texas Poetry Calendar 2010 (Dos Gatos Press, 2009), among others. Ed is an associate professor of English and director of Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina, and serves as the poet laureate of Columbia, South Carolina.

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Poem 12 ± World AIDS Day 2017

David Schimmelpfennig
The Road Forever Traveled

Not the type of road I’d otherwise pick.
No forks like Frost’s: just dirt, rutted and unkempt.
Meandering out to the main one
that sticks out on maps.
To the smooth tarmac that isn’t devastated
every time the donga’s get upgraded.

How many times have I walked this road?
Really a foot trail wide enough for a car.
Ever since I was three, one way or the other.
This time back toward my family.
Away from the bus stop,
electricity, telephones, running water.

Toward the hut, the village, our kraal.
No longer my hut or kraal—
I’ve made peace with that turn I chose to take.
Away from home and kraal,
probably that time when the bus was late
and the offer so inviting.

A momentary pleasure behind the store.
A turn taken never to be undone.
The cost was cheap, but who really pays?
Did I or is it them?
How are they without me?
I must go back and see them, minus me.

It’s not far away,
I can see the smoke from evening fires
sliding over the veldt.
Cooking smoke that lingers above the grass.
Not as hot as brush fire smoke
that hurries up into the sky.

I can see the breath of a few young men that pass.
A chilly night, but no steam passes from my lips.
Follow the footprints into the village.
The prints tell a lie, no new ones left behind from my steps.
Our hut’s door is open and dark
Do I need to sneak, ashamed how I made them cry?

My dearest Evelyn is easiest to see,
closest to the fire
kneeling in front of her
dented aluminum pot,
teetering on a grate over a fire
cooking pap for six.

Why all choked up, now that it’s meaningless?
I was seldom home for this.
Hardly ever enough for everyone;
a good enough reason.
Now without me they have even less.
She turns the white porridge to keep it from burning,
steam joins the smoke rising
through the hole in the thatched roof

We have four children together.
Blessed by almighty.
The eldest are boys, seventeen and eighteen,
working separate jobs in the city.
They send home money in a single envelope,
and look out for one another.

Our eldest daughter is fifteen
and will be married soon.
Such nimble fingers and strong back.
I got most of her lobola but it went too fast.
She fetches the water for most dinners
and brings enough in the plastic drum for breakfast.

Our youngest is twelve.
She does well in school and
builds up a big appetite on the running team,
always in the podium mix.
That makes three,
but this pot will shortly feed six.

Evelyn’s brother also rolled the dice with HIV
and had even better odds than me.
At least she had a regular job at the Hy-Vee Mart
But like times before kissing dice in town, he lost.
Two of his six will stand at their posts by this pot
and share space on the floor of the hut tonight.

AIDS also took my youngest brother.
There’s no Xhosa word for brother-in-law,
just her husband’s brother.
Our families are close,
even more so as they get smaller.
One of his boys waits feeling guiltier than the others,
not too far from the aluminum pot.

He’d rather be out of the hut;
beyond the village,
out in the quiet half-darkness lit by the moon.
So since, as usual, there’s no rain,
he’ll make a ball for his pocket out of his serving,
and head out for as long as he has courage.
No money for school; no curfew

The pap is starting to slowly thicken
as stomach’s ache in anticipation,
and after some sleep and breakfast tomorrow,
Evelyn’ll strain her back and collect firewood again.
Carry it home on her head in a tied-up-heap.
No one cares that parafin is subsidised and stoves are cheap.

They’d all say the same to anyone,
mieliepap cooked over a wood fire,
is number one.

 

logoDavid Schimmelpfennig’s work has appeared in Science and National Geographic. He holds a BS in industrial management from Purdue University as well as an MA and a PhD, both in economics, from Michigan State University. He was a senior Fulbright Scholar at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, in 2002 and a principal investigator on Rockefeller Foundation projects assessing the impacts of genetically modified crops in South Africa from 2000 to 2008.

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Poem 11 ± World AIDS Day 2017

Barbara Rockman
Ladder of bone rungs a love poem

I could barely get a finger hold      slender chest 
I fell against     impossible height to him
wraith of a man    corpse I insisted on    I had no foothold  
how his concave met me    oh barely-there man   
my body greater than      A girl wants linear and light-filled  
the length of tracks that tightens at the horizon  
Even his arms were see-through   his thighs were rigging 
for what would never sail      How hungry for kindness    
he was sapling     my prowling orchard      his long fingers 
hovered but did not hold    His burnt thumbs    stubs I pocketed 
I traced his skeleton collapsed from hanging    joints and 
hinges splayed     we rearranged    he  my half-heart   I  his already-sung
beautiful ridged man and the pandemic so far off 
it might be cloud over the street lamp we stood under   
those nights before autumn’s long windows    
before book spines cracked beneath us    
before ashes wormed and hung 
as the shutters of his chest closed       
as he turned toward what would kill him 
and still     I clung 

logoBarbara Rockman is the author of Sting and Nest (Sunstone Press, 2011), winner of the New Mexico-Arizona Poetry Book Award and the National Press Women Book Prize; and Into Moss and Singing (forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press) .Her poems appear in Calyx, Bellingham Review, Cimarron Review, Louisville Review, Nimrod and bosque. Rockman lives and teaches writing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is Workshop Coordinator for the Wingspan Poetry Project, which brings poetry to victims of domestic violence.

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This poem first appeared in Askew.

Poem 10 ± World AIDS Day 2017

Roger Ian Rosen
Bloody Fingerprints on an Innocent

Is it true that I still crane my neck,
Try to be noticed,
Try for some form of acknowledgement
At the mere sight of a gay man woman trans couple queer family bi nonbinary.
Yes, me too. Me too, I cry out in glances.
I’m here. We’re here. Together. I see you. Do you see me?

Growing up under the Reagan regime,
Listening to them
Decry my life not worth living,
Pounding pounding pounding away at their daily message:
My life worth death. Painful and alone and tossed
Both fickly and purposefully into heaps of other garbage.
Deserving of all ills real and imagined, figurative and
Literal.
A slow dawning as the door of normal slammed in my face
In the mirror one horrifying morning.
Oh, look. A faggot.
Me. Faggot. Death. Deserving. Me. Alone. Abomination. Me.
Disease itself. Me.
Pouring into me, through me, souring.
This host beautifully hospitable, giving the disease of condemnation a fertile ground to
Infect and cancer.
I had no choice—knew nothing else. There were no options of knowledge.
But I found them. Hungry and sick and
Desperate for a cure, I found them.
They were chemo, AZT. I ingested word after word,
Idea after idea, rant after rant.
Seeking an unlearning of things I didn’t know I’d learned.
Unconscious acceptance of the never questioned. I got high
On their questions. And strong. Each thought a piece I could
Pick up and glue back with glitter and lavender glue.

So much has faded, allowing the pulsing
Rage of still unanswered questions to flow and bloom in semi-automatic words that
Rapid-fire from these lips.
But so much remains.
Because I know it’s weird that after all this time
I still crane my neck to notice and to be noticed noticing.
You too? Yeah, you too. Me too, too.

But it is me now.
And I hold it close, lest I forget
Where I come from and who made me me,
Whose inhumanity stared back at me in that mirror.
Who stuck their thumbs into my still wet cement and left
Their bloody fingerprints on an innocent.

 

logoRoger Ian Rosen writes so that his husband might ever experience silence. He is author of Backdoor Bingo (a melding of gay pulp fiction and over-the-top camp, sex, and silliness…with audience participation!), which continues to unfurl on social media #backdoorbingo (_roger0nimo_ on Instagram and @Rogeronimo_com on Twitter) even as we speak. Roger is currently working towards an MFA in interdisciplinary arts at Goddard College in Vermont. (Editor’s note: I could not help myself from posting a link to this video of Roger at work/play.)

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Poem 9 ± World AIDS Day 2017

Robin Gorsline
A Seminary AIDS Quartet

First, there was Mike,
young, skinny, creating wonders
of liturgical truth,
not ever accepting
even the existence of a box
into which the chapel worship had to
fit.

And then Kevin
Roman Catholic theologian
who talked and wrote
openly, honestly,
about that which the Vatican fears most,
sex.

Stephen came to seminary
to untangle the mystery—at least to him, an atheist—
of why HIV/AIDS,
the virus he knew he carried,
freaked out so many good Christian
folk.

Finally, it was Norman,
later-in-life clergy student
keeping his sexual life
a secret until the virus
invaded, took him home
dead.

These four, among the finest men
I have known, part of an army
of men-loving-men New Yorkers
dying as so many
struggled to get the world
just to notice.

I see yet how it might have been,
the world graced by their gifts—
Mike hanging blue bunting
across the globe for all to know
Christ is not only dead, risen, coming again,
but already and always here;
Kevin leading papal panels
on sex, gender justice;
Stephen publishing the poems
bursting from his strong, hallowed hands and soul;
Norman preaching God’s truths
to a flock, a city, nation even,
hungry for different lives and world.

What might have been
can only be
what we carry of them
beyond our tears—
In vows to end the pandemic
still striking too many
good women and men, especially
Black men kept back and down—
in prayers of gratitude
for these four and so many more
whose too brief sojourns among us
leave us yearning for more.

 

logoRobin Gorsline is a late-in-life writer, claiming his passion after a varied career in public office and service, non-profit administration, religious leadership, and LGBTQIA and anti-racism activism. He writes several blogs, including SexBodiesSpirit and The Naked Theologian. He is a father of three and grandfather of two, lives in Greenbelt, MD, with his husband of 20 years and their standard poodle.

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Poem 8 ± World AIDS Day 2017

Risa Denenberg
the night we tossed your ashes

mingled with rose petals
into the whitecaps at Cherry Grove

can you see us

standing at the eastern edge
of sand at midnight
and the others, your friends
stampeding into waves
at high tide butt-naked
calling to me

come in come in come in

because of you
I have ebbed
into a bystander
the rest of my days
without buoyancy or grace

 

logoRisa Denenberg is the author of the poetry collections Whirlwind @ Lesbos (Headmistress Press, 2016), In My Exam Room (The Lives You Touch Publications, 2014), blinded by clouds (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014), Mean Distance from the Sun (Aldrich Press, 2013), and What We Owe Each Other (The Lives You Touch Publications, 2013). Denenberg lives a quiet life in a place of stunning beauty on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state and earns her keep as a nurse practitioner. She is a co-founder and editor at Headmistress Press, a publisher of lesbian poetry.

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Poem 7 ± World AIDS Day 2017

Laura Secord
For Women Living with HIV

Survivors with spindle arms and sofa bellies,
whose lovers died when they were young,
who toiled and raised their kids in isolation.

Some grew the extra neck of choking fat
the early meds gave. Some cannot retire,
sunk so deep in drug debt’s mire.

Most dismissed many years ago, any dreams
of sensuality, and struggled daily to keep
their status secret. Here’s to the women

who nursed their families, unbeknownst,
keeping church offices, doctors’
practices afloat, who made art, built monuments

to heroes, saved their schools, rescued
baby turtles, but turned from love,
fearing rejection from disclosure.

They balanced books, were fantastic cooks,
nursed our dads in ICU,
saved lives, went home alone.

They sang soprano in choirs, fed shut-ins,
counseled addicts and braided hair.
Some told their families, and were demoted

to a lonesome paper plate beside the Christmas china,
despite working nights to fund a niece’s tuition.
Here’s to survivors no one praises,

who lived in hiding―
and to those who broke their bonds of silence,
who stepped outside,

inspired others to live freely,
no longer censured by self,
no longer hostages to HIV.

 

logoLaura Secord’s poems have appeared in the Birmingham Weekly, Arts and Understanding, The Southern Women’s Review, PoemMemoirStory, Passager, the HIV Here & Now project Na(HIV)PoWriMo April 2017 online feature, and the Burning House Press poetry blog. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Sierra Nevada College. For thirty years, she combined the life of a writer and performer with a career as a nurse practitioner in HIV care. She is the co-founder of Birmingham’s Sister City Spoken Word Collective, and an editor of their upcoming anthology, Voices of Resistance.

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Robert Carr Reviews Madelyn Garner’s Hum of Our Blood

What Laughter? What Joy?

A Review of Madelyn Garner’s Hum of Our Blood

By Robert Carr

Some experiences require the passage of twenty years before you can write about them. This is the case with Madelyn Garner’s powerful Hum of Our Blood, published by 3: A Taos Press in 2017. In this collection, the author draws on her identity as a poet and as the mother of an artist, photographer Bradley Joseph Braverman. Brad died from complications of HIV disease in 1996, at the age of 34.

I write this review as a gay man, a poet, and a public health professional who has worked in the field of HIV prevention and care for over 30 years.

Garner shares powerful testimony in this collection. The poems are consistently evocative. What I admire, among so many things, is her simultaneous vulnerability and objectivity, her ability to relate to her son Brad as a mother—but also as a fellow artist.

Through these poems, Garner has found a way to bring her talented son back into the world. She has partnered with the dead—a challenge which I have been trying to understand and accomplish for most of my life.

Hum of Our Blood is skillfully organized into three core sections, tracing the course of Brad Braverman’s illness and the speaker’s response as mother and artist. Each of the three main sections opens with a triptych of poems, followed by a deep exploration of each phase in Brad’s AIDS diagnosis.

The book, through the order and titles of poems, succeeds in conveying multiples layers of meaning. For example, the first section “Triptych: Days of Diagnosis” includes the poems “As Ouija Board,” “As Etch-A-Sketch” and “As Playground Swing.” These titles introduce us to the horror of an AIDS diagnosis in the early days of the epidemic (before the availability of effective treatments) through the unlikely framework of the names of childhood toys.

An astonishing quality of Hum of Our Blood is the speaker’s readiness, willingness, and availability to inhabit the sexual life of her son. In “The Baths, 1982” we experience the throb of those years and that erotic milieu

…possessed cocks,

engorged and driven like pistons, exploding
in each pink-cheeked Mozart—creator

of complex études for four hands.

In the same poem, the speaker asks, in the voice of Brad Braverman, “How many times can I be kissed before I die?” This question opens a deep reality for many who survived the early AIDS epidemic. While reading Hum of Our Blood I found myself questioning the arbitrary nature of a pandemic. As a gay man who survived, I am now 58. Today, Brad Braverman would be 56. Each poem in this collection forces the reader, regardless of age, gender or sexuality, to evaluate meaning and value in their life. The poems express terror, but also call on the reader to find gratitude.

The arc of this collection is straightforward and elegant. We witness the transformation of the speaker and Brad Braverman in a series of lines with the power and concentration of epitaph.

In the triptych poem “Days of Diagnosis, As Playground Swing,” the speaker describes the young man, about to receive the fateful diagnosis, as ascending

…weightless—free—beyond the terror of what his blood tests will show.

Still fixable.

Deep into the collection, in the poem “What I Didn’t Know,” all has been transformed:

What laughter? What joy? He is unmendable.

Before his untimely death, Brad Braverman was an accomplished photographer represented by galleries from Los Angeles to New York. The book uses Braverman’s photographic images to extraordinary and heartbreaking effect. There are many examples, but perhaps none as powerful as the connection between word and photograph in the poem “Spring Lament.” 

My womb, old empty pot, cannot replace
what it has lost, but I am ready to nurture
seedlings, tack clematis to trellis,
chase off aphid and beetles.

If only you will tilt. 

These words are followed two pages later by a black-and-white Brad Braverman photograph of a paint chipped cast iron urn positioned in shadow. A sheet of white silk flows from the urn as if in strong wind. The connection between poem and photographic image is vivid, enhancing the narrative connection between mother and son. “Spring Lament” evokes “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” by William Carlos Williams, and we can imagine the speaker finding a parallel grief in Williams’s words:

Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.

Madelyn Garner does not flinch from describing the deepest grief and the tricks the mind plays in order to stay sane. In the poem “Schrödinger’s Cat” the speaker imagines a parallel world where Brad Braverman lives the life she had hoped for

My mind says Yes
to infinite copies of him coming
to the door, young
and transcendent with good blood,
bearing a kitten the color of shadows

Twenty-one years after Brad’s death, the author has found a vehicle for bringing the memory of her son to the door. She invites us to meet him, to appreciate their deep bond, and to learn from the power of their journey. These poems tap into a collective grief that remains relevant today.

Madelyn Garner

On a personal level, I experience this book as a gift. Reading and rereading the poems I found myself recalling my own mother, whom I lost 14 years ago. For years, from 1984-1994, she walked beside me at From All Walks of Life, the fundraising AIDS walk in Boston. She loved deeply, and she loved the young gay men that were in my life.

I will always treasure how strangers surrounded her on those marches. My mother became, in those moments, the mother of all those marchers. Men who had been rejected by their families flocked to her and she embraced them.

In this most personal of projects, Madelyn Garner has shown all of us that there are powerful women, powerful mothers, who still have our backs. This book is a healing force.

 

Publication details:
Perfect Paperback: 102 pages
Publisher: 3: A Taos Press; 1st edition (August 28, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0997201150
ISBN-13: 978-0997201154

 

 

 

 

Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, a chapbook published in 2016, and an associate editor with Indolent Books. Recent work appears in Assaracus, Bellevue Literary Review, Kettle Blue Review, New Verse News, Pretty Owl Poetry and other publications. He lives with his husband Stephen in Malden Massachusetts, and serves as deputy director for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

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Poem 6 ± World AIDS Day 2017

Greg Marzullo
Refugee crisis

They ran to their boats,
heaving off the gravelled shore into cold Aegean, where we
flailed, shoved, climbed one another.
Charon would surely reach us first
eyes flashing in the gloom.

Ferocious
they plowed the sea, the waters
cowed by their glare,
calloused hands gripped the oars,
unremitting.

Famished sirens, we
clawed at the hulls
wept into the waves;

they never faltered,
those women hauled their
brethren aboard and
sped back to Lesbos:

Aphrodite’s temple turned
charnel house,
love goddess wreathed with dead laurels.

For the lesbians without whom we’d all be dead
 

 

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Greg Marzullo has worked for the Washington Blade and the Phoenix New Times, among other publications. Winner of a Society for Professional Journalists award for arts criticism, he was a semi-finalist in the 2016 Tucson Festival of Books for his poetry.

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Poem 5 ± World AIDS Day 2017

Elizabeth Wilson
from The Collection of Izzy Mac

“It’s hard to write about the details of Bob and me, but without Bob, very little of me remains.”
—Journal entry, Izzy Mac(e Wilson), June 2017

1.
Thank you
I was jaded and getting harder.
My body mimicked my emotional state.
My heart was black and hard.
Then I saw the lighthouse,
The one with the man looking out,
Waves crashing around him.
And long before I could see his face
I knew him.
I love knowing him again!

 

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Elizabeth Wilson’s writing has appeared in both social work and women’s studies anthologies, scholarly publications, and technical publications. She blogs on the International Bipolar Foundation website.

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