Alfred Corn
To a Lover Who Is HIV-Positive

You ask what I feel.
Grief; and a hope
that springs from your intention
to forward projects as assertive
or lasting as flesh ever upholds.

Love; and a fear
that the so far implacable
cunning of a virus will smuggle away
substantial warmth, the face, the response
telling us who we are and might be.

Guilt; and bewilderment
that, through no special virtue of mine
or fault of yours, a shadowed affliction
overlooked me and settled on you. As if
all, always, got what was theirs.

Anger; and knowledge
that our venture won’t be joined
in perfect safety. Still, it’s better odds
than the risk of not feeling much at all.
Until you see yourself well in them,
love, keep looking in my eyes.

Alfred Corn is the author of numerous poetry collections including Stake: Selected Poems, 1972-1992 (Counterpoint, 1999) and, most recently, Unions (Barrow Street, 2014). He is also the author of two novels, Miranda’s Book (Eyewear Publishing, 2014) and Part of His Story (Mid List Press, 1997). He has written a study of prosody, The Poem’s Heartbeat (Copper Canyon, 2008), and two collections of critical essays, The Metamorphoses of Metaphor (Viking Adult, 1987) and Atlas: Selected Essays, 1989-2007 (University of Michigan Press (October 24, 2008). Corn lives in Rhode Island and spends part of the year in the UK.

This poem appeared in Contradictions (Copper Canyon, 2002) and is posted by permission of the author.

Marion Winik
Three Lost Boys
d. late 1980s, early 1990s

One was the snappish waiter at the Morning Call in the French Quarter, the guy who looked like a sailor: wavy gold hair, Aegean eyes, weathered, ruddy skin. Another was his boyfriend, a dignified sort with perfect posture and a trim moustache who cut my hair on a velvet barstool in their little slave-quarter apartment. Some of The Skater’s friends dropped him after I appeared on the scene, but these two didn’t mind.

Our first whisper of the nightmare ahead of all of us came after we’d moved to Austin and they came to visit, pulling up in our driveway in a clattering jalopy, purportedly stopping to refuel on their way out west. Neither was working anymore, they said, or feeling very well. Both were drinking heavily and stealing pills from the waiter’s mother, a frail person they had carted along with them from her home in Lake Charles. With their circumstances and charms so reduced, they quickly outstayed their welcome. Then stayed another month. At least it was the kind of thing that makes a good story. I told it for several years without understanding the bad part wasn’t the long distance phone bill, or the coffee cups full of port and Coca-Cola.

Their deaths were old news by the time we heard about them, but by then things had started to make their senseless sense. By then you might be handed an informational pamphlet with charts of mortality rates: rows labeled “Men who have sex with men,” “Injection drug users” and “Recipients of blood transfusion.” By then bravado was becoming very important.

A few years later, I watched my husband rollerblade through Jackson Square with a third boy from that crowd, a young protégée of a dress designer with a studio on Decatur Street. He had learned from the designer how to hand-paint silk and he made beautiful scarves. So adorable in his cut-off shorts, he was a bit of a liar, a wily Southern climber with a well-defined jaw and thick shiny hair, right out of Tennessee Williams.

Both he and my husband knew who was dead and who was alive, and they both knew whose side they were on.

Marion Winik is the author of First Comes Love (Random House, 1996) and The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2008.) Her other books are Telling (Random House, 1994); The Lunch-Box Chronicles (Random House, 1998); Rules for the Unruly (Simon and Schuster, 2001); Above Us Only Sky (Seal Press, 2005) and Highs in the Low Fifties: How I Stumbled Through the Joys of Single Living (Globe Pequot Press, 2013). She has also published two books of poetry, Nonstop (Cedar Rock Press, 1981) and Boycrazy (Slough Press, 1986).

Marion’s Bohemian Rhapsody column appears monthly at BaltimoreFishbowl.com, and her essays and articles have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, The Utne Reader, O, Salon, and Real Simple, among others. Her commentaries for All Things Considered are collected on the npr.org website, and she regularly reviews books for Newsday and Kirkus Review. A professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore, Marion was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction and has been inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. She has appeared on the Today Show, Politically Incorrectand Oprah.

To learn more, visit marionwinik.com.

This piece appears in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.

Marion Winik
The Skater
d. 1994

The third time I lost a lover I was 36: it was my first husband, the father of my children, the heart of my heart, a gay ex-figure skater I met at Mardi Gras in 1983, which had started out looking a lot like 1982 but was transformed into something else entirely. He was a beautiful young man, and beautiful things formed effortlessly in his wake: double axels, rosebushes, pale yellow-green cocktails made from Pernod. When I saw him tending bar in the French Quarter, I fell in love with him immediately, as did everyone.

Improbable as it seemed and seems, he loved me back. And so began his remarkable transformation from tank-topped Disco Thing to ponytailed stay-at-home dad. It helped that he was a person who felt no need to make sense of things, that despite his cool affect he was driven purely by emotion. Skater, hairdresser, gardener, lover of wall treatments, Virgin of Guadalupe icons and synth-pop compilations on cassette tape: yet when you saw him with his little sons, who slept in their baby seats on the floor of the hair salon, there was no doubt as to his true calling.

By the time we got married, we knew he was positive and I wasn’t. His old friends were already dying. I wholeheartedly believed we would be spared, but perhaps he did not.

There were six good years and two nightmarish ones, during which we took a fair shot at outdoing the virus in wrecking our own lives. Then there was the day he checked out of the hospice and came home to die. He had lived too long in the valley of the shadow, where time bloats up as if having an allergic reaction to your presence, where a week has a million days.

It made me sick when just four months after he gave up, better drugs were announced, but I don’t know if he would have waited even if he knew. Our brother-in-law, The Carpenter, had sent him postcards from a road he never wanted to see.

Many years later, when they were almost men, I gave his boys the tape he made them before he died, a tape I had listened to once and slipped into a drawer. They sat side by side on the bed, unbearably tall and handsome, one with the recorder on his knees, the other pretending to do something on his laptop. What sports do you play? asks their father, his voice high and soft from the morphine drip. He thinks he’s talking to the little guys who just visited him at the hospice. Are you taking good care of Mama? Do you remember the day at Grandmom’s when the boat floated away and Daddy had to jump in and save it so we could get home?

Marion Winik is the author of First Comes Love (Random House, 1996) and The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2008.) Her other books are Telling (Random House, 1994); The Lunch-Box Chronicles (Random House, 1998); Rules for the Unruly (Simon and Schuster, 2001); Above Us Only Sky (Seal Press, 2005) and Highs in the Low Fifties: How I Stumbled Through the Joys of Single Living (Globe Pequot Press, 2013). She has also published two books of poetry, Nonstop (Cedar Rock Press, 1981) and Boycrazy (Slough Press, 1986).

Marion’s Bohemian Rhapsody column appears monthly at BaltimoreFishbowl.com, and her essays and articles have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, The Utne Reader, O, Salon, and Real Simple, among others. Her commentaries for All Things Considered are collected on the npr.org website, and she regularly reviews books for Newsday and Kirkus Review. A professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore, Marion was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction and has been inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. She has appeared on the Today Show, Politically Incorrectand Oprah.

To learn more, visit marionwinik.com.

This piece appears in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.

Marion Winik
The Carpenter
d. 1993

One summer, at a swimming hole in Austin where we were playing backgammon and eating bagels, a couple of cute boys from our home state came up to introduce themselves. One of them, an immigrant Italian barber’s son, would become my brother, and not only because he married my sister seven years later.

He was our Dean Moriarty, irresistible, legendary, bossy and full of ideas. He could build anything, fix anything, and he could talk to dogs. He was the first white person I knew to appreciate hip-hop. He had a union card. He talked like Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. He had scholarships to art schools in Kansas City and New York, and he loved Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In Texas he spray-painted the name of my first book on a railroad bridge, and when we moved to New York, zoomed around at night printing the shapes of T-shirts on the walls. He and my sister hopped yachts in Florida, sent postcards from his relatives’ town in Italy, shipped home little packages of heroin from Thailand. He was not afraid of needles.

Next to one another, our lives were an object lesson in the class structure of the late twentieth-century East Coast suburb, the Italians versus the Jews. For example, the vast difference in the amount of money and attention devoted to our flat feet, lazy eyes and crooked teeth, our little talents and our educations, largely with the same results. He mocked me for how carefully I divided the phone bill in our communal apartment, which, I had to point out, was furnished entirely through his trash-picking. We used to laugh ourselves sick with our version of Sonny and Cher’s theme song: Well I don’t know if all that’s true, but you got me and baby, I got you. Babe. Doo doo doo doo. Fuck you, babe.

Do you remember when it seemed impossible that people as young and strong as this would lie with their heads shaved and their bones sticking out wearing diapers in St. Vincent’s Hospital? 1993, the year he died, was near the peak of the dying, and by the end of the century about a half million American boys, and a few girls, would die of AIDS. Twenty-five million worldwide now. It-was-his-time-he-is-at-peace-he-is-free-from-pain-at-last. Who wants to hear these things? I’d rather take the whole last few years of his life, the addiction, the sickness, the breakup, crumple them up and hide them like a paper full of mistakes you don’t want anyone to see. I miss him more, not less, as time goes by.

Marion Winik is the author of First Comes Love (Random House, 1996) and The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2008.) Her other books are Telling (Random House, 1994); The Lunch-Box Chronicles (Random House, 1998); Rules for the Unruly (Simon and Schuster, 2001); Above Us Only Sky (Seal Press, 2005) and Highs in the Low Fifties: How I Stumbled Through the Joys of Single Living (Globe Pequot Press, 2013). She has also published two books of poetry, Nonstop (Cedar Rock Press, 1981) and Boycrazy (Slough Press, 1986).

Marion’s Bohemian Rhapsody column appears monthly at BaltimoreFishbowl.com, and her essays and articles have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, The Utne Reader, O, Salon, and Real Simple, among others. Her commentaries for All Things Considered are collected on the npr.org website, and she regularly reviews books for Newsday and Kirkus Review. A professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore, Marion was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction and has been inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. She has appeared on the Today Show, Politically Incorrectand Oprah.

To learn more, visit marionwinik.com.

This piece appears in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.

Marion Winik
The Art Star
d. 1990

I must have taken the same acid he did at a Grateful Dead concert when we were fifteen, because his drawings look just like what I saw: the writhing, intertwined dancers, the fat black line between good and evil, the undulating burstingness of everything. His whole adorable symbology—the crawling baby, the barking dog, the blowjobs and dolphins, TV sets and serpents, flying saucers, dollar signs and ticking clocks—made perfect sense to me the moment I saw it. Out the dirty window of an A train stopped at West Fourth Street in 1981. It was like when I read “Howl” for the first time: I felt I’d been waiting to see it, or that I had seen it already, that I just wanted to keep seeing it again. Well, I was in luck about that. Soon he was everywhere.

Fifteen years later, my mother and I saw a retrospective of his work at a museum in Toronto. There were glass cases of his diaries and comic strips and drawings from when he was a kid. I was already in tears when I saw his birthdate, May 4, 1958, three days before mine. Also that year came Prince and Madonna and Grandmaster Flash, as well as poor crazy Darby Crash, poor crazy Michael Jackson and poor crazy Nancy Spungen. Also my second husband, the anarchist philosopher-king. It was a Chinese Year of the Dog, and the best minds of our generation were the dog-minds, marking, always marking, always wagging our tails, thinking about sex, doing it, no sense of public or private, always wolfing the treats, never ashamed to slice the air with our proud egomaniac bark. Where would pop culture be without us? The simplest things he wrote, like The only time I am happy is when I am working, gave me chills. So angry about AIDS but calmly accepting of his death at 31.

Marion Winik is the author of First Comes Love (Random House, 1996) and The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2008.) Her other books are Telling (Random House, 1994); The Lunch-Box Chronicles (Random House, 1998); Rules for the Unruly (Simon and Schuster, 2001); Above Us Only Sky (Seal Press, 2005) and Highs in the Low Fifties: How I Stumbled Through the Joys of Single Living (Globe Pequot Press, 2013). She has also published two books of poetry, Nonstop (Cedar Rock Press, 1981) and Boycrazy (Slough Press, 1986).

Marion’s Bohemian Rhapsody column appears monthly at BaltimoreFishbowl.com, and her essays and articles have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, The Utne Reader, O, Salon, and Real Simple, among others. Her commentaries for All Things Considered are collected on the npr.org website, and she regularly reviews books for Newsday and Kirkus Review. A professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore, Marion was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction and has been inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. She has appeared on the Today Show, Politically Incorrectand Oprah.

To learn more, visit marionwinik.com.

This piece appears in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.

Marion Winik
The Junkie
d. 1991

In my youth I was often told, usually by men, that I talked too much, so it was a relief to finally meet a guy who talked more. He was the son of a Chicano boxer from Texas retired to Pinebrook, New Jersey, the hometown of my future brother-in-law, The Carpenter. Growing up, they called him Bean—because he was Mexican, I reminded my sister the other day. Oh, boys will be boys: first tree houses and mischief, then girls and cigarettes, next roofing jobs and heroin. When we lived in the fifth-floor walkup on West Sixteenth Street, he’d show up at the door with his terrible complexion and boundless enthusiasm, sometimes with dope, sometimes sick, sometimes with his huge, silent friend Chris, sometimes with a matchbook on which he had written a phone number to buy a car, or drawn a diagram of how to grow opium poppies on the windowsill.

Remember how we all loved him despite his being somewhat unloveable? my sister said. I do. Having met him at what was probably the low point of my life, the infamous 1982, I was eager for nonjudgmental companionship, and was particularly transfixed by the way he concentrated on retracting the syringe when helping me shoot up. Together we watched my blood unfurl like fireworks in the clear liquid. I followed him around for a month or so, until he shrugged me off by shacking up with an old high school girlfriend. I was living far away by the time they all started dying. My sister remembers that on the way to his funeral she and her husband stopped at the SPCA. They adopted a blond lab and named it Bean. This was how we were back then, she sighs, meaning drugs flattened everything. On the other hand, when my son was 16 he named the puppy I gave him for Christmas after his dead father, so maybe they were just young.

Marion Winik is the author of First Comes Love (Random House, 1996) and The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2008.) Her other books are Telling (Random House, 1994); The Lunch-Box Chronicles (Random House, 1998); Rules for the Unruly (Simon and Schuster, 2001); Above Us Only Sky (Seal Press, 2005) and Highs in the Low Fifties: How I Stumbled Through the Joys of Single Living (Globe Pequot Press, 2013). She has also published two books of poetry, Nonstop (Cedar Rock Press, 1981) and Boycrazy (Slough Press, 1986).

Marion’s Bohemian Rhapsody column appears monthly at BaltimoreFishbowl.com, and her essays and articles have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, The Utne Reader, O, Salon, and Real Simple, among others. Her commentaries for All Things Considered are collected on the npr.org website, and she regularly reviews books for Newsday and Kirkus Review. A professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore, Marion was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction and has been inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. She has appeared on the Today Show, Politically Incorrectand Oprah.

To learn more, visit marionwinik.com.

This piece appears in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.

Aaron DeLee
SELFIE: TWINK

(twingk) n. 1. a glittering flake that’s thin, pointed, and shades the eye; capable of drifting, falling into the wrong spot and cutting a cornea on the laser-lit dancefloor; a speck in the spectrum ready to be swept up with a thousand others. 2. a terse period in one’s life when briefs barely tense at the waistband, often slipping off; when one repeatedly listens to, sings, relates to Popular and Part of Your World. 3. young enough to believe in fairy tales, the things daddies tell their boys before going to bed– ex.: Poz here, but on meds, very healthy, undetectable viral load — non-contagious. Actually makes a safer fuck than others. Just can’t do condoms any more, can’t feel anything through them. 4. Slang: the pejorative for one who’s easily slung; a lightweight accustomed to the vulgar, an obscene scene, characterized by a lack of good breeding like public schooled Hoosiers whose Health classes skipped this subject. Also see: Brent Corrigan; Peter Pan.

Aaron DeLee’s poems have appeared in Court Green, Assaracus, The Goodmen Project, and other publications. He received his BA from Loyola University Chicago and his MFA from Northwestern University.

This poem is not previously published.

Day Merrill
Before the Bridge

Before the bridge, the river flowed down into the lake.
Turning its face to the sun, it poured itself into the waiting.
No roads then, no paved walkways, no paths.
Just the river, the banks, the sun.
Deep pools and twirling eddies. Cool spots where trees
bent down to kiss the river as it danced its way home.
Any dark places forged by nature in her wisdom, not by man.
Tumult from storms—thunder and lightning, not gunshots.
Sharp rocks and smooth stones, not spent needles and empty vials.
Ecstasy from the simple act of creation celebrating itself.

You sit before the bridge and seek solace, or is it redemption?
No matter, it is affirmation both sought and given by you and the river.

If I could, I would unroll the bandages of your life,
Uncover the source of hurts done to you, and
those done to yourself.
Winding back the years, exposing
the bare flesh of your life to sun and light
until you were like that baby in the manger,
Tiny, new and perfect.
Then I would swaddle you in something strong enough
to last your whole life through.

I am no miracle worker. I do not know how to keep you safe.
So I knit you poems with prayers stitched into every line,
Asking only that God hold you
in the love you have always deserved.

Day Merrill’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin Roof Press, Halcyon, The Binnacle, Contemporary Rural Social Work, and Quick Brown Fox. After a career as an English teacher and a university administrator, she became a career coach. Day lives in Collingwood, Ontario on the shores of Georgian Bay/Lake Huron where with her husband and a rescued dog and cat.

This poem is not previously published.

C. Russell Price
Mr. Doomsday

Your blue jeans are ripped at the crotch
and tonight I’m getting that t-shirt wet.

You make me your handsomest pig as I puff
through your pit patch: your workday armor.

If you are wearing red underwear,
you will want to fuck me while looking at my sister.

You say with a straight-edge chagrin,
“You can ask only one question. Put on that wig.”

I save pleasantries and want only untamable baggage,
I kiss the Needle’s party gift,

I lick the Razor’s bracelet defeat.
I take you in me to plant a cherry bomb.

Tonight’s sex soundtrack is another pretty dead thing.
When the loop begins, it’s time to pay up,

shower, get gone. Returning, you smell like me
and I give you one on the house

because I know the sad boy scent.
You pull out with the breaking news.

Tom Brokaw still looks amazing.
The time to unmute the TV and stop jackhammering has arrived.

The latest great flood starts with an unstickable American faucet,
a whole Floridian town with its hands on its hips,

bubble gum smacking: each pop a “so this is it?”
With you limp beside me, I imagine: first the tub, then Tampa,

then the whole South is underwater. This John will rule
with an iron cock ring and super hero calves.

We will start with the Stars and Bars;
we burn the flag and name the dead.

Your family stops using the N-word,
your parents rainbow bumper sticker the whole state of VA.

This Wet Earth has no dry land for your bullshit.
The big mouths have been busted and the bullies’re buried.

My sex education consisted of touch → kiss → AIDS,
Brandon Blankenship: you were wrong and I don’t fucking forgive you.

My John and I fuck every day because we’re the last left in Chicago.
We pretend the market’s still standing and closing at 10.

No other world but this one now.
When my John is gone too long,

I think he’s found a third
breathing thing in our fish tank home.

I wonder if he pays them after, if he says my name
like a foreclosed amusement park.

If rather than questioning, he simply says “I’m sorry for bombing
those islands that you loved.”

C. Russell Price is a genderqueer poet originally from Virginia but lives in Chicago. Previous publications include: Assaracus, Court Green, Glitterwolf, MiPOesias, Weave, and elsewhere. They are a 2015 Lambda Fellow in Poetry. They currently work with TriQuarterly and Story Club Magazine. Their chapbook Tonight We Fuck The Trailer Park Out of Each Other is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in Summer 2016.

The HIV Here & Now Project
Atomic Numbers (Some Viruses Are Manmade): Found Poem

Thursday marked the 70th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. A second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later.

350,000: Population of Hiroshima before the bombing,
of which 40,000 were military personnel.

140,000: Estimated death toll, including those who died
from radiation-related injuries and illness through Dec. 31, 1945.

300,000: Total death toll to date, including those who have died
from radiation-related cancers.

1.2 million: Population of Hiroshima today.

31,500: Height in feet (9,600 meters) from which the B-29
Enola Gay dropped the “Little Boy” bomb.

2,000: Height in feet (600 meters) at which the bomb
exploded 43 seconds after it was dropped.

3,000-4,000: The estimated temperature in Celsius (5,400-7,200 Fahrenheit)
at ground zero seconds after the detonation.

8,900: Approximate weight of the “Little Boy” bomb
in pounds (about 4 metric tons).

1,600: Radius in feet (500 meters) from ground zero
in which the entire population died that day.

90: Percent of Hiroshima that was destroyed.

45: Minutes after the 8:15 a.m. blast that a “black rain”
of highly radioactive particles started falling.

3-6: Weeks after the bombing during which most of the victims
with severe radiation symptoms died.

10 million: Folded paper (“origami”) cranes
that decorate the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima each year.

This poem appears as an article by the Associated Press in The New York Times today.

Sources: Hiroshima city government; Japan Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare; Japan Foreign Ministry.