A Poetry Squawk
By Robert Carr
Author of Amaranth

On the way to workshop I hit the curb in a Boston rotary and blow out a tire. I pretend it hasn’t happened, though the percussion of the rim on the Mystic Valley Parkway is deafening. Already, an inner voice is yelling, “Why the hell didn’t you pull over sooner, you’ll destroy your rim!” My reply? “I’m workshopping a poem about jerking-off and I want to get to class!”

So, I accept that I’m not going to make it another three miles to the poets that gather in Cambridge and I pull off the road. I’ve always had a lot of power in my head, but when it comes to being in the world of doing things—that’s been sporadic.

I’m fifty-six years old and I’ve never changed a tire. I text Tom, the workshop facilitator, and tell him I’ve broken down. I call my husband Stephen and tell him I’m breaking down. I need him to help me to find the thing you use to raise the car. The…jack, that’s right!

That’s when the next poem comes—it’s not about rotaries, or traffic circles, or round-a-bouts, or flats, or the grease that should be on my hands. It arrives with anxiety, sharpens like a high beam, speeds into the anger of being incapable.

The poem quickly finds the voice of a queer speaker. The voice is pissed. I’m on the memo app of my phone tapping out the words and by the time Stephen pulls in behind me there’s a baby poem in the world. With his tongue, the “you” flips lit cigarettes in and out of his mouth to amuse a child. I’m playing with line breaks.

When it’s not things like hitting curbs (or really anything that makes me feel something during the day), poems come at me at night like dreams or nightmares. In that half-space between sleep and waking, a word, a phrase, an entire poem shows up and demands to be written down. I keep my phone beside the bed and light up that memo app. (It’s 4:53 a.m. right now and that’s what happened about a half-hour ago when I woke up thinking about tires.)

The words in my head demand the writing. It’s pretty obnoxious. Even when I’m alone in the middle of the night. When I’m with other people (usually Stephen), it’s more obnoxious. “Stop! Pull over! I’ve got to get this down!” Otherwise, it’s gone.

A Poetry Squawk
By Sarah Sarai
Author of Geographies of Soul and Taffeta

The hammock of the Indolent Books logo beckoned to me when it was a mere twinkle in a graphic designer’s eye. It boldly and with cheek represents my revered indolence, an overlooked and perhaps abused state of being.

Indolence, as a concept, is a vote against capitalism, with its need for ever expanding growth and ever expanding earnings. Both come at the peril of the workers. Give me a pennywhistle (but first, tell me what it is), a book, an iced tea, and a hammock and I will have no desire to move the world, as opposed to Archimedes, who told a reporter at Brainy Quotes, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” As you probably know, he was a mathematician, engineer, physicist in Sicily, in the 200s BC.

Good for Archimedes. I have no problem with the innately inventive, a category that includes all style of creative writers and creative anythingelsers — cooks, mechanics, physicians. If it works, when it works, a go-get-em nature is grand. When it ends up with an overwhelming majority of people who work hard with little personal gain, then nah.

We who are indolent are spiritually evolved. We see the tiny spin of light each of us is, the speck among specks among specks. We who are indolent believe we are all bits of a divinity and that that is, or should be, enough. Alas, it’s not always enough. We struggle with understanding our destinies. Should we do more, given that, like all humans, we have talents and inclinations. Instead of a lever, Archimedes could offer us a level with its three bubbles of balance.

Paul Lafargue, a well-known socialist in nineteenth century France, wrote with humor about indolence’s poor cousin, laziness. Here’s a bit “The Right to be Lazy.” Please note: Lafargue and his wife, finding themselves helpless from old age and penury, committed suicide together. Even more notable: LaFargue’s wife was Laura Marx, Karl Marx’s daughter.

Weigh your options.

From “The Right to be Lazy”:

DOES any one believe that, because the toilers of the time of the mediæval guilds worked five days out of seven in a week, they lived upon air and water only, as the deluding political economists tell us? Go to! They had leisure to taste of earthly pleasure, to cherish love, to make and to keep open house in honor of the great God, Leisure. In those days, that morose, hypocritically Protestant England was called “Merrie England.” Rabelais, Quevedo, Cervantes, the unknown authors of the spicy novels of those days, make our mouths water with their descriptions of those enormous feasts, at which the peoples of that time regaled themselves, and towards which “nothing was spared.” Jordaens and the Dutch school of painters have portrayed them for us, in their pictures of jovial life. Noble, giant stomachs, what has become of you? Exalted spirits, ye who comprehended the whole of human thought, whither are ye gone? We are thoroughly degenerated and dwarfed. Tubercular cows, potatoes, wine made with fuchsine, beer from saffron, and Prussian whiskey in wise conjunction with compulsory labor have weakened our bodies and dulled our intellects. And at the same time that mankind ties up its stomach, and the productivity of the machine goes on increasing day by day, the political economists wish to preach to us Malthusian doctrine, the religion of abstinence and the dogma of work!

For more, please consult The Right to be Lazy, 1883, courtesy of the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

A Poetry Squawk
By Darius Stewart
Author of The Ghost the Night Becomes

Yes, I admit it, this is about one thing, and one thing only: I fail miserably at scansion. It’s one of the reasons I’m not a doctor: scansion is finite; the practice of medical science is finite. It’s why math and science detest me, and why the feeling is quite mutual. When I encounter anything remotely finite, I become finitely remote. For example, approach me with the idea of geometric proofs and word problems, or how measuring a line of verse as a method of inferring meaning in a poem, not to mention the inherent formalist’s tool for crafting it, and I will counter with:

“Give me ‘Things I Just Can’t Fucking Understand’ for a thousand, Alex.”

To me, these are concepts tantamount to mixing oil and water then using the mixture to fry an egg. Imagine that.

(Did I clarify that scansion is too finite for a free verse poet such as I . . . or is it me?)

Perhaps the underlying problem is that I find scansion counter-intuitive to understanding what a poem demands that I understand; whether it’s for the purposes of analysis or for construction, scanning a poem is like performing the Viennese waltz and instead of wedding oneself to the rhythms of the music, to the sweeping gestures, the glissandos of the feet dancing across the floor, one moves mechanically to the metronome: 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3 . . .

Much art a dancing robot makes not.

Poetry, as with most modern literary mediums, is robust and shape-shifting. In the face of traditional rule today’s poetry doesn’t just fly, but suggests alternatives to the status quo. So does this make me an illegitimate poet if I can’t correctly assign stressed and unstressed syllables in a line? What if, in trying to scan a poem, being from the South, I employ additions or subtractions to words because it’s customary to how we create language in this region? What inherent meaning is thereby lost due to inadequate arithmetic? Stressed, unstressed, I’m stressed.

Of course, I don’t intend to decry the merits of and necessity for scansion used formally to arrange and infer meaning. Even as a free verse poet, I still rely on scansion; only my usage is more akin to how a composer might score a variety of time signatures to subvert a predominate theme, thereby adding dimension and texture to a piece, not to mention eliciting a variety of emotional responses.

(Maybe I should become a composer. I’ve always loved syncopation. Though, ironically, I find jazz composition to be too formally informal.)

What it all means is I can do without restricting myself to purisms. For some poets, scansion and other formalities are the lifeblood of their work. Verse isn’t verse unless it’s attuned to its metrical implications. I’d rather make up my own rules just to see what I didn’t know I could create. If a bit of self-consciously metrical passages bebop their way into the poem, then so be it; I’m still a free verser—kind of like how I can still do the robot, but I don’t dance like one.

Darius Stewart is the author of The Terribly Beautiful (2006) and Sotto Voce (2008), each of which was an Editor’s Choice Selection in the Main Street Rag Poetry Chapbook Series, as well as The Ghost the Night Becomes (2014), winner of the 2013 Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Prize. Other poems and prose appear widely in literary journals and anthologies. He is a former James A. Michener Fellow in poetry, receiving the M.F.A. degree from The University of Texas at Austin. Presently, he resides in Knoxville, Tenn.,  with his dog, Phillip J. “Fry.”

A Poetry Squawk
By Nicole Callihan
Author of SuperLoop and A Study in Spring (with Zoe Ryder White)

I.
All weekend, my husband made me work in the yard. I put on soft, yellow gloves and pushed my sleeves up. I must admit I am a reluctant gardener, but I do love the feel of the sun on my skin, and if I practice long enough, the rhythm starts to settle in: the eight-inch spacing, the weight of the spade, a handful of manure, a bundle of bulbs or tangle of roots. Yesterday, we planted the whole hill with periwinkle vinca; last week’s azaleas are blazing; the rhododendrons seem promising. Sometimes neighbors stop, and we talk about deer or the weather. Late in the afternoon, I stand in the shower and wash the earth off my body. I welcome it: it’s been such a long time since I’ve seen actual dirt going down the drain.

II.
I don’t know why I believed so thoroughly that if I began digging a hole in my tiny, dull North Carolina town, and dug and dug with my blue plastic shovel through the soft and hard and fiery layers, I would find, on the other side of the dense mad planet: China. I guess it was as good a way as any for the daycare workers to keep us busy. Here, kid, go dig a hole to China. I imagined first finding those tiny cobs of corn, the ones we got in every take-out dish we ordered from the Double Happiness in Wilmington, and then there would be strangers and rickshaws. The sky would be a whole different blue, and every cookie would hold the future.

III.
My mother is haunted by a dream in which she kills a man and buries his body. I must have been seven or eight when she first told me about him, but she’s had the dream for as long as she can remember. Sometimes she buries the body under the pecan tree in her childhood backyard, or out behind the reservation house where we lived in South Dakota, or in the field near the apartment we first rented in Tulsa, or just south of the duck pond at the big white house that she saved and saved to buy. I don’t think she’s ever been caught; her dream operates entirely around the fear that she’ll be discovered.

IV.
And so, why do I write? I think that’s the question I’m supposed to be answering. Well, I write to feel the sun on my arms, to embrace the tedium, to learn the names of things, to watch it all bloom after a long, long winter. And I write, too, to go someplace far away from where I am, to dig and dig, and find, on the other side of the world, in Madrid or Amsterdam or Tokyo, a stranger who might share a meal or a cigarette with me, who might understand something I’m also trying to understand. And then, of course, there are the bodies. Let’s just say: I’ve got to have somewhere to bury them.

Nicole Callihan writes poems, stories and essays. Her work has appeared in, among others, The American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Forklift, Ohio, PANK, and as a Poem-a-Day feature from the Academy of American Poets. Her books include A Study in Spring (with Zoë Ryder White), winner of the 2015 Baltic Writing Residency Chapbook Contest; the 2012 nonfiction Henry River Mill Village (with Ruby Young Kellar); and SuperLoop (Sock Monkey Press, 2014). Her chapbook The Deeply Flawed Human is forthcoming from Deadly Chaps Press in July 2016. Nicole lives with her husband and daughters in Brooklyn, New York.

A Poetry Squawk
By Lisa Andrews
Author of Dear Liz

I used to do a lot of writing while walking. (A friend saw me doing this years ago — before even flip phones — and assumed I must be memorizing lines for a play.) These days, more often than not, I write at home. Sometimes in absolute quiet (I’ve been lucky lately); sometimes while listening to music (music without words or in a language I can’t understand) — usually classical music, often opera. The music builds a wall around me; becomes a kind of armor against what I call the front-of-the-brain world — the world of health insurance disputes, taxes, proofreading. The music is larger than I am; inside it, I enter a different state of mind.

The back of the brain is where writing poetry happens for me. I keep writing and writing — out of a memory or an obsession — out of something I had no idea I was going to write about but that came up in the act of writing. I am writing as fast as I can, writing whatever comes into my head — what I am seeing, hearing — hoping to write faster than I can think, so that I may fall into something unknowingly — something that will take me by surprise.

I am not in charge. I am not in control. But I am, I hope, in a place where I will not be interrupted (here control enters in). I go for the early hours rather than the later ones — but I’ll take whatever I can get. A stretch of uninterrupted, uninterruptible time is the ideal. At home, I turn off every device.

Sometimes I go to a museum or a café. The subway is good. Trains are good. The shower can be great (although I may not be able to write anything down). You can’t really do other things on the subway. You’re not going to answer the door or the phone or the buzzer. You’re not, I hope, going to get up and start cleaning the subway car. There’s something about the movement, the motion of the subway car — and a kind of anonymity that covers me, encloses me (I am not talking about rush hour).

I once took a train from Penn Station almost all the way to Johnson, Vermont, and I wrote (almost) the entire way there. On the way back, I was not so lucky. It was a much smaller train. People were friendly. There were long stops. People were very friendly.

Writing over a period of months (or years), certain things keep coming up — surface repeatedly. Whether in the instant, or, more likely, over a period of time, something catches, takes hold; takes over. I work on it — letting it work on me, following it where it takes me. There will be multiple drafts of multiple versions.

Slowly, something begins to take shape, begins to cohere. Longer drafts I take with me wherever I go. Shorter drafts (or memorized drafts) I take with me on long walks, saying the lines out loud, hearing how things sound, making changes and writing them down — adding and subtracting…

Lisa Andrews grew up in Michigan and moved back to her native New York to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. A graduate of Hunter College, she received an MA in English Literature and an MFA in Poetry from NYU, where she taught in the Expository Writing Program and worked with poetry students at Goldwater Hospital and Bayview Correctional Facility. Chosen by Dael Orlandersmith as a recipient of the New Voice Poetry Award from the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA, Lisa has had residencies
at Blue Mountain Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her poems have appeared in Gargoyle, HIV Here & Now, Mudfish, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Zone 3. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Tony Geiger.

By Joss Barton
Contributing Editor

Baby birds squallin’ in a nest made of hay, twigs, and garbage lodged beneath the sleeve air conditioner outside your apartment window. Should you ask the landlord to have pest control destroy the nest? You think of how death based on discomfort always brings the worst kinds of karma, like six months of cold showers and no heat, or your mother letting you know you’re breaking her heart. Your bed still smells of the stale poppers you spilled on your sheets last night while getting fucked by a man you met off Craigslist. He’s bisexual and you fucked before, one summer afternoon after his soccer game. He arrives sweaty with moist milky skin, his thick cock throbbing through mesh shorts. He fucked you raw but pulled out to shoot his load. But last night, as you straddled his body, running your hands across his hard flesh, his cock ramming up your ass, he is disconnected. He continues to fuck you, but his eyes go somewhere past your skin, his erection slowly deflating with each thrust. You know he posts ads looking to fuck men and trans women, but only in the ads targeting men does he say he’s POZ/undetectable. You tell him you know, and that you don’t care. You just want his cum. He ends up pumping two loads inside you.

He isn’t the first man with HIV you’ve fucked. You loose your virginity the first semester of college at 19. A good part of those first sexual years are spent terrified of HIV. You use condoms like you’re told to, take them like candy from bowls at prevention centers across campus. You’re even okay with settling for sloppy blowjobs because seroconversion by oral sex would require taking anon loads right after oral surgery, like, CUM INSIDE MY BLOODY WISDOM TOOTH DRY SOCKET DADDY!!! But sometimes the condom isn’t on, and in those moments, you always whine to the tops please, don’t cum in me. This pattern continues thru your 20s and each year your interest in condoms wanes while your fascination with erections grows with blissful intensity. You realize somewhere in your early 20s, coming up through the faggotry, that statistically a good percentage of the men fucking you were already HIV+ or would seroconvert at some point. You’ve lost count but your best guess is you’ve had sex with somewhere between 300 and 400 men. Every HIV test you take comes with a feast of inner-paranoid shame, self-loathing, and fear. You admit, every time, the process feels better, healthier, with each kernel of knowledge and de-stigmatizing you teach yourself about HIV, treatment as prevention, incubation periods, seroconversion symptoms, risk-reduction practices. You know systems profit off HIV and marginalized bodies, and that under capitalism, The State works by employing medical industrial systems to remind us our bodies are not our own. We can’t liberate the cells or the genitals. We can’t be seen in the wrong bathroom. We can’t evolve without AIDS.

Last year, your black butchqueen sisters start to get on PrEP one by one. You kiki with them on the phone about taking raw dicks, start using the hashtag #TRUVADARYDR, very faggot homage to EVE’s WHAT YA WANT: BOMBSHELL JUST A SECOND/MAMI WANNA SPEAK OUT: Sunday brunches spent gagging over gangbangs and five load Fridays. The #TruvadaWhore think pieces prompt you to ask your friends how they got on the drug. You more than meet the requirements for a high-risk patient. Cum was now QWEEN of your sexual life. You craved it in your mouth and ass as much as possible. What once seemed like a shy fascination was now a full-grown HOBBY. Your pussy becomes a beaming Technicolor rainbow but with a pot of cum at the end of every afternoon fuck.

Obamacare comes through and you’re able to make an appointment with one of the few queer/trans-affirming doctors in Saint Louis. You sit in the exam room listening to him explain the PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) consultation and what to expect with hormone replacement therapy (HRT). He tells you he’s starting you off slow on a low dosage and that if the HIV test is negative you can get started on Truvada (the brand name of the drug used for PrEP). Behind you, on the wall, is a huge multicolored painting of Judy Garland, her face repeated over and over again in rows of film, transitioning between pastel colors and black and white, and she just stares at you, her face in her hands.

You’ve been on HRT and Truvada for two months now. The estradiol starts white at half a milligram, hues sky blue at 1 milligram, and when you pack your PM pill in your plastic wallet the two milligrams sometimes look like crumbling robin’s eggs lining the red seams with light dust. The Truvada stays blue. Your pussy is the divine drunk on desire. It don’t give a fuck about HIV. It needs weed and silicone lube. It is a queero-faggot-tranny-god. Your body isn’t soft enough. It has ugly feet and missing eyelashes. What will your mind do when the fear of HIV is gone? Will you realize you’re poor? Will you demand a pill to cure poverty from your body? Where is the gene therapy to get Islan a murder conviction? These pills won’t stop you from being slaughtered. They won’t heal you from cultural genocide. You write a poem after Tamara Dominguez is killed in Kansas City: death stroked our hair and kissed our cheeks and asked us to never call their phones only text only let it fuck us at five or six in the morning only wear a wig and black panties and neon fishnets and shiny heels only snort and smoke what it brings over in clear plastic baggies only sleep when it’s all over.

The men fucking you are all sad in their own ways. The short, tatted stripclub bouncer who lives around the corner constantly wants to know if you’re negative yet always wants to cum raw in your ass. The HS basketball coach made you the sidechick through two different girlfriends. The hung former frat boy turned Trump supporter who you run into walking his Labrador one morning in the lobby of your other trick. Their textfloods are always looking for pussy and ass and your clit or your cum and always how horny they are and how they miss your body. They always fuck you in beds where their wives or girlfriends or buddies won’t find, where your value is sold on ripped thigh highs, 7-inch pumps, hard nipples and your cock tucked into velvet thongs. They’re the kind of men who drown cigarettes in puddles, whistle a lil sunshine with a lil rain, lust on you, the girl picking skin off her lips, tossing the flesh on the bar. They never take off their wedding rings. You take them raw or if they insist rubbered. It doesn’t matter. They want to own your holes. Is it clique to believe bottoming is an art?

These medical interventions you’ve chosen are the best resources and tools you have to ensure you stay alive in this world. You believe this because you know there are people and institutions that want you erased. Your humanity is still debated and negotiated while your sisters shout and fight for freedom in North Carolina. You dream of jails and host cells exploding with virus. You think of how the mind is a wonderful and frightening place. You vogue yourself back to health with duckwalks and deathdrops and druggy cunty wrists. Survival sounds like Minnie Riperton singing Rainy Day in Centerville, tastes like fresh March mud worms, feels like the ravenous mouths of screaming chicks.

Learn more about Contributing Editor Joss Barton and the rest of Our Team.

By CJ Stobinski
Contributing Editor

April 9, 2016—This morning I awoke to seven inches of snow covering my car and, for that matter, everything else in sight. Even in Toledo, where all four seasons can be experienced in a day, one hardly expects to encounter this much snow so far into the year. “Pretty,” I heard it described perfectly, “but uncalled for.”

I managed to clean my car off well enough to rush to the yoga studio I’ve frequented for the past two and a half months just in time for class. A co-owner of the studio was teaching class today, and she asked us to ruminate on how nature, and life, can bring the unexpected our way, but can still result in something absolutely breathtakingly beautiful if we embrace it.

After a particularly enjoyable class, I went about my day trying to keep this sentiment close to heart. An exasperatingly stressful serving shift later that night found me repeating, “Keep with the breath, it’ll be ok,” as I attempted to remain calm when all I wanted to do was scream and freak out. Nothing seemed to be going my way, until I spotted my yoga teacher standing at the host stand, requesting me as a server. In that moment I knew it was finally time to write this.

Today was the 30th birthday, or would have been, of a friend who was the victim of a wrong way drunk driving accident on I-75 early Christmas morning a few years back. He was supposed to be hosting his first Christmas, his favorite holiday, but instead left this world tragically in an instant.

I only knew him from four months of working together, and I don’t even have a picture with him, but he was extremely kind to me when he could have easily been as nasty to me as I was to him when first getting to know him. He was that amazing person you know who makes you work for their friendship, but once you’ve earned it you realize just how worthwhile it was breaking through the hard outer shell to get to the gooey inside. After calling him an asshole in the middle of the restaurant, he could easily have turned the entire staff against me, but instead reached out to me and lent a hand of kindness. He was the first gay man ever to show me the true meaning of friendship. I will never forget the call from an unknown number after work, him telling me to “Stop crying over spilled milk.”

I can still hear the echo of the door slamming behind me as I walked down the corridor away from room 101 at the local health department. When the tester turned the OraQuick around, hesitated, and asked me how many pink lines I saw, my heart sank. I had entered a half hour prior, resolved to start a new year in control of my health and life. I left in a hurry, in control of neither, less than nine hours away from my 24th birthday.

A few weeks prior, I had woken up next to a fifth of gin I couldn’t remember finishing, and witnessed what a bowl of Chipotle looks like in reverse all over my bathroom, followed by an emergency appendectomy later that night. As I waited for the results of my CAT scan, I joked to my mom and littlest sister that this was Life #7 of my nine cat lives. The first six I spent wrapping my car around a tree at age 18, resulting in a medically induced coma to control bleeding on my brain, a stable neck fracture at a young age I learned of from said accident, and a few other crazy stories.

I thought, how better to start taking control of my life and health than with an HIV test? It had been some time since my last test, and although I was having less sex and had fewer partners than at any other time in my life, it was time to check it off the list. Instead, a second tester was brought into the room as I held the Western Blot pad in my cheek, and I scoffed as she said she wanted me to feel empowered by my diagnosis.

I managed to drive myself home, wanting to throw myself from the expressway overpass next to my job, which was just down the street from my apartment at the time. One of the two friends I told that day convinced me not to, saying this could be the end or the next chapter, but it was up to me which chapter that was. She was the oldest friend of my friend that died in the car accident.

My two earliest memories in life are of being the fastest kid in gym class, the one everyone wanted to catch while playing Rabbits & Foxes, and before all else, of experiencing abusive sexual exposure. Ironically, I’ve spent most of my life running from my issues. My longtime childhood friend and I—he was two years my senior—explored our sexuality at an extremely early age; so young that I don’t remember how it first started.

The situation between us evolved into different beasts over the span of about six years. At times he was my only friend, and I went along with “playing doctor” in the acres of forest behind our houses because I didn’t know any better. As I moved into puberty, I think I was genuinely attracted to him at times, but the shame of being gay was strong enough to contort my young psyche into a twisted mess.

This friend also tried unsuccessfully to mess around with my younger sister close in age, so I am certain it started out in a less than innocent manner. At the age of 15, after four years of not speaking to him, I confronted him about the better part of a decade between us. The breaking in his voice as he told me he was raped by his uncle told me he’d never told anyone this, and suddenly everything made sense. I could no longer hold him responsible for what transpired between us. He was just as much a victim as I had been, truly remorseful, and too young to know any better.

Walking into work a few weeks after learning I had HIV, I saw the most exotically beautiful calico kitten running around and immediately knew I had to adopt her. One of my best friends working with me had caught a kitten (most likely her brother) a few months prior, and it brought her fulfillment. I was extremely resistant to the idea of starting medication, and I’d told very few people about my HIV secret at the time, including my best friend. Desperate for non-judgmental companionship, I set a live trap borrowed from my grandmother hoping for a snare.

The following day, I came upon the trap to see I was successful in my quest to capture the elusive calico. Growing up on acres of field-land, I had close to 200 cats over the first 15 years of my life, but never a calico. Little did I know, they are a breed of their own. She ferociously shook the cage as I carried it back to my car, spitting, hissing, and vehemently protesting my forced human interaction unabatedly.

Confined to my bathroom, I was able to pet the calico, ever so lightly, on her terms. The name Cleopatra seemed to bestow itself upon the majestic queen. Middle name Beaverhausen added for good measure. I let her out of the bathroom the next day, and came home to an empty apartment. I turned everything upside down, even checking the microwave. Twice. I was losing it. I took to my newly reactivated Facebook page to proclaim, “MY PUSSY ESCAPED.” I was convinced I’d captured the world’s first teleporting cat. After two days, I finally discovered Cleopatra’s hiding spot—underneath the floorboard beneath my sink. My mom told me she was feral and that I should get rid of her. I told her I wasn’t going to give up so easily, that she needed time, and was worthy of my effort and love.

Three months, two house moves, one brotherly cat rape, and three vet visits (including an emergency spay) later, Cleopatra was more committed to hating me than ever. Not only had I never held her, she would barely even let me pet her anymore. We had moved in with two roommates I hardly knew, and everything was good for about six weeks, until I wanted to take a bath. During a level 3 snow emergency, on February 1st, I went to take a bath in the upstairs bathroom my roommates used (I had been using a finished bathroom with a standup shower in the basement, which I thought was for my privacy and comfort) only to be told that I wasn’t allowed because I had HIV. This lit a fire inside that I hadn’t felt since fighting the school board to establish the Gay Straight Alliance in my high school and since lobbying for anti-bullying legislation with the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN).

In the meantime, I’d been attending a Buddhist temple that helped me accept my diagnosis, and it took about two months to get prescribed the newest once-daily medication on the market at the time, Triumeq. I stood at the service bar at work on February 13th and said, “Buddha, help me,” as I swallowed the first of my pills. Less than a week later I drove almost five hours to Indiana University to participate in a social media campaign called HIV Ends With Me Because… with the slogan “I Believe in a Better Way.”

After returning the next day, I went on the Humane Society’s website and saw a newly turned-in cat that captivated my attention. I went to the Humane Society in search of Fields, an all black, long-haired companion for Cleopatra. I searched the first room in the hallway to no avail, moving onto the next. I picked up one of the long-haired black cats in the next room, and it immediately playfully nibbled on my earlobe. IT WAS FIELDS! He was missing most of the fur on his underbelly and tail, having had numerous burrs buzzed off. I walked to the front desk and said, “I want the dirtiest, most scraggily looking cat here; I’m adopting Fields.” Someone had found him in, you guessed it, a field, 25 minutes west of Toledo without a collar and turned him in.

I took Fields home, and to no surprise, Cleopatra was not having it. She hissed, swatted, and growled at Fields as he paid no attention to her. He sauntered around the room as if saying, “Simmer down bitch, we’re adopted.” The calm, cool, and collected Zen Master Fields, whom I have yet to hear hiss to this day, almost immediately changed Cleopatra’s disposition. Within a week, she was more sociable than ever, and beginning to follow his lead of welcoming my interaction once again. Now at 15+ pounds, he is the definition of a gentle giant, offering many early morning, afternoon, and evening greetings of kisses. After about a week, I realized that Fields was turned in on February 13th, the same day I started meds.

After the Indiana HIV Ends With Me photo shoot, I partnered with the now-defunct Positive Young People’s Foundation as their Ohio Ambassador and threw my own stigma-busting photo shoot at Toledo’s 1st Annual LGBT Health Fair. My slogan, inspired by activist Robert Breining, was HIV Ends With Me Because…#OurDreamsAreNotInfected. Two weeks later I came out about my HIV status in a Facebook post, announced the start of a 5K awareness campaign to bring attention to the rising rates of HIV in today’s youth, and started raising money for Toledo’s first AIDS Walk in 5 years. The next day I went on two live news broadcasts as a client of AIDS Resource Center Ohio and announced my campaign to the city of Toledo.

Within four days time, people pledged over $1,200 to push me to be the top individual fundraiser for Toledo, where I took 1st place in the 5K. As a Grand Walker, I was invited to a celebration in Dayton the next day, where I won the 5K as well, pulling it off by three seconds. This was only my third race ever, and I’d just won two in two days. Needless to say, I was beyond ecstatic and couldn’t believe that I’d accomplished it. A week later I took 17th and 1st in my age group at the Glass City 5K. I could say I trained harder or slept better than my competition, but neither is probably the case. Deep down I believe that I WANTED it more. I wanted to show that an HIV diagnosis does not have to be a death sentence, or an end to a quality life, but rather can be a beautiful rebirth of self.

After being the fastest kid in gym class in second grade, I became the biggest kid in my class of 500 by ninth grade. I self-medicated years of depression stemming from my past abuse with my drug of choice: food. At 5’8” I reached over 250 pounds with a 38-inch waist. I began my weight-loss journey before I acquired the virus and had dropped about 70 of the almost 100 I’ve lost, but the resounding thought in my head was “HOW UNFAIR.” I had done all this work to get healthy and fit, and who could love me now that I had HIV?

Living through my diagnosis taught me that if you allow people to value your worth, then they will. Most of the people I’ve slept with in my life, once I found myself in the situation I wanted to leave it, but proceeded because I never learned how to say no. Living through my diagnosis taught me that self-respect—in the form of being able to say no, whether it be to destructive drugs or sex, that fifth or maybe even first drink, or whatever demons you battle, is the truest form of love: love for oneself.

Now, I am not glamorizing living with HIV. I have dedicated my life to the fight to end the ongoing epidemic. I have become an Ohio Department of Health HIV Education Presentation Trainer, helping to rewrite the updated curriculum this year. I am pursuing a Community Health Worker Certification, completing my clinicals in the same hallway I was diagnosed in. I’ll also be attending Sero Project’s HIV Is Not A Crime law decriminalization training this year, will be running all three of the Ohio AIDS Walk 5Ks, and hope to be invited to AIDS Watch Ohio to lobby and educate the legislative bodies. I believe if you live with HIV, you should help others live without it. I truly Believe in a Better Way.

My diagnosis presented me with a choice of continuing to run from my problems or looking them dead in the eye and daring them to defeat me. It woke me up to a life I wasn’t living, allowed me to recognize a growing alcohol dependency and a life-long dependency on anger. It was time to stop crying over the spilled milk and truly live the last life I had left, my Cat Life #9. HIV is now living with me at an undetectable level, and I can honestly say I’m healthier than I’ve ever been.

See, in many ways I am Cleopatra, who to this day I haven’t held. Exposed to the wild at a very young age for a long time, we both recoil at most human interaction, unless it’s on our own terms, because we don’t trust it. As I have begun to heal, more and more she curls up beside me and the free-flowing Fields, inviting my touch, healing with us.

Something I’ve learned is that we move on from traumatic experiences in waves. Some days you can feel completely freed from shackles you once wore, and on other days feel like you’re right back in them, hog-tied and chained to the floor. Over time, the former should grow more numerous, and will crowd out the latter, but there will still be the days filled with self-doubt and judgment. If the closure you’re looking for is never again to feel the weight of those handcuffs, the feeling will find you just as you’ve convinced yourself you’re over something, and the unexpectedness of it will rout your soul once again.

I know ahead lie days both good and bad, but when you choose to love more than you hate, trust more than you worry, and get up every time you fall down, you learn how to pick locks with much greater ease.

Thinking back to when my now friend at the Health Department said she wanted me to feel empowered by my diagnosis, I can’t help but echo the same sentiment to those struggling with their own. People will ask you, “Do you regret getting HIV?” and frankly, who has time to answer that question? Mrs. Nowak, a teacher I had in the seventh grade, taught us never to answer “what if” questions. All we have is the present moment and a choice how to spend it.

I have committed myself to a life of wellness because I reject the sentiment that society and the media impose upon people living with HIV (PLWHIV), that our lives can never be as good as before our diagnosis, and certainly cannot improve. It is time for PLWHIV to reclaim our place in society, and not just to ask for it, but to DEMAND it, because Our Dreams ARE NOT Infected. We are no longer just going to survive, we are going to THRIVE!

There is never a better time to take charge of your life and the direction it’s taking than now. So on the days when you least want to, trudge through the seven inches of snow thrown your way in spring and show up on the yoga mat that is life. Establish your self-worth and let no one tear it down. Make the hard choice to say no to the things that serve you no longer, and usher in the good.

Whether I win one, all three, or none of the Ohio AIDS Walk 5Ks next in my awareness campaign, what truly matters is that I have begun to heal. I now have burgeoning trust in my head, love and forgiveness in my heart, and most importantly, purpose in my soul. Once again, I feel like the fastest kid in gym class.

Learn more about Contributing Editor CJ Stobinski and the rest of Our Team.

Charlie Sheen joins the 1.2 million people in the US living with HIV, including me, and the 50,000 people in the US newly infected every year. Welcome aboard, Charlie. As you know, Charlie, because you are apparently in care, on meds, and virologically suppressed (“undetectable”), HIV is not a death sentence. But it’s not a joke, either. And even though you may have been “forced out” about your HIV status because of mounting gossip and legal action from sex partners, you will find that lifting the veil of secrecy admits much light, and the heat of truth can become the warmth of love.