Poem 4 ± World AIDS Day 2017

Julene Tripp Weaver
Miracle Meds

Pharmaceutical wonders are at work
but I believe only in this moment
of well-being.
—Jane Kenyon

I refused AZT. Eventually, my T-cell count
fell to fifty, only then I agreed
to a non-protease regimen:
Epivir, Zerit, Viread and Viramune.
Their chemistry made me manic,
unable to sleep, deprived. A walking
time bomb waiting to explode.

A friend asks, Why do you call it sex addiction?
Often I want to hide from everyone—
no one comprehends—only in my own time,
with my own words and slow space is there peace.

There was no choice but to start a protease.
Hell to take meds every day with meals that must
contain fat. Surprised I survived this far
with a relationship, a man who stayed.

Eventually the pills sorted themselves out—
and I had to agree the drugs are a miracle—
but death will not stop, pernicious and cruel,
laughing it will enter, a common infection,
my skin will turn ugly, isolate me from the world,
ravish my insides, steal my energy.

There are days I forget to take my pills—
days I live normal—want to feel the breeze
without the neuropathy, enjoy a quiet moment,
sit by a window with a book
and a pen, ready to catch words.

 

logoJulene Tripp Weaver is the author of Truth Be Bold: Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS (Finishing Line Press, 2017), No Father Can Save Her (Plain View Press, 2011), and Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manager Wails Her Blues (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Riverbabble, River & South Review, Paddock Review, and The Seattle Review of Books. A psychotherapist, Weaver worked in AIDS services for over 21 years. Find more of her writing at www.julenetrippweaver.com.

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Poem 3 ± World AIDS Day 2017

Dennis Rhodes
Passing

They think no one dies anymore.
The worst is over. Time to move on
with their uninfected lives. The truth is
men have struggled for twenty years or more
trying to get their “cocktails” just right,
fearful as ever of night sweats, random sores
breaking out on their bodies. They
have been chronically underweight
and gaunt, some with walkers. Yes,
life has gone on for the many.
No one deliberately ignores the few:
they are largely, but kindly, unnoticed.
My friend Frank passed yesterday.
They think no one dies anymore.

 

logoDennis Rhodes is the author of Spiritus Pizza & Other Poems (Vital Links, 2000) and Entering Dennis (Xlibris, 2005). His poems and essays have appeared in BLOOM, Chelsea Station, Lambda Literary Review, The Cape Cod Times, New York Newsday, Fine Gardening, Avocet, Backstreet, Ibbetson Street, bear creek haiku, Aurorean, and Alembic, among others.

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Poem 2 ± World AIDS Day 2017

Al Smith
Tribal Survival

A part of me wanted to shed a tear,
But my well of feeling was so deep
It felt more like mourning’s nadir.
Profound feelings managed to seep
To the depths of my weary soul.
I was reading stories of long-term
Survivors of the HIV and AIDS toll.
They coped while others became infirm,
And tended them until they expired.
The survivors living on to become
Victims themselves, overwhelmed and tired.
In some cases getting to be scum,
Too sick to work, but too healthy to perish;
Ending up in medical and financial limbo.
In an effort to avoid more nightmarish
Emotional trauma, they isolated in woe.
Still living and struggling to adjust,
In trying to keep it all together,
Some days it’s been a case of just
Putting one foot in front of the other.
But it’s not over until the fat lady sings.
Disappointment, joy, loss, love, despair,
Boredom, hope and gratefulness are fillings
For their individual stories of life’s scare.
In a few cases older men have connected.
Ultimately, who will be the last man standing;
The last man to tell his tale, respected
For enduring to the final disbanding?

 

logoAl Smith tested positive for HIV in 1988. He lives in San Diego, California.

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Poem 1 ± World AIDS Day 2017

Vernita Hall
I Knew a Man

for Gregory

I knew a man
who could charm the coin from Charon’s hand
or Midas’s, too, squeeze lemonade from sand,
hula rings like Saturn, drum thunder like Jupiter
whenever he laughed, and he laughed some.

I knew a man
who could dance on the head of a pin
or the top of a bar. Around the pole he’d spin
like a compass needle. His word—true north.
He never called the shots—they begged to come.

This man, my friend,
could thread a needle with a baseball bat,
eclipse the sun, or wheedle cream from an alley cat.
Always top dog, the black elephant in the room,
he never took a back seat lest he throned it, Paul Bunyan-esque.

The man I knew
could spin a yarn like Rumpelstiltskin
or negotiate extra wishes from a jinn.
His laser eyes could weep a secret out from a stone.
He walked with Jesus upon the waters, two abreast.

Did you know my friend?
He was the father of invention—and a muthuh, too.
Switched the Grim Reaper gay, broke the back of convention.
He rose well-heeled, sprinkled motherwit like seed,
his tongue, oil-slick. He could listen through the tips of his toes.

When Gabriel sounds
that trumpet for the day of rest
New Orleans-style, he’ll strut at the head of the blessed,
arm-in-arm with Peter and Michael, too.
He’ll be leading the band, prompting them their cue,
this man I knew.

 

logoA Rosemont College MFA, Vernita Hall placed second in American Literary Review’s Creative Nonfiction Contest; was a finalist for the Cutthroat Nonfiction, Rita Dove, Paumanok, and Atlanta Review Poetry Awards; a semi-finalist in the Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest and Ruminate’s VanderMey Nonfiction Prize. The Hitchhiking Robot Learns About Philadelphians won the 2016 Moonstone Chapbook Contest (judge Afaa Michael Weaver). She serves on the poetry review board of Philadelphia Stories. Poetry and essays appeared or are forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Philadelphia Stories, Referential, Mezzo Cammin, Whirlwind, Canary, African American Review, Snapdragon, Grayson Books anthology Forgotten Women, and five other anthologies.

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I’m Sorry For Your Loss

By CJ Stobinski
Contributing Editor

In July 2015, my grandmother was diagnosed with stage four gallbladder cancer and was given nine months to live. She battled for her life until May 10, 2017, and lived mainly symptom free until the last month of her life, not even losing her hair during chemo. She saw another great-grand child come into this world, got to finally walk down the aisle at a grandchild’s wedding, and enjoyed another birthday and Christmas season, which she loved so much, that nobody but herself believed she would see. I read this at her funeral on May 16, 2017.

“I’ve gone back and forth since hugging my grandmother’s still warm body a week ago whether I should read this or not, but it’s been said nothing haunts us like the things we don’t say.”

I’m sorry for your loss. It’s this stupid thing we say to each other when someone dies and you can’t think of anything else to say. I’m sure more than one of you has said it today, maybe said it in this funeral home before. I’m sure I’ve even said it myself. It’s a way for us to retreat inward and protect our hearts from injury, from fully feeling something.

There’s a quote from my favorite movie (The United States of Leland) that’s stuck with me for over a decade: “I think there are two ways you can see the world. You can either see the sadness that’s behind everything, or you choose to keep it all out.” Another character says, “I recall when our lives were unusual and electric. When we burned with something close to fire, but now we sway to a different rhythm. Lives lived without meaning, or even directed hope. The passage of time measured only by loss. Loss of a job, loss of a minivan…a son.”

To me, a life measured by loss is one of the saddest existences imaginable, and my grandmother’s life will never be measured by loss. Humanity is so afraid of showing each other our hearts, of being vulnerable, raw. On October 11, 2014, I attended a funeral for my work manager’s husband. He was a master carpenter for the restaurant group and he renovated the restaurant I work at in February of 2012. They met, fell in love, and he proposed the summer before I started in 2013. Shortly after, he found he had stage four brain cancer. They got married despite everything and fought like hell. His showing was on their first wedding anniversary.

I sat through that funeral 11 days after learning that I was living with HIV, completely resistant to the idea of medication at the time, and wondered, what will people say about me at my funeral. The resounding voice in my head was, “Wow, this guy’s a DICK.” HIV forced me to examine my life, look in the mirror and see that it was anger, resentment, and bitterness I was carrying around from past childhood traumas which was slowly killing me on the inside, not HIV.

After I went on the news two years ago to advocate for People Living With HIV, my grandma reached out to me in my birthday card to make sure I was okay, all the while dealing with her first rounds of chemo. My grandmother was selfless. Her instinct was not to warn my younger sisters to not drink out of glasses after me as one immediate family member did. It was not to tell me I was sick for taking a single pill a day, as another family member did, a pill which gives me both a life expectancy of 70+ and an undetectable viral load I’ve maintained for over two years now, which brings the risk of transmission down to zero. Her instinct was to love without limits and expectations.

She once called me out of the blue. I was sitting on the floor of the dorm I lived in the year I went to college in Pennsylvania. I had decided to leave and not return so I could figure out my path to the person I exist as today. I hadn’t told anyone yet, but knew all the people who would look down upon me for leaving, for not living the life they expected me to live. I didn’t tell my grandma I was leaving, but she told me, “CJ, you can be whoever you want to be, whatever you do, I believe in you.” She had no idea how much that meant to me, how much it will always mean to me.

When I returned home, the person who needlessly warned my sisters told me I broke my mother’s heart by leaving school. It’s funny how we talk about people who live their lives to their own standards. When they’re alive, we call them hard-headed, stubborn, inappropriate, embarrassing even. When they’re dead, we say, “They did things their own way.” If we spent more time respecting that a path different from our own is not wrong, just different, maybe we could all coexist a little more peacefully.

In January, I traveled with Youth Across Borders to Honduras to a home for children living with and affected by HIV. Sixty percent of people with HIV in Central America live in Honduras, where 10% of children are born with HIV. Traveling to the second most impoverished country in the western hemisphere, naturally people asked, “What did you go to help them with?” But, you see, I went to Montaña de Luz, the Mountain of Light, next to the village of Nueva Esperanza, New Hope, to learn from the children and the people of Honduras who nurture their lives.

They taught me that money is not the only currency worth something in this world, that a smile, laughter, kindness, and looking someone in the eyes when you speak to them are worth their weight in gold and diamonds. Above all, they taught me that the one true universal language in this world is love.

They had this prayer in capilla every morning that I loved. I’m not much of a prayer, but whether you praise the Sun, the Moon, Vishnu, Allah, Jesus and his father Yahweh, or you oscillate towards The Big Electron, the core message is love: it doesn’t punish, it doesn’t reward, it just is. Anything further is a perversion. I like to say, “You can be certain you’ve created God in your own image when God hates all the same people you do.” My friend Emily would just say, “If it’s not LOVE, it’s a LIE. Emily 1:1” I still have some work to do obviously.

The children of Montaña de Luz prayed to Jesus Christos, who is really just the embodiment of love—love is above us (bring hands up above in an arch), love is below us (bring hands to shin-level in arch), love is in front of us (bring arms parallel to the ground in front), love is beside us (pull hands to torso and slide down), love is behind us (bring hands behind you almost parallel), and love is inside our hearts (bring hands up to your chest). Then repeat the hand motions.

My grandma was my favorite person in this world, because the only expectation she had when I was with her was that my heart was beating inside my chest. I didn’t see her very often in the last two years of her life, because frankly I’ve felt like a stranger when I’m around most of my family, that people are afraid to even speak to me, and it was easier to stay away.

When I got a great job finally not in a restaurant last year with Toledo/Lucas County CareNet, helping those less fortunate than me access life-saving health insurance, the two people I hoped would be grateful told me they didn’t believe my job should exist. My grandmother may have felt the same, but she just smiled and said “I’m happy for you CJ.”

It is said the single biggest regret people have on their deathbed is that they wished they had lived a life true to themselves, rather than the one expected of them. My grandma embodied this and wished to cultivate it wherever she went. She was never afraid to tell someone who thought “their shit did not stink” the truth.

I just finished a three-week program at a yoga studio where I’m certifying as a teacher this summer, and the first day I met a woman named Diana Patton. Just sitting in a circle with her I knew I was supposed to meet her. She asked us a question from her memoir, Inspiration In My Shoes. “Have you lived the best day of your life?” She added, “It’s when you decide that this life is your own, and you’re not something someone did to you, that you alone are responsible for your happiness.”

The next morning, I was meditating in the aerial hammocks at the studio, wrapped in a silk cocoon, looking up at what looked like wings reaching to the ceiling, and all I could think was, “Why would anyone choose to stay a caterpillar?”

Have you lived the best day of your life? Have you decided that this life is your own? Have you forgiven the people that hurt you? Have you forgiven the people who did not have the courage to apologize to you? Most importantly, have you forgiven yourself?

“I forgive you Chris (my mom’s husband), I forgive you Katie (my older sister), and Mom I forgive you, I’ll always forgive you.”

I know that my grandmother died with a satisfied mind. A week ago she decided to withdraw care and enter hospice. I got to the long-term care facility she’d been at for a few weeks just as the woman from hospice was talking about her morning transfer, and my grandma asked, “What now?” The worker said, “There’s a nice pond.” She was supposed to have five to seven days. Figuratively, my grandma said, “Fuck that shit, deuces wild bitches.”

I know this because the next morning I started my Mysore yoga practice at 5:30 A.M. with a prayer for peace for her, and I was stronger than I should have been on that mat. Right before I lay down in Shavasana, also known as Corpse Pose, I looked out the window and saw the sun was breaking through the clouds and I swear I heard her say, “You don’t need me to believe in you anymore, because now you believe in yourself.”

My mouth trembled with trepidation as I laid down to rest and I felt her peace wash over me. I was not surprised when my mom’s name appeared on my phone 20 minutes later, calling to tell me my grandma passed between 5:00 and 6:30 when I was practicing.

If you were at her 80th birthday party, she said that she was going to beat this, and if you told me you believed her I’d call you a liar, because I saw the look on all your faces, and knew the look on my own. Doris Jean Akens, Smith, and later Larrow proved us all wrong, and beat this in her own way, on her own time. She saw so much life beyond what was expected, but in the end, she knew the truth that scares us the most: that nothing and no one in this world is worth holding onto, not even one’s life. She knew that, eventually, it’s just time to let go.

I got her this giant amaryllis for Christmas 2015, what was expected to be her last. It’s first bloom was the new moon in April last month, and she passed on the full “flower” moon on May 10th in Scorpio, her sign, and that I find peace in.

So please, don’t tell me you’re “sorry for my loss.” I gained a 26-year lesson in how to be a badass, how to love without expectations, and ultimately, how to let go. Instead, tell me about the time she convinced the county snow plow to give her a ride home from the bar in a blizzard and fell out of the truck three sheets to the wind. Tell me about how many times she told you the same story about shitting her pants that she loved to tell so much. Or please, tell me how funny it was to watch me dance and karaoke at six years old to Clarence Carter’s “Strokin’” at Larrow’s Town & Country, the bar she owned. “Cue the music….just kidding.” Just be real, raw, authentic, show me your heart.

My grandmother’s life will never be measured by loss, but by the life, love, and support she gave unwaveringly.

To close, I’d like to read a quote from the book, The Painted Drum, by Louise Erdrich, that has given me strength over the past few years.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself, you tasted as many as you could.

For Doris Jean Larrow
November 7, 1935-May 10, 2017

 

Contributing Editor CJ Stobinski is an activist and advocate for the HIV community. He serves as a Youth Ambassador for Youth Across Borders, as well as Youth Ambassador for the social media campaign Rise Up To HIV. He has competed in races wearing the campaign’s No Shame About Being HIV+ tee shirt since May 2015. CJ is currently on his Undetectable=Untransmittable Racing Tour, educating people about undetectable viral loads, and bringing people’s knowledge of HIV into the 21st century. He is a Certified Community Health Worker in Toledo, Ohio, working as a Referral Assistant for the Northwest Ohio Pathways HUB, combating infant mortality and adult chronic health conditions. In his spare time, he loves to cook, play with his two fluffy cats, train for his upcoming triathlons, and is pursuing a yoga teacher certification.

Na(HIV)PoWriMo ± April 30, 2017

Michael Broder
I had a dream that I was back.

—dreamt on the night of April 23 and recorded on the morning of April 24 at 9:24 a.m.

I had a dream that I was back. It’s not clear where I had been. I was married to my husband. A man I loved many years ago who had died was alive in the dream, and he had a husband too. They lived in an apartment on Brighton First Road abutting the beach and the boardwalk that he and I had lived in once, but then we broke up and got new partners and they kept the beach-front house while my husband and I moved farther away. The husbands decided we should swap. At a certain point in the dream, I think the idea was that we were swapping husbands, and I was getting my old love back. But later in the dream it seemed we were sticking with our current husbands but switching apartments. I would be living at the beach again. Nothing could make me happier. Friends gathered, they welcomed us back and cheered us on. Doormen and security guards were so happy to see us back. We passed by a retired teacher or political figure we had known and admired who lived in the street now, scribbling bits of memory on a writing pad. We talked. We read what he had just written. Back in the Brighton Beach apartment, I complained about certain decorating choices my ex and his husband had made, including a carpet with an elaborate design in the pile. I talked about redecorating and a friend said better to save your money at this stage in your life. You’ll need it.

 
 
Michael Broder is the author of Drug and Disease Free (Indolent Books, 2016) and This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He is the founder of the HIV Here & Now project, Indolent Books, and Indolent Arts Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and a backyard colony of stray and feral cats.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Write a poem based on a dream you had. Or write a poem about a dream you didn’t have. Find a way to connect it to HIV. Can you find the connection to HIV in today’s poem?

Na(HIV)PoWriMo ± April 29, 2017

Iris Lee
We’re Still Here

We meet and speak
less now
about pills and T-cells,
so glad to be here
when so many aren’t.

We meet and speak
less now
of memorials and tears
and the fear,
and more now

about “what now?”
when we meet now
in the old bars.
We speak about the theater
and other pleasure those others

who aren’t
are missing because of
no pills, vanished T-cells.
But here we are,
meeting and speaking,

pill-poppers extraordinaire
trying to tell
dumb youngsters in bars
our stories but
they aren’t interested.
Kids!

 

Iris Lee is the author of Urban Bird Life (NYQ Books, 2010). She conducts a writing workshop at The Actors Fund, which originated as a workshop for theater professionals affected by HIV/AIDS.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poet wrote today’s poem in response to a prompt that she presented to her own students in an advanced poetry class. We share that prompt with you today: Write a poem in the voice of a first-person plural (“we”) dispassionately discussing a very serious situation—in our case, some aspect of HIV (risk, testing, treatment, prevention, living with, being affected by, etc.)—keeping the tone restrained, using repetition and cadence to achieve a light touch despite the subject matter. Thank you Iris Lee for the poem and the prompt.

Na(HIV)PoWriMo ± April 28, 2017

Barbara Rockman
As My Lover Dies of AIDS

As the clear cut mountain
so the boy incarcerated for a crime

he did not commit he wanted to
bring his mother bags of gold

As the disappeared wolves
and crabs so the juniper turns to rust

As the boy sought his father’s
arms to wrap round what his brother shunned
what his every pore and prayer craved—

simple love a body twin to his own
so the forest so the tide and glacier
turn ashen with refusal

The boy turned man is dying
of what was natural as spring run-off
as turtles shuffling young to salt water

He has watched the earth corrode
As contagion corrupts cells so
a country’s veins rupture

As he grows old
as the mountain’s scraped raw
so flesh blisters

Sea afloat in plastic
and yet tufts of spring grass

His body frail as drought
and yet he wets his lips and hums

One riff for the continent
one for the self

 

Barbara Rockman is the author of Sting and Nest (Sunstone Press, 2011) and Absence of Wind (University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming). Her poems have appeared in Calyx, Bellingham Review, The Pinch, Louisville Review, Nimrod and elsewhere. Barbara received the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award and the National Press Women Book Prize. She lives in Santa Fe, NM where she teaches poetry and leads writing workshops for victims of domestic violence.

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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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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

As Na(HIV)PoWriMo draws to a close, we’ve encouraged you to write poems in form. Today we encourage you to write an abecedarian—a poem in which each line begins with a successive letter of the alphabet, or some variation on that basic principle. A couple of HIV Here & Now poets have contributed abecedarians, including this poem by Jenna Le and this sequence of five abecedarians by Kathleen A. Lawrence.

Na(HIV)PoWriMo ± April 27, 2017

Korbin Jones
The Epidemic

An erasure poem based on Ports of the Sun by Eleanor Early.

The graves are a tangle of rust and tattered leaves. There are gay guests. “Your Health.” “My Health.” Sounds something like possession. They abandon the place. The first to die in horrible agony was too much for the rest, and they were rather worried.

“You see,” he said, “we know what an invasion is like.”

 

Korbin Jones is a senior at Northwest Missouri State University double majoring in Spanish and Writing with an emphasis in Creative Writing and Publishing and minoring in Art.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Inspired by today’s poem, write an erasure poem about HIV. Today’s poet took inspiration from a travel book that received a rather lackluster review from Kirkus Reviews, but made for a rather stunning erasure poem. Here’s one place where you can read about erasure poems.

Na(HIV)PoWriMo ± April 26, 2017

Andrea L. Watson
Requiem in Radiant Time

for B.

Your soul-of-doves flew from Chama toward heart
of Antonito, over the 1911 Jewelry Factory, half-past 2
drug dealers marking time in front of the Palace Hotel,
nesting finally at the hilltop near your 80-lb mother.

You had a good time. The time
your 3rd grade teacher kept you after study-school
to give you watercolors from the Narrow Gauge Gift Shop;

the time you painted your step-brother’s barn
Buddhist gold, adding a colors-of-the-rainbow flag;

midnight, by mountain central time, when
you boarded the airplane for New York City with 24
other guys, sassy rally ribbon on your right shoulder.

Remember, you sewed on 11 ripe rhinestones?

I kiss the time you nicked my neck with thinning shears;
pale beer was your antiseptic: I was not afraid.

Today, the hospice is cold. Your bed is a coffin,
white-muslin lined, waiting; you do not recognize me.
The illness snips at your brain like a comb and scissors set.

In your strands of dreams, your mother is not drunk,
and you are not alone, at age 7, watching
for her to come back; you are sure she is dead
but you are dead; rain on her window fades to 0.

 

Andrea Watson is the founding publisher and editor of 3: A Taos Press. Her poetry has appeared in Nimrod, Rhino, Ekphrasis, International Poetry Review, and The Dublin Quarterly, among others. She is co-editor of Collecting Life: Poets on Objects Known and Imagined (3: A Taos Press, 2011)and of Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai (FutureCycle Press, 2013), the proceeds of which are donated to the Malala Fund for Education for Girls.

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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.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books (HIV Here & Now is a project of Indolent Books).

Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Na(HIV)PoWriMo is dwindling to a close, and we have not seen many poems in form in the series (perhaps a few sonnets). Write a poem in form touching on HIV: sonnet, villanelle, sestina, haiku (perhaps a series of haiku), ghazal, pantoum, etc. Use our old friend the Internet to find out about forms you are interested and to learn or review the rules for their composition.