Michael Broder
I had a dream that I was back.

—dreamt on the night of April 23 and recorded on the morning of April 24 at 9:24 a.m.

 
 
Michael Broder is the author of Drug and Disease Free (Indolent Books, 2016) and This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He is the founder of the HIV Here & Now project, Indolent Books, and Indolent Arts Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and a backyard colony of stray and feral cats.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Write a poem based on a dream you had. Or write a poem about a dream you didn’t have. Find a way to connect it to HIV. Can you find the connection to HIV in today’s poem?

Iris Lee
We’re Still Here

We meet and speak
less now
about pills and T-cells,
so glad to be here
when so many aren’t.

We meet and speak
less now
of memorials and tears
and the fear,
and more now

about “what now?”
when we meet now
in the old bars.
We speak about the theater
and other pleasure those others

who aren’t
are missing because of
no pills, vanished T-cells.
But here we are,
meeting and speaking,

pill-poppers extraordinaire
trying to tell
dumb youngsters in bars
our stories but
they aren’t interested.
Kids!

Iris Lee is the author of Urban Bird Life (NYQ Books, 2010). She conducts a writing workshop at The Actors Fund, which originated as a workshop for theater professionals affected by HIV/AIDS.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poet wrote today’s poem in response to a prompt that she presented to her own students in an advanced poetry class. We share that prompt with you today: Write a poem in the voice of a first-person plural (“we”) dispassionately discussing a very serious situation—in our case, some aspect of HIV (risk, testing, treatment, prevention, living with, being affected by, etc.)—keeping the tone restrained, using repetition and cadence to achieve a light touch despite the subject matter. Thank you Iris Lee for the poem and the prompt.

Barbara Rockman
As My Lover Dies of AIDS

As the clear cut mountain
so the boy incarcerated for a crime

he did not commit he wanted to
bring his mother bags of gold

As the disappeared wolves
and crabs so the juniper turns to rust

As the boy sought his father’s
arms to wrap round what his brother shunned
what his every pore and prayer craved—

simple love a body twin to his own
so the forest so the tide and glacier
turn ashen with refusal

The boy turned man is dying
of what was natural as spring run-off
as turtles shuffling young to salt water

He has watched the earth corrode
As contagion corrupts cells so
a country’s veins rupture

As he grows old
as the mountain’s scraped raw
so flesh blisters

Sea afloat in plastic
and yet tufts of spring grass

His body frail as drought
and yet he wets his lips and hums

One riff for the continent
one for the self

Barbara Rockman is the author of Sting and Nest (Sunstone Press, 2011) and Absence of Wind (University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming). Her poems have appeared in Calyx, Bellingham Review, The Pinch, Louisville Review, Nimrod and elsewhere. Barbara received the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award and the National Press Women Book Prize. She lives in Santa Fe, NM where she teaches poetry and leads writing workshops for victims of domestic violence.

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To support the mission and work of HIV Here & Now, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

As Na(HIV)PoWriMo draws to a close, we’ve encouraged you to write poems in form. Today we encourage you to write an abecedarian—a poem in which each line begins with a successive letter of the alphabet, or some variation on that basic principle. A couple of HIV Here & Now poets have contributed abecedarians, including this poem by Jenna Le and this sequence of five abecedarians by Kathleen A. Lawrence.

Korbin Jones
The Epidemic

An erasure poem based on Ports of the Sun by Eleanor Early.

The graves are a tangle of rust and tattered leaves. There are gay guests. “Your Health.” “My Health.” Sounds something like possession. They abandon the place. The first to die in horrible agony was too much for the rest, and they were rather worried.

“You see,” he said, “we know what an invasion is like.”

Korbin Jones is a senior at Northwest Missouri State University double majoring in Spanish and Writing with an emphasis in Creative Writing and Publishing and minoring in Art.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Inspired by today’s poem, write an erasure poem about HIV. Today’s poet took inspiration from a travel book that received a rather lackluster review from Kirkus Reviews, but made for a rather stunning erasure poem. Here’s one place where you can read about erasure poems.

Andrea L. Watson
Requiem in Radiant Time

for B.

Your soul-of-doves flew from Chama toward heart
of Antonito, over the 1911 Jewelry Factory, half-past 2
drug dealers marking time in front of the Palace Hotel,
nesting finally at the hilltop near your 80-lb mother.

You had a good time. The time
your 3rd grade teacher kept you after study-school
to give you watercolors from the Narrow Gauge Gift Shop;

the time you painted your step-brother’s barn
Buddhist gold, adding a colors-of-the-rainbow flag;

midnight, by mountain central time, when
you boarded the airplane for New York City with 24
other guys, sassy rally ribbon on your right shoulder.

Remember, you sewed on 11 ripe rhinestones?

I kiss the time you nicked my neck with thinning shears;
pale beer was your antiseptic: I was not afraid.

Today, the hospice is cold. Your bed is a coffin,
white-muslin lined, waiting; you do not recognize me.
The illness snips at your brain like a comb and scissors set.

In your strands of dreams, your mother is not drunk,
and you are not alone, at age 7, watching
for her to come back; you are sure she is dead
but you are dead; rain on her window fades to 0.

Andrea Watson is the founding publisher and editor of 3: A Taos Press. Her poetry has appeared in Nimrod, Rhino, Ekphrasis, International Poetry Review, and The Dublin Quarterly, among others. She is co-editor of Collecting Life: Poets on Objects Known and Imagined (3: A Taos Press, 2011)and of Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai (FutureCycle Press, 2013), the proceeds of which are donated to the Malala Fund for Education for Girls.

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To support the mission and work of HIV Here & Now, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Na(HIV)PoWriMo is dwindling to a close, and we have not seen many poems in form in the series (perhaps a few sonnets). Write a poem in form touching on HIV: sonnet, villanelle, sestina, haiku (perhaps a series of haiku), ghazal, pantoum, etc. Use our old friend the Internet to find out about forms you are interested and to learn or review the rules for their composition.

Dennis Rhodes
At the Monster

My body is as undetectable
as the virus lurking within it,
standing in the heated crowd
along the dance floor. Old
and sober. That’s the best I can say
for myself, the finest example
I can set for all the young men
around me. I’m not nostalgic
or sentimental: I just want
to feel what transparency is like,
to put old memories in their place;
If this were thirty years ago
most of them would want to screw me.
Now they look not at me but through me.

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 others.

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To support the mission and work of HIV Here & Now, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

One of the exciting new developments on the road to ending HIV is the discovery that treatment is prevention—than an HIV-positive person on treatment with an undetectable viral load cannot transmit the virus to HIV-negative partners. Write a poem about treatment as a concept, perhaps thinking about different uses of the word: treatment for a condition, treating someone nicely or badly, window treatments, etc. Can you connect these different types of “treatment” in the same poem?

Keiko Lane
late fall hospice fragment

In the garden, we build an altar on El Dia de Los Muertos,
searching for the thinning veil between worlds.

Climbing the walls around us,
bougainvillea lit by the light of dead stars.

Leonid meteors make their way through the night,
trailing tails of their flame’s demise. His eyes follow them

across the courtyard, as far as he can see, following, then later
unfollowing, not the thing, but the thing it might have become.

Keiko Lane, MFT, is a psychotherapist and educator in Berkeley, CA. A poet and essayist, she writes and teaches about the the intersections of queer culture and kinship, oppression resistance, racial and gender justice, HIV criminalization, reproductive justice, and liberation psychology. Her writing has appeared most recently in The Feminist Porn Book, Queering Sexual Violence, The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Heath and Healthcare, and online on TheRumpus.com, TheFeministWire.com, and TheBody.com. www.keikolanemft.com.

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To support the mission and work of HIV Here & Now, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Write a poem about being on PEP—post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV. PEP started in the 1990s as a response to occupational exposures—mostly accidental needle sticks among healthcare workers. But more recently, PEP has been offered to people who have a possible exposure to HIV from sex or sharing needles when injecting drug. Read more about PEP for non-occupations exposures here.

Mark Ward
Bare

The television glowed red with stretchmarks
unable to contain the friction displayed
within perfect bodies light throws shadows,
fables of how the game is played.

It’s easy to subdivide derision,
to overwhelm risk with validation,
hands and skin accepting benediction.
Tonight’s lit with a well-worn negation;

moonlight cloaks the animal, makes it think
the world is a windowless tomorrow
holding steady on the brink of sunlight.
His lithe archetype might drown out the night.

You can burn the worst on overcast days.
You should learn not to yearn for the cause of the blaze.

Mark Ward‘s poems have appeared in Assaracus, Tincture, The Good Men Project, HIV Here & Now, Storm Cellar, Studies in Arts and Humanities, Off the Rocks, The Wild Ones, Vast Sky, and Emerge, as well as in the anthologies Out of Sequence: The Sonnets Remixed, The Myriad Carnival and Not Just Another Pretty Face. He founded Impossible Archetype, a journal of LGBTQ+ poetry. He lives in Dublin, Ireland. Learn more at astintinyourspotlight.wordpress.com.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem is a sonnet. Write an HIV poem in sonnet form. My husband, poet Jason Schneiderman, wrote a whole crown of sonnets about HIV and me in his book Sublimation Point (Four Way Books, 2004). The complete crown is posted with permission here. (You can look up “sonnet crown” online; frankly, I do not see any good online discussions of it, but there are a number of good books out there about poetic forms).

Vernita Hall
I Knew a Man

for Gregory

I knew a man
who could charm the coin from Charon’s hand
or Midas’, too, squeeze lemonade from sand,
hula rings like Saturn, drum thunder like Jupiter
whenever he laughed, and he laughed some.

I knew a man
who could dance on the head of a pin
or the top of a bar. Around the pole he’d spin
like a compass needle. His word—true north.
He never called the shots—they begged to come.

This man, my friend,
could thread a needle with a baseball bat,
eclipse the sun, or wheedle cream from an alley cat.
Always top dog, the black elephant in the room,
he never took a back seat lest he throned it, Paul Bunyan-esque.

The man I knew
could spin a yarn like Rumpelstiltskin
or negotiate extra wishes from a jinn.
His laser eyes could weep a secret out from a stone.
He walked with Jesus upon the waters, two abreast.

Did you know my friend?
He was the father of invention—and a muthuh, too.
Switched the Grim Reaper gay, broke the back of convention.
He rose well-heeled, sprinkled motherwit like seed,
his tongue, oil-slick. He could listen through the tips of his toes.

When Gabriel sounds
that trumpet for the day of rest
New Orleans-style, he’ll strut at the head of the blessed,
arm-in-arm with Peter and Michael, too.
He’ll be leading the band, prompting them their cue,
this man I knew.

Vernita Hall‘s poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Philadelphia Stories, Referential, Mezzo Cammin, Whirlwind, Canary, African American Review, Snapdragon, and several anthologies, including Forgotten Women (Grayson Books, 2017). Her poetry collection The Hitchhiking Robot Learns About Philadelphians won the 2016 Moonstone Chapbook Contest, judged by Afaa Michael Weaver. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Rosemont College and serves on the poetry review board of Philadelphia Stories.

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To support the mission and work of HIV Here & Now, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

We post many elegies for loved one who died of AIDS. Write a poem about someone who did NOT die of AIDS—someone who is living with HIV: maybe someone you love. Poet David Groff wrote an entire collection of poems, Clay (Trio House Press, 2013), about his husband who is living with HIV. You can read a generous excerpt from Clay here.

David Groff
Revival

We made a list of every state
we each had sex in. You won
with 31, delighted: summer stock.
Fifty now and dead, you reappear
made up at Community Café Stage
in Quarryville in performances
of You Can’t Take It with You,
the owner’s son, the suitor,
keen for xylophones and fireworks,
puppyish, blond again, the shot at sex
an encore in eyes I almost know.
On the barn of stage a shooting star,
you strut like a Saturday out of town.
My applause enfolds you like the shroud
Ophelia wore, or Mercutio.

David Groff is the author of Clay (Trio House, 2013) and Theory of Devolution (Illinois, 2002), selected by Mark Doty for the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle. With Jim Elledge he coedited Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (University of Wisconsin, 2012). With Philip Clark he coedited Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson, 2010). With Richard Berman he coedited Whitman’s Men: Walt Whitman’s Calamus Poems Celebrated by Contemporary Photographers (Universe, 1996). He completed the book The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood for its author, the late Robin Hardy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999; Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2002). David’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He teaches in the MFA creative writing program of the City College of New York.

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To support the mission and work of HIV Here & Now, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books (HIV Here & Now is a project of Indolent Books).

Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

In honor of today’s poet, write a poem that CELEBRATES the life of someone who died of AIDS, rather than a lament. Of course, there’s always that tension in elegy between celebration and lament, but in our experience here at HH&N, we find that lament tends to win out when many poets write about loved ones lost to AIDS. Resist! Resist that impulse to wallow in grief. Of course we grieve! But do we love our loved ones because they tied a sad and tragic death, or because they lived a joyous and creative life? But first and foremost—be a poet!