Mark Ward
Discord—

To touch me after all
the news:
yearning to sew his
body in. A Keep
Out couched with
tears; an ffff-
Infectious: an enforced
dance, bodies
alight with too much
information.
I’m afraid to touch you,
after all we’ve been
through

Mark Ward is the author of Circumference (Finishing Line Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Assaracus, Tincture, Cordite, and the anthology Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman (Squares & Rebels, 2019), edited by Raymond Luczak. He is founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry. He blogs at A Stint in Your Spotlight.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem grew out of our April 3 prompt about serodiscordant relationships. This poem also has to do with disclosure of one’s HIV status—the parter reveals their new HIV-positive diagnosis to the speaker. Write a poem that involves disclosure of HIV status—any scenario you can imagine: the speaker or another voice in the poem declares that they are HIV-positive, or HIV-negative, or perhaps even on PrEP. How does one person’s disclosure affect themself, or another person in the poem, or both, or multiple people?

Terrence Sykes
Resurrection

To the appointed & assigned place
at the assigned & appointed time

Could even Jesus raise the dread
from & of this day

Sitting in the car
unable to even open the door
to see through blinding tears

Resurrecting memories
I see him fall
then rise

Walking along a beach
hand in hand
hiking in the mountains
mile after mile
exploring foreign streets
passport upon passport

Passages fold & unfold
& refold
tearing the fabric of time

Oh Lazarus—you were the first
please show him the way
he always followed
when we danced!

Oh Sebastian—bound
pierced in the forest
where are the tender angels
that tended your wounds!

Even fragrant herbs & flowers
not enough to awake his senses
freshly cut from our garden
lay on his casket—descending
as they lay him down

I arise—but he does not
The time for miracles
I turn—this too has passed

Terrence Sykes is a GASP (Gay Alcoholic Southern Poet) and was born and raised in the rural coal mining area of Virginia. This isolation brings the theme of remembrance to his creations, whether real or imagined. Though not traditional in his spiritual path, these traditional threads of his past are woven into his tapestry of writing. His poetry, photography, and flash fiction have been published in Bangladesh, Canada, India, Ireland Mauritius,Scotland, Spain and the United States.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem uses the figure of speech known as apostrophe, sometimes introduced by the interjection, “Oh” (see “Oh Lazarus” and “Oh Sebastian” in today’s poem). An apostrophe is a direct address to someone who is not present or is dead, or to an inanimate object.

Write a poem on any HIV/AIDS-related topic in which you at least one apostrophe (up to as many as you want).

Marjorie Moorhead
April Locket

—For Jorge Soto Sanchez

Heart shaped, in my birthday month,
I keep the image of you.

April, so full of hope
for sun, and buds, and blossom.

I don’t know the month we met. It was warm.
Summer time. An art exhibit space.

We shared our lives together at young love’s
accelerated pace. You left before the disease had a name

that was spoken aloud. Only whispered with fear and shame.
No cure; not even viable treatment back then.

Amazingly, I stayed alive. Watched others drown in that wake
of different fate. Survival/or not, a question worn daily, and handled

like prayer beads, draped around searching fingers.
Looking back into my locket at you,

sadness lingers. Here’s April again; another birthday to mark.
I’ve a few grey hairs, everything and nothing to fear.

Grateful for blessings, I shed
a heart-shaped tear.

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)

Write a poem in couplets (two-line stanzas) on any HIV/AIDS-related topic.

This Story
Kaylin Kaupish

This story needs to be told
I was sitting near the Stonewall with flowers
In my lap waiting to lay them down when
Suddenly this story fell into my lap as well
She wore hot pink had long blonde hair
The lines by her eyes so defined like canyons
Whether from weather or worry I could not
Tell her age but she told me how the people died
On the street in the hundreds right before her eyes
They said there was a cure but they didn’t mean for us
She tells me that her friend died on New Year’s Eve
Her friend called her up and said Take me dancing
Dress me up in a big beautiful dress I wanna dance tonight
They danced all night and afterward they left the club
Sat on the curb breathing heavy and dripping in sweat
She said her friend’s mascara was running and she laid
Her head on her shoulder and She died right there

Kaylin Kaupish grew up in Richmond, Virginia. She attended Virginia Commonwealth University and received her Bachelor’s degree in English with minors in Writing and Italian Studies. She was executive editor for the university literary magazine, Amendment and interned for Blackbird, an online literary journal. Her writing focuses on the city of her childhood, sibling relationships, and the juxtaposition of nature within the urban environment. Her work has appeared in Quail Bell Magazine, Focus Camera’s Wavelength, Angels on Earth, Mysterious Ways, New York Film Academy, and Minetta Review. Kaylin lives in Brooklyn. 

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem recounts a tale told to the speaker by a passerby in a gay neighborhood in New York City. Write a poem in which a person who has experienced HIV/AIDS firsthand tells their story to another person who reports it to the reader. Speaker and informant may be real or imagined. 

John K. Probst
I’ve stayed much too late at the faire (36)

I’ve stayed too late, so very, very late,
Oh! I’ve stayed much too late at the faire!

I remember a time when the lights were ablaze,
And we played and we played, in the penny arcade.

And with friends and lovers always at my side,
We observed the exhibitions, and rode all the rides.

And with laughter and frivolity our ever reactions,
We took in all the fair midway exhibits and attractions.

Always enjoying the days bountiful care free play,
We feasted on cotton candy and drank pink lemonade.

But those days were another place, another time, and I was
Young, I was innocent, and in my prime. And lasting
Relationships were not my pace, and so not to take place.

And now I sit on a bench alone at the end of the pier,
Watching the setting sun slowly disappear, into a still water
Grave of the horizon’s gray colored veneer.

Chiding myself for not being in my youth, more honest, with
Others, and careless with truth, and being immature with
Regards to my relationship longevities, I always cast my lot
In personal relations curt brevity.

But those, then were my mistakes, my foolish decisions,
And one’s fate, (especially at this late date) does not allow
One to make, in realizing one’s mistakes, new revisions.

So am left at my bench to view programs of the day, blown in the wind, discarded, and it is then that I remember scenes of a midway, where friends, lovers, and I daily met and departed.

(Those memories are far better, than to continue within my gloom, or return to my one bulb light room, alone in my desolance, alone in my loneliness…alone…alone…self entombed!)

Yes, realizing, at this time and at this date, I’ve stayed so late,
So very, very late, with only memories of better times i must now bear, for I never took the time for personal relations care, and so now I’m alone and have no one with whom my memories to share.

Yes i’ve stayed very late! Yes i’ve stayed oh so late!
Yes, i’ve stayed much too late at the faire!

In 2005, John K. Probst retired from Feather River College in Quincy, California, after twenty five years of teaching humanities classes and directing plays and musicals. For more information about his life and work, visit his website: The World of John K. Probst

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

The speaker of today’s poem thinks or feels that he has in a sense outlived himself, having neglected relationships in his youth, so that now, in old age, he feels alone. Write a poem about the increasing sense of isolation and loneliness that often accompanies aging, particularly among older people with HIV/AIDS who have lost so many friends since the epidemic began in 1981.

Dennis Rhodes
No Clouds Today

I’m surprisingly at peace today.
There seems to be a perfect storm:
I feel my meds doing their job
and keeping my anxiety low.
I want them to award the Nobel Prize
to the men and women who invented
Abilify. In truth, I feel no stress
at all, about anything, a miracle.
What on earth is happening to me?
Truvada gave me a new lease on life.
Poetry flows like a river to the sea.
If this is the day the Lord has made
I’m grabbing it by the balls, sober
and content—holding on for dear life.

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 other journals. Rhodes served as literary editor of Body Positive magazine (an important source of information for people living with HIV and AIDS in the 1980s and 90s) and later as poetry editor of Provincetown Magazine. He co-founded the Provincetown Poetry Festival and ran it from 1999–2001. For a number of years, Rhodes hosted a radio program on WOMR in Provincetown, featuring interviews and poetry readings with a different Provincetown or Cape Cod poet every week.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem is about long-term survival with HIV/AIDS. Write a poem about long term survival with HIV/AIDS, based either on your own experience, the experience of someone you know personally, the experience of someone you do not know personally but have learned about, or the imagined experience of an fictional person.

William Leo Coakley
Five Short Poems

The Course of My Life

—for Eric Rhein

As my first leaf turned black,
I feared it was early decay,
But I rose into my darkness,
My ebony elegance,
Now I am all leaves,
Unafraid to continue to grow.

In Washington, Walt Whitman Walks Out of Hide/Seek

I too saw ants and worse
Crawl on the dead, on suffering man.
Once I held a young god in my arms
In his last hour, whispered in his sweet ear
“Stay with me, we will live forever.”

Now they drive us out—I know their kind.
Brother, it’s you I’m with. Did they think I’d stay
To watch you die again on their blank wall?

Night Letter

—To the memory of Ari Darom, dancer of pure energy and Dionysian promise, born 12 March 1943, died at the year’s turning, 1983

Ah my dark bird, your arms poised in flowering flight,
Is it you sunk to this cage of little bones
Dancing, white, white, white in the pure, cold, waters?

Liberation

—To the memory of Alastair Kerr

Sweet sir, sweet fairy, is there no man left, no god, to trust?–
We have woven you a martyr’s shroud with the threads of love and lust.
When the last death is counted, when the young men know no temptation,
Lead them through the burnt-out houses to rebuild our liberation.

Those who died for our sins

visit me still in the night,
their wasted faces holding death back,
their eyes too far gone to accuse me.
Or they dance before me in their own selves
so beautiful the darkness is worn down
like the steps to the old tower
that shine to lead us upwards again.

The poems of William Leo Coakley have appeared in Paris Review, London Magazine, The Nation, New American Review, and Poetry Review (London), among other journals and anthologies. His poem “Horses Burning” won a Sotheby’s International Poetry Competition Prize. He won the 2013 Der Hovanessian Prize from the New England Poetry Club for his translation of a poem by Constantin Cavafy. Coakley’s Helikon Press published many important volumes of poetry, including Thom Gunn’s Talbot Road in 1981.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s series of five short poems includes poems in memory of a person lost to AIDS. Write a poem in memory of a person lost to AIDS. This can be someone you knew personally, or a public figure who meant a lot to you.

Joel Donato Jacob
Sero Discord

I may never see things through his eyes.
He, who sits with his knee
brushing against my knee
looking past my shoulder to watch
me play a word game on my phone;
simultaneously,
he stands across a shortened lifetime
of exhausted mornings,
shortness of breath,
and flashes of nausea.

I would have asked him to play,
but staring at the moving letters
make him dizzy.
So I write him short poems, in stillness.
But he can’t read for long anymore,
and that, he says, is the part of him he lost
and misses most.

Instead, I say, I want to be
on that cliff with him. Tell him
I will hold his hand and stare
at the enormity of the disease
with him, and it will shrink
in humiliation because my mortality
will make immense
this love.

But in the meantime, I do not
understand how
he would think
I wouldn’t want to kiss his frosted lips,
and hold his desert hands,
or travel the degrees of desolation
upon the torso that cages
his rogue heart. I am sad
that I do not understand him
or how happy he is, each time
the test kit says I am not like him.

Joel Donato Jacob is a member of Linangan ng Imahen, Retorika, at Anyo (Image, Rhetoric, and Form) a nationally recognized, volunteer-run, educational nongovernmental organization (NGO) in the Philippines that seeks to promote literature, language, and patriotism. Joel is also a volunteer for LoveYourself, an AIDS Service Organization (ASO) in the Philippines. He likes mountaineering and being lazy on the beach.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem is about a serodiscordant relationship—an intimate partnership in which one member is HIV-positive and the other is HIV-negative. Write a poem about an HIV serodiscordant relationship, real or imagined.

Stephen Mead
Cradling Rage

To do it hold
a child dying of AIDS, hear
on the news about the death
of a porn star due to the same
disease, then have a co-worker say:
“Just desserts.”

Jesus Christ, I wasn’t born with this fury.

Like a second skin it grew,
a kind of daily respired fire walked
within.

Of all the stinging slaps against tolerance,
of every shove a spirit confronts,
I could comment on over ten thousand times
& yet not convert any listener who isn’t
wise to the truth.
Here is the crux:
People believe as they want.

Here is a soul composed of matter
saying death doesn’t discriminate, a
slogan billboard-fit, rising in the
face of real hatred & hugging it with
a rage which still attempts

understanding.

In addition to this there is, of
course, unreasonable human pettiness &
fear.

(For Casey Donovan, et. al.)

A resident of NY, Stephen Mead is an artist, writer, maker of short-collage films and sound-collage downloads. His latest P.O.D. Amazon release is an art-text hybrid, According to the Order of Nature (We too are Cosmos Made), a work which takes to task the words which have been used against LGBT folks from time immemorial. Learn more about his work at Poetry on the Line.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem uses rage as a starting point for talking about HIV/AIDS. Write a poem about HIV/AIDS using rage or any other emotion as your starting point. (Believe it or not, some people feel gratitude in the face of their HIV infection, because it forced them to reevaluate their choices and behaviors and make positive changes for their own health and well-being.)