Roger Ian Rosen
Haiku for World AIDS Day 

Drug and disease free.
What a strange combination
Of disparate things.

Growing old’s no curse.
Considering history,
It’s a privilege.

You freaked out when he
Told you he was poz? Then why’d
You wear a condom?

We ain’t gonna fuck.
Not because you’re poz ~ because
You said you don’t vote.

Blank journals. Millions.
Each one a long story, short.
Novel novellas.

So on trend right now:
Everyone claiming they’re vers.
We are all liars.

Safety practices:
PrEP and TasP. Wait…PrEP AND TasP?
Now that’s confusing.

We are still living.
Living! And we’re still dying.
It is not over.

Fuck the fear from me.
Stuff me with science. Release
Me from ignorance.

Waves of fire rolled in.
High tide crush of “deserve it”s
Setting us ablaze.

Editor’s Note: Roger wrote these haiku at my request, based on the spirit of his frequent haiku posts on Instagram touching on various aspects of queer life and love. If they are too irreverent, blame me; if you love them, the credit is all Roger’s.

Roger Ian Rosen is a husband, step-father, son, brother, uncle, activist, writer, Broadway performer (Fiddler on the Roof), recovering office manager (where he child wrangled upwards of 60 adults) and hernia survivor. He currently works at Trader Joe’s in Millburn where he can be seen utilizing his BFA from NYU putting kale on a shelf. Also, he serves on the Human Rights Campaign’s Greater NY Steering Committee as the Volunteer Coordinator for NJ. And finally, Roger thinks Vimeo needs to expand its gender options beyond Male, Female, and N/A. #SeeFacebook

Bonus Poems for World AIDS Day

Chad Kenney
Consequence

It happens to everyone—
my mother
my brother also
his lover my lover
almost all my friends
have experienced the same.
A consequence of life lived hard an accident
risk taken lightly
bad luck.
It doesn’t matter in the end.

Seventeen years bound together quietly at first
a chronic infection
voracious virus
hijack healthy cells to seed its own
at my expense.

Having lived so long
while others have gone I’ve had time to dwell
on a child’s fear.
Waking in the dark
unable to sleep
hostile dreams nightmares
tightness, tears and terror No comfort to be had
from those who should.

A child no longer
though still experiencing
dark nights
confronting quiet questions.
What happens when you die?
I don’t remember being born.
Who taught this child to fear, where are they now
when the fearful time is near?

Chad Kenney writes: This was written in 2002. I am quite alive here after more than thirty-three years. I spent 15 years as an AIDS Activist in Denver, Colorado. The best work I ever did was developing the newsletter, RESOLUTE: Dedicated to Surviving HIV. Virtually everyone who produced RESOLUTE is gone. All were members of The PWA Coalition Colorado.

p.c. scearce
So Now It’s A Matter of Talking About It

So now it’s a matter of talking about it, I being
placed in a box living, believing constantly
challenged, fraught with fight for every-
thing that matters. The doctor plainly
said it: “You’re HIV positive.”
“Um, well.”—my response.

Once upon a time, I met a prince in a mirror.
He was in front of me gazing in a sigh.
There you have the answers; its weighted
lifting as I knew my collapse.

Yes, you may know me, I step beside you
with my cane—it is my balance, it is
my catch from free fall, it is my knee-
grappling that gives a second and
I acknowledge its slack before I’m
alright again against the world
charging forward through
tingles pain and however
strong I pathway along
-side; weakness shoves me
forward toward the end of
a block then again I repeat
heave an accomplishment—
go on on on on and further
on ’til I’m numb at my footstep.

And to the end it’s HIV with
disability you might not know
it with diversity both hoists
my ability, my challenge,
my daily dosage and it’s as if
I’m at the top of an escalator
then there is vertigo’s quick,
I step back step back move
forward step uneasy back—
the tango I dance a feat
more impressive I know
to leap move down, and
with every little inch, I feel
like yards ahead travel.

Once upon a time, I met a prince in a mirror;
I was in front of me regarding myself
my chin rises my head twists;
I thought was this me as it
is important to realize I’m
watching me living
striving to feel
love again.

Originally from Danville, Virginia, Phillip Calvert Scearce (p.c. scearce) moved to Washington, DC, with a scholarship to George Mason University’s Masters in Fine Arts in Poetry Program. His work has appeared in the Screen Door Review, Euantes, and Ember, as well as two compilations from Averett College, The 1993 Poets and The 1994 Poets, and appears in Super Stoked Poetry: An Anthology of Queer Poets from the Capturing Fire Slam & Summit (Capturing Fire Press, 2018), edited by Regie Cabico. He has work forthcoming in the anthology Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman, edited by Raymond Luczak for Squares & Rebels, an imprint of Handtype Press. He continues to live in Washington, DC, where he is a disabled retiree with HIV cohabiting with two cats.

Davidson Garrett
Il Fantasma: Living at the McBurney YMCA

Like Mad Lucia di Lammermoor
I wander eerie halls in stark darkness

not in a bloody wedding gown—
but tiptoeing, wrapped in a white towel.

Overwrought Lucia—murdered her husband
because of an unwanted forced nuptial.

My marriage to art—paralyzed with fear
from a virus looming in this metropolis of death.

Despair, disease, all around—
a nightmare house of reclusive souls.

The AIDS plague of New York City
zaps my neighbors—creating emaciated faces

of horror. Crazy Lucy heard internal voices
as I hear woeful men moaning

minor key shrieks behind closed doors.
The phantasmagoric voices in my head

plead—do not give up and die—
keep plodding an unbroken legato line.

For within these operatic walls of doom
a seed of harmonious healing may soon be planted.

Davidson Garrett is the author of What Happened to The Man Who Taught Me Beowulf and Other Poems (Advent Purple Press, 2017). His poetry has been published in The New York Times, The Episcopal New Yorker, The Stillwater Review, Xavier Review, 2 Bridges Review, Sensations Magazine, and Podium.  One of Davidson’s most joyful experiences was hearing Dame Joan Sutherland sing the title role in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in 1982 at The Metropolitan Opera. Garrett lived at the McBurney YMCA in Chelsea from 1978 until 2000. More info at davidsongarrett.com.

Ina Roy-Faderman
someone told me today that i got lucky

your bones crumble
tiny stellates hung from
threads of memory
spicules of pain
concentrate in the heart
catching on fibers
hanging next to desiccated
words “you got lucky”
the blue-scrubbed nurse
i still hear the twenty years
gone in each
beat absent of you
and the stains that
i cannot wash even if
i wished to but
they hold the
shadow lingers in
corners of the bedroom
still with blade thin bones
hands spread as tense as
starfish and then relaxed
flying upwards to the last
night

Ina Roy-Faderman (inafelltoearth.com) teaches college and graduate biomedical ethics and is an associate fiction editor for Rivet Journal and librarian for a school for gifted children. Her poetry, fiction, interviews, and literary analyses have appeared in The Rumpus, Inscape, Midwestern Studies in Philosophy, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Poems in the Aftermath: An Anthology from the 2016 Presidential Transition Period (Indolent Books, 2018), edited by Michael Broder.

Jarred Thompson
Handcuffs

ground down history into
masses of meat, all stumps and eyes,
gawking at the back of a police van.

try it on, lover whispers,
clicking away freedom to an immobile channel:
watch, react, yank,
give up touch to be touched, used.

incense of cabbage and sacraments of gnawed tattoos
blesses a man-to-metal union, bars channeling, holding back,
separating what you were from what you are
rapist killer criminal scum deviant

dirty slut: torture is a love demanding to know every cog inside,
ticking away under skin, bogged down by heavy animal loving.

your separation is for y(our) benefit
bent arseholes singing to closed eyes
wishing on wetness that will bring…

…release comes when you’ve forgotten your mother’s rules
Don’t talk to strangers.
Respect your body.
Be gentle.
Be kind.
Bind us—cool-as-sin—to chinks of metal loving; Pavlovian dreams reencountered
Again. Again. Again.
as we break our cum upon each other;
transubstantiated chained communions leaping toward escape.

Jarred Thompson‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, Type House Literary Magazine, Outcast Magazine, the Esthetic Apostle, Sky Island Journal, Cosmographia Books, Best New African Poets Anthology of 2016, and New Contrast Literary Journal. His chapbook Universes and Paradoxes was shortlisted for the Kingdom in the Wild Poetry Prize. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, New Contrast Literary Journal (forthcoming 2018), The Rainy Day Literary Magazine, ImageOutWrite, the Johannesburg Review of Books and Transcending the Flame: The Writivism Mentoring Anthology (Black Letter Media, 2018).

SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now project via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Rob Jacques
Interrogation

He’s older, impartial, somewhat benign (but not entirely),
this stethoscoped man in his starched, white coat,
and he sets himself down in front of yet another one,
this time you, his three-fifteen appointment, idiopathic,
an adult male patient presenting nondescript symptoms,
and he throws a stern glance your way; that is to say,
he looks not directly at you, but rather takes you in,
you with your unappealing auras of pathos and need.

His medical certificates with seals hang on a plain wall
among incongruous photos of someone’s summer
in Vichy, another copy of Ponte Vecchio, and a sepia
of Florence under Borgia rule. You’d like to ask polite,
ice-breaking questions, but you don’t have in common
enough experiences for banter, and you fear you know
less about the Borgias, Florence, and Vichy than you do
about bothering problems and why they drove you here.

Besides, he’s already flipping through your thin folder,
frowning, presumably trying to recall who you really are
and why he should care, other than he must deal from
his paid position, his Hippocratic oath, and bald curiosity.

Be careful. He doesn’t want to know more than he has to.
And you don’t want to share intimacies with a total stranger
who, after all, knows nothing factual about you other than
vulnerable flesh (and even that in a non-pleasurable way).

He straightens and says, “What seems to be the problem?”
to which you babble your symptoms that sound silly now,
stuff about dry coughing, waking with a morning headache,
night sweats alternating with chills, chronic dry mouth,
a slight dizziness really more of a mere lightheadedness,
really nothing too severe, nothing you aren’t getting used to,
nothing you can’t live with if it comes right down to it,
and several other unrelated pricks and tingles here and there
that disturb your conscious efforts to be normal. You strive
to tell him everything physical that surrounds what sits
centered in the slippery silence between sentences and waits.

You know it will end. You will be done and leave soon
with few facts and more questions, with renewed waiting
on your wrinkled hands. You won’t have told him everything,
although he’s trained to guess that accurately, fill in the blanks
and report whatever needs reporting to those who get reports.
Sometimes you want to cry out, though you know you won’t.
You know why they say confession is good for the soul, know
at times you feel the needle going in, know at times you don’t.

Rob Jacques is the author of War Poet Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Prairie Schooner, Amsterdam Quarterly, Poet Lore, The Healing Muse, and Assaracus. He lives on a rural island in Washington State’s Puget Sound.

Jarred Thompson
The Power of Chronic Illness

Every day is a poker game
with a hooded figure who’s always silent.

Every day you pound away the sickness
with weights, treadmills, steam rooms, salads, protein, pills.

Every day you kiss and hug and touch
coddling their fear in your hardened hands.

Every day you live beyond the pills
reducing a scaly devil to a plastic mannequin.

Every day it sits underneath your tongue
bulging out when the walls tighten around your lungs.

Every day, an invincible summer rises to meet
the Pluto of your nightmares and daydreams.

Every day, a controlled hatred
moves your feet up every stairway.

Every day you fracture, you break, you splinter,
then rebuild.

Every day a part of you is fighting
dreaming of forever.

Jarred Thompson‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, Type House Literary Magazine, Outcast Magazine, the Esthetic Apostle, Sky Island Journal, Cosmographia Books, Best New African Poets Anthology of 2016, and New Contrast Literary Journal. His chapbook Universes and Paradoxes was shortlisted for the Kingdom in the Wild Poetry Prize. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, New Contrast Literary Journal (forthcoming 2018), The Rainy Day Literary Magazine, ImageOutWrite, the Johannesburg Review of Books and Transcending the Flame: The Writivism Mentoring Anthology (Black Letter Media, 2018).

SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now project via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Rob Jacques
Prayer for My Caregiver

…don’t let him lose his
willingness to stick with me,
to make love and to make
love work…
—Tim Dlugos

Please don’t let his endurance break
on the stone-hard core of my failing.
Let him soldier on remembering
things damn hard to remember now
in the contumacious blossoming
of my death. Don’t let him forget
the road to here has been too long
to end with this possibility of regret.

Please let him see beyond my skin
of hematomas, wrinkles and stains
to the underlying freshness he once
stroked and rubbed, wet with kisses,
felt warm and smooth against him,
warm and smooth as he felt it soft
though firm over young muscle
in an orgasmic Apocalypse of love.

With his soul of a golden retriever,
let him find playfulness each hour
that recedes from us ebbing out with
life’s retreating, null tide. Let him
still fetch and stay for me, loyally
joyful, curling up by my scant side.
Let him find in my smile at his antics
a golden retriever’s peace of mind.

Let him know after all these years
he remains my lover, though past
youth and strength and savoir faire
have evanesced, disappearing
into age’s deepening forest duff
dissolving to provide sustenance
for our souls. Lovers ever, we, never
relinquishing desire, never thinking
for a moment we’ve had enough.

In the fandango of being newly one,
we never saw coming all following
new-spring kissing, summer rising,
our flesh heralding nothing untoward,
our youth a perfect mask disguising
turns in our road, valleys beyond
our hills, and we danced our dance
never seeing age’s approaching ills.

Please don’t let him leave. Please
keep him by me until I separate
from time and space, done with flesh,
nature adamantly splitting asunder
fresh spirits earlier united earnestly
in their desire, innocence, and wonder.
I’ll be gone in what’ll seem to him
only brief misery once I’ve moved on.

Pills, catheters, oxygen and bedpans,
sickroom odors and claustrophobia,
ugly cleanups and ruining spills,
soiled everything lying everywhere,
forgetting in the middle of complaining
how I’m a human being in disrepair:
this will pass and fade for him after
anguish and I no longer need his care.

Until then, though, let him linger long
and be a solace as only love may solace
the to-and-fro of life’s stressed tossings.
Let him be here with me until one night
there’s no morning. Let him know
he may go then to where he will, love
that was hard now proven, love proven
master of life when comes good or ill.

Rob Jacques is the author of War Poet Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Prairie Schooner, Amsterdam Quarterly, Poet Lore, The Healing Muse, and Assaracus. He lives on a rural island in Washington State’s Puget Sound.

Jarred Thompson
Numbers

They’ll be printed on a page, scribbled down margins, confirming your deepest fears.
With every extra zero and every digit that countdowns
To withered hands and skeleton faces

Unreal results, faces that rush you from
Room to
Room:
Rows of smiling teeth shaking hands two by two.
A thousand miles away I watch it all unfold and unfurl in my hand:
a gigantic single turd, a nauseating smell
of a hospital floor that I cannot get up from.

Hold the three bottles to your chest,
little capsules that hold countless mornings.
Tomorrow I become something different
counting down the numbers, always the numbers,
that never lie,
only multiply and multiply

Jarred Thompson‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, Type House Literary Magazine, Outcast Magazine, the Esthetic Apostle, Sky Island Journal, Cosmographia Books, Best New African Poets Anthology of 2016, and New Contrast Literary Journal. His chapbook Universes and Paradoxes was shortlisted for the Kingdom in the Wild Poetry Prize. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, New Contrast Literary Journal (forthcoming 2018), The Rainy Day Literary Magazine, ImageOutWrite, the Johannesburg Review of Books and Transcending the Flame: The Writivism Mentoring Anthology (Black Letter Media, 2018).

SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now project via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Jarred Thompson
Telling

When I utter those words
And the air vibrates with meaning
between You and Me,
then you will hear and decipher,
and the plagues of Moses will be unleashed upon your body:
rivers of blood,
plagues of toads
locusts to feast on your brain
your first-born-self taken in the night by a silent
microscopic spirit that doesn’t know what it’s doing.

When I cut time and space with my tongue,
lashing like a whip across a slave’s back,
we’ll both feel the power of a phrase,
the renegotiation of knowledge,
the invisible tasting of what words cannot touch
only indicate.

I think of what goes down a well when no one is looking,
soft moans muffled by too much water
too much weight
too little light.

When these words reach you
after light-years of traveling
tell me you’ll see the stars between my teeth,
the galaxies spiraling, colorful in my mouth.
Though they are non-existent now,
swept away by a giant unthinking hand,
they existed and shone at a point in time.
Now their light, shimmering, refracted by city dust,
is finally reaching your ears.

Jarred Thompson‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, Type House Literary Magazine, Outcast Magazine, the Esthetic Apostle, Sky Island Journal, Cosmographia Books, Best New African Poets Anthology of 2016, and New Contrast Literary Journal. His chapbook Universes and Paradoxes was shortlisted for the Kingdom in the Wild Poetry Prize. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, New Contrast Literary Journal (forthcoming 2018), The Rainy Day Literary Magazine, ImageOutWrite, the Johannesburg Review of Books and Transcending the Flame: The Writivism Mentoring Anthology (Black Letter Media, 2018).

SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now project via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Robert Carr
Soldier and Commander

We are the timeless fuck in skinless
dark. We slide shining-smooth surfaces
inside each other. You’re my loved fat

woman, peach-breathed boy, bone-broke man.
I am your wife, beast-beloved, chameleon
-husband, whisper-girl.

Release of shit in a death-bed, spread
of blood shaken over birth. Salt of first cry, sugar
of breast milk, black rattle vomit.

Try me on, trade pluck of brow. We sit
back to back and share a braid.
Lean out, test the tug of hair.

Massachusetts-based poet Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth (Indolent Books, 2016) and The Unbuttoned Eye, a full-length collection forthcoming from 3: A Taos Press. Among other publications his poetry appears in the Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Massachusetts Review and Rattle. Robert is Developmental Editor with Indolent Books and an editor for the anthology Bodies and Scars, forthcoming from the Ghana Writes Literary Group. Additional information can be found at robertcarr.org.