Risa Denenberg
What it’s like now (without you)

that we’re running out of voltage—

I spend a lot of time faking
when I’m really thinking about (suicide)

what it was that undid me that you salved that got so unsalved again
when you left me (survivor / loser)

I met your parents, after
(they cannibalized your apartment)

I read your journals, after.
Where you described (turning tricks in Naples
snorting cocaine, drinking Remy Martin
and) how they cannibalized you.

When you were living, we shared unloveliness
but you (death) never respond to my queries.

Risa Denenberg is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, slight faith (MoonPath Press, 2018). She is a co-founder of Headmistress Press, publisher of Lesbian/Bi/Trans poetry. She curates The Poetry Café, an online meeting place where poetry chapbooks are reviewed. For more information: thepoetrycafe.online and risadenenberg.com

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem, like others in this series, is about the loss of a loved one to AIDS. In this case, the poem is addressed directly to the loved one who died (that is, addressed to a “you”). Write a poem addressed directly to a person who died of AIDS. This could be a person you knew, a person you admired, or even an imaginary person.

Logan February
Made of Stone

Sometimes you are eating an apple, or
drinking gin at a terrible party,
so you remember the softness of your throat.

Sometimes you are dressed in nothing
but your heavy emotion, kept warm instead
by some shifting in the abyss of your belly

that makes you think: Oh I’m not made of stone
after all. Anyone can think of a sculpted boy
as gorgeous, but who looks close enough to see it,

the fresh sheen over the figure’s eyes? Who asks if
that is perhaps not the sweet juice of soft fruit
upon your lips, stretches upward to taste it?

That is rare. That is tenderness, like marble teeth
breaking the apple’s delicate red skin. That is love:
when he pulls his mouth from the salt of your grief

and comes away crying, too.

Logan February is the author of Mannequin in the Nude (PANK Books, 2019), Painted Blue With Saltwater (Indolent Books, 2018), and How to Cook a Ghost (Glass Poetry Press, 2017). A Nigerian poet, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, Vinyl, Paperbag, Tinderbox, Raleigh Review, and other journals. February is the Associate Director of Winter Tangerine’s Dovesong Labs.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem does not refer directly to HIV/AIDS, but the presence of HIV/AIDS can be gleaned in some of the speaker’s emotional language. Write a poem that invokes HIV/AIDS without referring to it directly.

Julene Tripp Weaver
Dues Paid

Watching death up close
nursing through sickness
holding hands in welfare
offices, going with a client
to get him hooked up with
an infectious disease doctor
at the VA, writing killer letters
to social security disability
stating my position, my
experience with the client
letters that turned the case
around. I was a terror, proud
to take on the difficult, to sit
with the dying, hold grief for
hundreds of souls. The stress
for eighteen years through
a war, making only enough
in return, the reward, knowing
what I did mattered. If there is a
heaven I doubt I have to worry.

Julene Tripp Weaver is the author of the poetry collection Truth be Bold—Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS (Finishing Line Press, 2017), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards for Bisexual Nonfiction, and won the Bisexual Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The Seattle Review of Books, Poetry Pacific, Mad Swirl, and Antinarrative Journal. Weaver is a psychotherapist in Seattle, WA. More of her writing can be found at julenetrippweaver.com.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

The speaker of today’s poem is an allied healthcare professional—one of the nurses, physician assistants, counselors, and others who provide medical or psychosocial support services to people with HIV/AIDS. Write a poem on any HIV/AIDS-related topic that includes the presence of an allied healthcare professional, or in the voice of an allied healthcare professional.

Elaine Sexton
Dear Larry Josephs

is reincarnated as a blue jay.
I see you today: insistent,
charming, annoyingly
steely blue eyed. Before the Internet,

read those six syllables:
be fore the In ter net

you died, so when I search
for your death date (dear, friend,
I forget) at first
I find nothing. I guess.

In my no longer existent phone book
under the letter “J”
my recollection stutters,
who still keeps numbers
in a book? The paper and ink
you favored, writer, reporter, first one “out”
from your last job
at The Times,

we have you to thank
for one face of AIDS
in the newsroom,

for the way the word “gay”
eased into the official vernacular
replacing “homosexual,”

you to thank , before marriage equality,
pushing for
partners to be named
in The Times obituaries as who
we are survived by,

you: upright
queer
man
among straight-laced colleagues,
you: Ivy, too,
your nature to mess with
all that’s fit to print.

Here you are.
Dead in 1991.
Dead at 34.
Here for all who don’t know
you, dear Larry Josephs. Still here,
still queer, still dear.

Elaine Sexton is the author of three collections of poetry, Prospect/Refuge (2015, Sheep Meadow), Causeway (New Issues, 2008), and Sleuth (New Issues, 2003). Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals including American Poetry Review, Poetry, Art in America, Oprah Magazine, Pleiades, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry Daily. She teaches poetry and text and image workshops at the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute and New York University. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. elainesexton.org

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem celebrates a man who made a difference by being openly gay and HIV-positive in the newsroom of a major US newspaper. Write a poem about a person who made a difference by being out about their HIV-positive status in literature, the arts, culture, society, politics, etc.

James Diaz
The Sweetest Damn Slice of Pie

—For Kevin

He stands at the door
bandages wrapped around
the bloody sores on his harms
asking for a ride to the supermarket
but that isn’t how I remember him best

I remember him like this;
we’re standing outside waiting
for an NA meeting to begin
people giving me shit
because of the bright
flashy colors of my funky looking shirt
“don’t listen to them James, if we were in Miami right now
you’be the best dressed guy in the room,” he tells me

and later at a pizza parlor
he turns to me and says
“your Dad is simply one of the best human beings I know”

on that ride to the super market
along the heat hazy southern highway
he apologizes for the state he’s in
for the bandages
“don’t apologize for being sick Kevin,” my Dad says
before leaving the store he spots
the sweetest looking box of pie,
“my Doctor says I can’t have this stuff,
but damn this looks so good,
but I ain’t got the money for it either”
my Dad buys the pie for him
and as Kevin stands at the door one last time
something like a bit of joy
even if ever so small
flashes in his eyes

the next day news comes
he died during the night
“I’m really glad I bought him that pie,” my Dad says
he deserved something sweet
with all the hell he’s been carrying

back in the 90’s
Kevin had been one of the best addiction counselors in the area
until he developed AIDS and eventually relapsed himself
he was a figurehead in the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous
when my father first got clean Kevin was his counselor in rehab
circle of life
come head to tail
who once held you up
now must be held up that way too
by you

a ride to the store
a box of pie
a little bit of sweetness the night before
the very last night in a long line
of dark nights that always seem like the last
and never are until they are

but this is how I remember him
the one who, when everyone else teased the shit out of someone
for something so small like a funky lookin shirt
tossed his cigarette in the hot southern air
and said “don’t listen to them,
if we were somewhere else right now
we’d be kings brother,
we’d be kings”

James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) and editor (along with Elisabeth Horan & Amy Alexander) of the anthology What Keeps us Here: Songs from The Other Side of Trauma (Anti-Heroin Chic Press, 2019). In 2016 he founded the online literary arts and music journal Anti-Heroin Chic to provide a platform for often unheard voices, including those struggling with addiction, mental illness and prison/confinement. His most recent work can be found in Moonchild Magazine; Occulum; Yes, Poetry; Drunk Monkeys; and Thimble Literary Magazine. He lives in upstate New York, in between balanced rocks and horse farms. He has never believed in anything as strongly as he does the power of poetry to help heal a shattered life.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Most poems on HIV Here & Now address AIDS among gay men. Fewer poems in this project address AIDS among women or bisexual men. Fewer still address AIDS in the context of injection drug use. Today’s poem addresses HIV/AIDS among those who inject drugs. Write a poem about HIV/AIDS in the context of injection drug use. 

Jo Going
Tundra and Song

—For Gustavo Motta

I live now
by that lake in the far north
where I came after your dying,
to cry, to write, to pray.
As the sky gathers leaves and swans,
it is your laughter I hear,
and your song.
What remains these long years after
is what i held in my arms
with your last soft breath:
the distilled
essence
of pure
love.

The poet writes: This is for my beloved brother and best friend, Gustavo Motta, musician, composer, stage director, who died during the early years before there was the medical help there is today. Keep singing.

Jo Going is the author of Wild Cranes (National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1997), a book of poems and paintings that won the Library Fellows Award. The book is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it is part of the Franklin Furnace permanent collection. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Bloomsbury Review, New Art Criterion, SECAC Review, Driftwood, Washington Square Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Nimrod. A resident of Alaska, she has held artist-in-residence and visiting artist positions abroad in Italy, including at the American Academy in Rome.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem uses direct address (“you” pronouns and verbs) to speak to and about a loved one who died of AIDS before there were effective treatments (which became available in 1996). Write a poem in which you use direct address to speak to and about a person who died of AIDS—long ago or recently; loved one or beloved public figure; real or imaginary.

Mary Ellen Talley
One Juicy Tomato

All the cherry tomatoes
split, spotted, bruised in baskets.
She asked that her gravestone say,
Here lies one juicy tomato.
Oh, rambunctious bodily fluids,
persona springing to life on the vine.
The pillow from her preschool class read,
When you go to bed at night,
all our hands will hold you tight.
Oh, for proper pH, added coffee grounds,
baking soda, crushed egg shells
into loamy soil with no blight.
Nowadays she could’ve flourished.
Green growth surrounds the gravestone.

Poems by Mary Ellen Talley have appeared in Raven Chronicles, Banshee, and Flatbush Review, as well as in anthologies Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Book, 2018), edited by Michael Broder; All We Can Hold: Poems of Motherhood (Sage Hill Press, 2016), edited by Elise Gregory, Emily Gwinn, Kate Maude, Kaleen McCandless, and Laura Walker; and Ice Cream Poems: Reflections on Life with Ice Cream (World Enough Writers, 2017), edited by Patricia Fargnoli.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem, as noted by the author, is about a woman who’d still be alive had she been diagnosed now. Write a poem in which you imagine what it would be like for a person who died of AIDS before there were effective treatment (starting in 1996) if they were alive now. As always, if you do not have a personal connection to a real-life person about whom you can write, consider writing about a celebrity (writer, artist, actor, activist, etc.) whom you admired, or even an imaginary person.

Daniel de Cullá
Two Trans on Saturdays

In the middle of a farm in Valsaín, Segovia, very close to Boca del Asno, there is a high plateau ready for dances, parties and feasts.

To me, to this one, a friend has invited me, Miguel de Vergas, who is a builder, but who only knows how to make the foundations, who, in turn, has been invited by the owners, gentlemen of Morón, for the great provision that It brings you everything.

The attractive thing to see is that two transvestites friends of my friend have been invited, who come every Saturday, and I would like to see them and know what they know.

Once I was well sucked, I fell into the arms of one in the Calle de la Ballesta in Madrid and, when I asked him where I put it, I fell asleep, waking up in the middle of the night a gory lady who looked like a jar to me, who ordered me:

—Go fuck yourself!

Angry I had to leave and, in another bar next door, I entered. A young lady told me that by rushing me I would have to invite her to a cubata. What I did complacent.

We are already in the middle of the party with the music of an organ grinder as before. The two transvestites are dancing tightly, as if they were throwing a saddle with music. His thumbs come out from behind their asses with a bathtub artichoke at the tip of the cocoon, which does not stop urinating yellowish as donkeys.

Little red and yellow flowers, loose and feast, and the same grass of the lawn, they let themselves wet happily.

A young waitress, with a gold label and stitched on the left side of her white blouse, above the tit, who said: Gervaise, not very graceful, addressed the audience, saying:

—Learn from them. That dance and wet take. Take advantage of the occasion because the gentlemen are about to arrive, and they always come quickly and without time.

Daniel de Cullá from Burgos in Spain is a mail artist, poet, writer and photographer. He was involved in a number of poetry and theatre events in Spain, Germany and Switzerland. He has more than 70 published books. Daniel is a member of various writer’s associations, such as the Spanish Writers Association, Poets of the World, The Blake Society,

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem is only indirectly about HIV/AIDS. What is striking about this poem is it almost surrealistic account of a queer social event. Write a poem in which you use surrealistic, whimsical language to represent a world in which HIV/AIDS is always lurking in the background, even if not state directly.

Charles K. Morris
Limbo of Isolation

Turned to the wall written with sweat,
smeared with expellations of patient generations,
geography she studies minute by hour
to find the path back
to her life
before the gossamer curtained limbo of isolation
in a room full of people who refuse to see her.
The only touch she feels is her own caress
of sweat
and humid weep of the wall she traces.
The virus she didn’t ask for
that drags her back to childhood
shrinking her to a younger self
before he took her life with shared love.
She cannot see this fragile beauty
as a bell-jarred Haitian orchid.
All day to the wall
as if to see through to the other side
of the sea
where she can wander
invisible amongst the happy healthy
who cannot see what is not
on a screen in their life.
She cannot be touched there either
nor shunned
just ignored by the race
to gather everything
before the spine cold creeps in.
Inhumanity lied to her parents,
deceived everyone
until its awesome power squeezes
from inside
her withering beautiful body.

Charles K. Morris is a medical doctor who has worked in Haiti since the earthquake in 2010. He has helped run and staff a heart failure program at Hospital Albert Schweitzer, where the staff treats largely young women with peripartum cardiomyopathy, many of whom are HIV-positive.  Dr. Morris writes; “I have always been struck by the social isolation and abandonment of these women with HIV which causes depression and lack of hope, often resulting in a premature death when we can actually treat the actual disease.” The JAMA (the journal of the American Medical Association) has published some of his other poems about Haiti.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem is about HIV/AIDS in a country other than the United States. Write a poem set in another country about any HIV/AIDS-related topic.

Marjorie Moorhead
Remembering Jorge

—For Jorge Soto Sanchez

Constant motion. Dot-dot-dot;
cross-hatch cross-hatch cross-hatch;

the scritch-scratch of pen on page.
You filled drawing books this way.

White pages turned herringbone and houndstooth
with shading and shaping.

Bodies; faces; places.
Hearts; phalluses; breasts.

Round bellies and buttocks;
cheekbones; third eyes.

Pain and love and nature and cityscape.
Moon; stars. Scars of childhood; loves of manhood.

You told your story on page after page,
stretched canvas and cardboard.

Your heart poured through your pen;
stroked canvases thick with gesso.

It bled and bled a crimson love
until it burst its seams and stopped.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Marjorie Moorhead met the artist Jorge Soto Sanchez in NYC in the mid 1980s. They lived together in VT, where Jorge died from AIDS, and Marjorie lived on without him. It was not difficult to write a remembrance. Jorge’s art can be seen online, if you google him.

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of the chapbook, Survival, Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press, 2019) Her poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. She writes from the NH/VT border.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem uses a lot of alliteration, repetition, and rhyme, especially in pairs of words (scritch-scratch; pen on page; herringbone and houndstooth; shading and shaping; faces/places; hearts/breasts; bellies and buttocks; scars of/loves of; childhood/manhood; page after page; canvas and cardboard; poured through your pen; bled and bled; seams and stopped). Write a poem using alliteration, repetition, and rhyme, about any HIV/AIDS-related topic.