Dennis Rhodes
At the Monster

My body is as undetectable
as the virus lurking within it,
standing in the heated crowd
along the dance floor. Old
and sober. That’s the best I can say
for myself, the finest example
I can set for all the young men
around me. I’m not nostalgic
or sentimental: I just want
to feel what transparency is like,
to put old memories in their place;
If this were thirty years ago
most of them would want to screw me.
Now they look not at me but through me.

Dennis 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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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

One of the exciting new developments on the road to ending HIV is the discovery that treatment is prevention—than an HIV-positive person on treatment with an undetectable viral load cannot transmit the virus to HIV-negative partners. Write a poem about treatment as a concept, perhaps thinking about different uses of the word: treatment for a condition, treating someone nicely or badly, window treatments, etc. Can you connect these different types of “treatment” in the same poem?

Keiko Lane
late fall hospice fragment

In the garden, we build an altar on El Dia de Los Muertos,
searching for the thinning veil between worlds.

Climbing the walls around us,
bougainvillea lit by the light of dead stars.

Leonid meteors make their way through the night,
trailing tails of their flame’s demise. His eyes follow them

across the courtyard, as far as he can see, following, then later
unfollowing, not the thing, but the thing it might have become.

Keiko Lane, MFT, is a psychotherapist and educator in Berkeley, CA. A poet and essayist, she writes and teaches about the the intersections of queer culture and kinship, oppression resistance, racial and gender justice, HIV criminalization, reproductive justice, and liberation psychology. Her writing has appeared most recently in The Feminist Porn Book, Queering Sexual Violence, The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Heath and Healthcare, and online on TheRumpus.com, TheFeministWire.com, and TheBody.com. www.keikolanemft.com.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Write a poem about being on PEP—post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV. PEP started in the 1990s as a response to occupational exposures—mostly accidental needle sticks among healthcare workers. But more recently, PEP has been offered to people who have a possible exposure to HIV from sex or sharing needles when injecting drug. Read more about PEP for non-occupations exposures here.

Mark Ward
Bare

The television glowed red with stretchmarks
unable to contain the friction displayed
within perfect bodies light throws shadows,
fables of how the game is played.

It’s easy to subdivide derision,
to overwhelm risk with validation,
hands and skin accepting benediction.
Tonight’s lit with a well-worn negation;

moonlight cloaks the animal, makes it think
the world is a windowless tomorrow
holding steady on the brink of sunlight.
His lithe archetype might drown out the night.

You can burn the worst on overcast days.
You should learn not to yearn for the cause of the blaze.

Mark Ward‘s poems have appeared in Assaracus, Tincture, The Good Men Project, HIV Here & Now, Storm Cellar, Studies in Arts and Humanities, Off the Rocks, The Wild Ones, Vast Sky, and Emerge, as well as in the anthologies Out of Sequence: The Sonnets Remixed, The Myriad Carnival and Not Just Another Pretty Face. He founded Impossible Archetype, a journal of LGBTQ+ poetry. He lives in Dublin, Ireland. Learn more at astintinyourspotlight.wordpress.com.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem is a sonnet. Write an HIV poem in sonnet form. My husband, poet Jason Schneiderman, wrote a whole crown of sonnets about HIV and me in his book Sublimation Point (Four Way Books, 2004). The complete crown is posted with permission here. (You can look up “sonnet crown” online; frankly, I do not see any good online discussions of it, but there are a number of good books out there about poetic forms).

Vernita Hall
I Knew a Man

for Gregory

I knew a man
who could charm the coin from Charon’s hand
or Midas’, 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.

Vernita Hall‘s poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Philadelphia Stories, Referential, Mezzo Cammin, Whirlwind, Canary, African American Review, Snapdragon, and several anthologies, including Forgotten Women (Grayson Books, 2017). Her poetry collection The Hitchhiking Robot Learns About Philadelphians won the 2016 Moonstone Chapbook Contest, judged by Afaa Michael Weaver. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Rosemont College and serves on the poetry review board of Philadelphia Stories.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

We post many elegies for loved one who died of AIDS. Write a poem about someone who did NOT die of AIDS—someone who is living with HIV: maybe someone you love. Poet David Groff wrote an entire collection of poems, Clay (Trio House Press, 2013), about his husband who is living with HIV. You can read a generous excerpt from Clay here.

David Groff
Revival

We made a list of every state
we each had sex in. You won
with 31, delighted: summer stock.
Fifty now and dead, you reappear
made up at Community Café Stage
in Quarryville in performances
of You Can’t Take It with You,
the owner’s son, the suitor,
keen for xylophones and fireworks,
puppyish, blond again, the shot at sex
an encore in eyes I almost know.
On the barn of stage a shooting star,
you strut like a Saturday out of town.
My applause enfolds you like the shroud
Ophelia wore, or Mercutio.

David Groff is the author of Clay (Trio House, 2013) and Theory of Devolution (Illinois, 2002), selected by Mark Doty for the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle. With Jim Elledge he coedited Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (University of Wisconsin, 2012). With Philip Clark he coedited Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson, 2010). With Richard Berman he coedited Whitman’s Men: Walt Whitman’s Calamus Poems Celebrated by Contemporary Photographers (Universe, 1996). He completed the book The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood for its author, the late Robin Hardy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999; Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2002). David’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He teaches in the MFA creative writing program of the City College of New York.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

In honor of today’s poet, write a poem that CELEBRATES the life of someone who died of AIDS, rather than a lament. Of course, there’s always that tension in elegy between celebration and lament, but in our experience here at HH&N, we find that lament tends to win out when many poets write about loved ones lost to AIDS. Resist! Resist that impulse to wallow in grief. Of course we grieve! But do we love our loved ones because they tied a sad and tragic death, or because they lived a joyous and creative life? But first and foremost—be a poet!

Abigail Frankfurt
Pablo The Bullet

we are a country called
Never Knew Better
you are King
happy I know
this our counsel
our kitchen table
pass me the needle
don’t splash blood
rig in my pocket—even at the airport
steal me the money—I am your girl
pull out my eye
cut the phone wires
this is together
call me Don’t Care
I am contagious
who owes who anything
choke me harder
my gilded bullet
I’m on your edge
both feet bleeding
yank me back up
your hands are filthy
you rotting corpse
I wasn’t ready
my worsening luck
I don’t believe in
any 9 to 5ing
any House of Jesus
roll of the die
you took the wheel
bled into me
somewhere there is whistling
my stomach sinks
each early April
rise
rise
I am floating
backwards
towards you

Abigail Frankfurt writes, “I am a writer living in NYC. I lost my partner to AIDS in 2008. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him.”

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem touches on HIV transmission via injecting drug use. Of an estimated 1.2 million people living in the US today, some 170,000 of them were infected by sharing needles, syringes, or other injecting equipment. Write a poem that touches on HIV and injecting drug use. Of course, every poet has their own approach, but we suggest following Emily Dickinson in telling all the truth, but telling it slant. You can be graphic about injecting drug use if you want, but you can also be oblique, metaphorical, allusive, allegorical, etc. First and foremost—be a poet!

Manya Magnus
Jack

As a junior in high school in Berkeley, I was asked to share a job at our local flower shop with a friend, after school and on weekends. She did not last long so I took over all the shifts myself. I found in the back workroom of that flower shop respite from the outside world, where Jack and John and I worked together listening to 80s pop, preparing roses, filling FTD orders from across the wire, manning the cash register on slow days and busy days, like valentine’s day and mothers’ day when the lines would snake around the block. They taught me how to do adult things, like sweep a floor properly, clean up the counter after oneself, count change, have a presentational customer face, which has served me very well, where you let the customer know he or she is right, and you smile, and active listen, and you have empathy—I am sorry that your friend died; I hope your mom feels better; congratulations on your engagement!—and listen to their flower-based questions—are they looking for a sympathy bouquet? What is the best type of lilies to make up with? Are these gardenias from Hawaii?—and have confidence in your answer, even when not quite sure (skills used often in healthcare in later years). Working at a flower shop is more like being a bartender than a retail clerk, because customers come back for the conversations not only the purchase.

John was funny and wry and dry and usually sarcastic but always kind; if he were cast in a 1980s sitcom he’d be the stereotypical gay uncle of the kid protagonist and always get the funny lines. Jack was more reserved, the owner, well respected it seemed through my teenage perception at least. They welcomed me in and never judged; they helped me forget the confusing things going on at home and general upset. When I’d leave the store people would comment that I’d be perfumed in flower and so I was; my clothes and skin would remain fragrant after every shift. When I was very low and ended up in a facility for troubled teens for a week they sent me the Cadillac of all bouquets and I was able to read between the lines of each of the flowers and I laughed; when I came back, they never mentioned anything they just hugged me and told me to get to work.

I came back from college one summer and heard through the grapevine that Jack had died of AIDS. I did not know he was sick, although I was old enough to have been aware of the early days, the first cases, GRID, the first deaths, Reagan. I never was able to confirm this to be the case, though I did go back to the store and no one was still there; I’d wish I’d kept in touch but went away to grow up, so didn’t. This was back in the day before the Internet, when it would have been considered morbid to go to the library and look on the microfiche for someone’s obituary.

In any event, because of Jack I ended up devoting my career to HIV research, 25+ years of working to end the epidemic. He never knew this of course. I think of him often.

Manya Magnus is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, where she studies novel approaches to HIV prevention and removal of structural barriers. Her books include Essentials of Infectious Disease Epidemiology (Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2007), Essential Readings in Infectious Disease Epidemiology (Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2008), Intermediate Epidemiology: Methods that Matter (Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2014), and (publishing as Manya DeLeon Miller) The Complete Fertility Organizer (Wiley, 1999).

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

In honor of today’s poet, an epidemiologist who studies new approaches to HIV prevention, write a poem that leverages the technical vocabulary of HIV. We suggest using that inimitable medical resource, Wikipedia, to look up some of the following terms and see what gets your creative juices flowing: human immunodeficiency virus; acquired immune deficiency syndrome; retrovirus; virion; capsid; reverse transcriptase; protease; integrase; antiretroviral therapy; viral load; T cell; macrophage; monocyte; lymphocyte; proviral DNA; genetic barrier to resistance…okay, that’s enough for one day!

Jo Going
After AIDS

And then one night
you came to me,
like putting on a coat,
and lifted me flying.

Through phantasmagoric shifting
geometries of light
we traveled,

me, ecstatic to be with you once more,
and you in that familiar role—teacher, protector—
now in this form:
an assurance of being.

I didn’t question.

Centerwise, we paused
before a pulsing blackness,
a void of nothing
and everything,
a palpitation of presence,
into which you disappeared,
while I watched, illuminated.

Many years now,
and I have been
wondering…

knowing that light journey
became my luminescence.

And yet,
and yet,
I miss you still,

and more,

while ever opening your gift:

the distilled essence
of pure love.

From a long poem cycle, “The Midwife of Death”, written in response to the poet’s sharing her brother’s journey through AIDS.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Notice how today’s poem, like so many poems posted by the HIV Here & Now project since June 2015, is a recollection of a loved one who died of AIDS by a surviving loved one. As a change of pace, try writing a poem in the voice of a person who died of AIDS. Or perhaps in dialogue with a person who died of AIDS. For some examples, take a look at Marie Howe’s poem, “The Last Time,” from her landmark book, What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1998), or Michael Broder’s poem, “The Remembered One,” from his book This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014).

Michael Broder
All the men I like to get fucked by

All the men I like to get fucked by
Are dealers
T mostly, G too, but usually they want me
To parTy not do G
I’m still tryna lose my G cherry
I was about to, now, with The Dark Lord,
But he asked me if I’d had any alcohol and I had,
I’d taken a swig of red wine right out of the bottle
Right before I left to come here (to the Dark Lord’s place)
Just as a little treat & to get the coffee taste
Out of my mouth

NOTES:
T=methamphetamine, the drug you may remember from Breaking Bad.
G=GHB or gamma-hydroxybutyrate, the drug you may remember from The Black Party.

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 publications and anthologies. He holds a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from New York University, and a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Broder lives in Brooklyn with his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and a backyard colony of stray and feral cats.

Due to the arrival of tax day, there has been a delay in posting new NaPoWriMo poems. The board of directors and entirely volunteer staff of Indolent Books apologizes for this inconvenience and suspects it will happen again.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Notice how in today’s poem, Michael Broder writes about party drugs. In 2017, HIV is not just a virus or a disease. It touches on every aspect of the life of those at the highest risk: men who have sex with men, transgender women, people of color, people who are poor, homeless, unstably housed, or engaged in sex work, among others. Write a poem from the perspective of a speaker who is a member of one of these groups, whether or not that is who you, the poet, actually are. Go ahead; it’s okay—we here at the HIV Here & Now project still believe that poetry is a way into identities other than our own, a way to empathize with the plight or fate or experience of others.

Michael Angelo Tata
From The Real Housewives of Nowhere

TAMEKA

My night has been insufferably
empty without you like so many
lost digits following the decimal
point of a misguided fraction
that has aspired to become
an irrational number: talk
about an identity crisis.

The confused consumption
of abstruse French philosophy,
the laundering of electric pink
and purple Armani briefs
in a community washroom
straight out of Bates Motel,
shopping for KY at Circus CVS
in the middle of the night, all
the things I do to fill the hours
we’re not kissing, those blank
and endless parentheses punctuating
the plenitude I feel when you’re
near with lovely gaps of nothingness
whose zeros I count manically.
Talked to my Mom, prepared
for a job interview, let Spotify
bathe me in funky aural
neurotransmitters. Facebook
drama here and there, saluting
Gatita in the hallway and letting
her out to forage, since she’s
eating for like sixteen these
days. I refuse to comment on her
promiscuity, but we might wanna
get her feline PrEP. Just saying.

Now I’m boiling Italian Wedding
Soup from a blue can and preparing
a hot shower to wash my dead skin
cells down the drain with a foam
of shower gel and fragmented
ironies. This misplaced jungle
cold that has blown down here
from the North is in my bones
where it turns my soft yellow
marrow to white marshmallow
fit for inclusion atop a Peepza.

Somewhere you are sleeping.
On the floor, a baby blue leather
Puma bag lies engorged with
ensembles tailored to all the places
we’ll go this week end when you
visit: the upscale Nicaraguan fritanga
with the very tall, cross-eyed waiter
whom Brendolina wants to bang,
and of course the fancy taquería
with a bar door ripped unceremoniously
from a graffiti-covered porta-potty
where all the white girls drink tequila
as they prepare for the rigors of
Insta-fame and maybe a Winter Party
practice run at that new bar everyone
is praying will stay open (it won’t).
I live for your fortuitous arrival
and will see your famous chin and
its forest of foliage so soon I can
almost taste the gustatory wonders
of this tropical crevice that dominates
my desires on an arctic night
of Eskimos licking SnoCones
in the cool methane igloos of Titan.

 
Michael Angelo Tata is an independent scholar, poet and essayist. His Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality arrived to critical acclaim from Intertheory Press in 2010. Most recently, his ongoing examination of the ramifications of Derridean thought on friendship, philosophy and materiality appears in Italy’s Rivista di Estetica. His work on Dorothy and William Wordsworth’s conjoined consciousness vis-à-vis Systems Theory was also included in the ecopoetic collection Romantic Sustainability: Endurance and the Natural World, 1780-1830 (Lexington Books, 2015).

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Notice how in today’s poem, Michael Angelo Tata uses pop culture references like Real American Housewives, French philosophy, Armani briefs, Bates Motel, KY, CVS, Spotify, Facebook, PrEP, and more. Write a poem that uses pop culture references in creative, imaginative, unexpected ways.