Abigail Frankfurt
Pablo The Bullet

we are a country called
Never Knew Better
you are King
happy I know
this our counsel
our kitchen table
pass me the needle
don’t splash blood
rig in my pocket—even at the airport
steal me the money—I am your girl
pull out my eye
cut the phone wires
this is together
call me Don’t Care
I am contagious
who owes who anything
choke me harder
my gilded bullet
I’m on your edge
both feet bleeding
yank me back up
your hands are filthy
you rotting corpse
I wasn’t ready
my worsening luck
I don’t believe in
any 9 to 5ing
any House of Jesus
roll of the die
you took the wheel
bled into me
somewhere there is whistling
my stomach sinks
each early April
rise
rise
I am floating
backwards
towards you

Abigail Frankfurt writes, “I am a writer living in NYC. I lost my partner to AIDS in 2008. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him.”

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Today’s poem touches on HIV transmission via injecting drug use. Of an estimated 1.2 million people living in the US today, some 170,000 of them were infected by sharing needles, syringes, or other injecting equipment. Write a poem that touches on HIV and injecting drug use. Of course, every poet has their own approach, but we suggest following Emily Dickinson in telling all the truth, but telling it slant. You can be graphic about injecting drug use if you want, but you can also be oblique, metaphorical, allusive, allegorical, etc. First and foremost—be a poet!

Manya Magnus
Jack

As a junior in high school in Berkeley, I was asked to share a job at our local flower shop with a friend, after school and on weekends. She did not last long so I took over all the shifts myself. I found in the back workroom of that flower shop respite from the outside world, where Jack and John and I worked together listening to 80s pop, preparing roses, filling FTD orders from across the wire, manning the cash register on slow days and busy days, like valentine’s day and mothers’ day when the lines would snake around the block. They taught me how to do adult things, like sweep a floor properly, clean up the counter after oneself, count change, have a presentational customer face, which has served me very well, where you let the customer know he or she is right, and you smile, and active listen, and you have empathy—I am sorry that your friend died; I hope your mom feels better; congratulations on your engagement!—and listen to their flower-based questions—are they looking for a sympathy bouquet? What is the best type of lilies to make up with? Are these gardenias from Hawaii?—and have confidence in your answer, even when not quite sure (skills used often in healthcare in later years). Working at a flower shop is more like being a bartender than a retail clerk, because customers come back for the conversations not only the purchase.

John was funny and wry and dry and usually sarcastic but always kind; if he were cast in a 1980s sitcom he’d be the stereotypical gay uncle of the kid protagonist and always get the funny lines. Jack was more reserved, the owner, well respected it seemed through my teenage perception at least. They welcomed me in and never judged; they helped me forget the confusing things going on at home and general upset. When I’d leave the store people would comment that I’d be perfumed in flower and so I was; my clothes and skin would remain fragrant after every shift. When I was very low and ended up in a facility for troubled teens for a week they sent me the Cadillac of all bouquets and I was able to read between the lines of each of the flowers and I laughed; when I came back, they never mentioned anything they just hugged me and told me to get to work.

I came back from college one summer and heard through the grapevine that Jack had died of AIDS. I did not know he was sick, although I was old enough to have been aware of the early days, the first cases, GRID, the first deaths, Reagan. I never was able to confirm this to be the case, though I did go back to the store and no one was still there; I’d wish I’d kept in touch but went away to grow up, so didn’t. This was back in the day before the Internet, when it would have been considered morbid to go to the library and look on the microfiche for someone’s obituary.

In any event, because of Jack I ended up devoting my career to HIV research, 25+ years of working to end the epidemic. He never knew this of course. I think of him often.

Manya Magnus is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, where she studies novel approaches to HIV prevention and removal of structural barriers. Her books include Essentials of Infectious Disease Epidemiology (Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2007), Essential Readings in Infectious Disease Epidemiology (Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2008), Intermediate Epidemiology: Methods that Matter (Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2014), and (publishing as Manya DeLeon Miller) The Complete Fertility Organizer (Wiley, 1999).

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

In honor of today’s poet, an epidemiologist who studies new approaches to HIV prevention, write a poem that leverages the technical vocabulary of HIV. We suggest using that inimitable medical resource, Wikipedia, to look up some of the following terms and see what gets your creative juices flowing: human immunodeficiency virus; acquired immune deficiency syndrome; retrovirus; virion; capsid; reverse transcriptase; protease; integrase; antiretroviral therapy; viral load; T cell; macrophage; monocyte; lymphocyte; proviral DNA; genetic barrier to resistance…okay, that’s enough for one day!

Jo Going
After AIDS

And then one night
you came to me,
like putting on a coat,
and lifted me flying.

Through phantasmagoric shifting
geometries of light
we traveled,

me, ecstatic to be with you once more,
and you in that familiar role—teacher, protector—
now in this form:
an assurance of being.

I didn’t question.

Centerwise, we paused
before a pulsing blackness,
a void of nothing
and everything,
a palpitation of presence,
into which you disappeared,
while I watched, illuminated.

Many years now,
and I have been
wondering…

knowing that light journey
became my luminescence.

And yet,
and yet,
I miss you still,

and more,

while ever opening your gift:

the distilled essence
of pure love.

From a long poem cycle, “The Midwife of Death”, written in response to the poet’s sharing her brother’s journey through AIDS.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Notice how today’s poem, like so many poems posted by the HIV Here & Now project since June 2015, is a recollection of a loved one who died of AIDS by a surviving loved one. As a change of pace, try writing a poem in the voice of a person who died of AIDS. Or perhaps in dialogue with a person who died of AIDS. For some examples, take a look at Marie Howe’s poem, “The Last Time,” from her landmark book, What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1998), or Michael Broder’s poem, “The Remembered One,” from his book This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014).

Michael Broder
All the men I like to get fucked by

All the men I like to get fucked by
Are dealers
T mostly, G too, but usually they want me
To parTy not do G
I’m still tryna lose my G cherry
I was about to, now, with The Dark Lord,
But he asked me if I’d had any alcohol and I had,
I’d taken a swig of red wine right out of the bottle
Right before I left to come here (to the Dark Lord’s place)
Just as a little treat & to get the coffee taste
Out of my mouth

NOTES:
T=methamphetamine, the drug you may remember from Breaking Bad.
G=GHB or gamma-hydroxybutyrate, the drug you may remember from The Black Party.

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 publications and anthologies. He holds a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from New York University, and a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Broder lives in Brooklyn with his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and a backyard colony of stray and feral cats.

Due to the arrival of tax day, there has been a delay in posting new NaPoWriMo poems. The board of directors and entirely volunteer staff of Indolent Books apologizes for this inconvenience and suspects it will happen again.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Notice how in today’s poem, Michael Broder writes about party drugs. In 2017, HIV is not just a virus or a disease. It touches on every aspect of the life of those at the highest risk: men who have sex with men, transgender women, people of color, people who are poor, homeless, unstably housed, or engaged in sex work, among others. Write a poem from the perspective of a speaker who is a member of one of these groups, whether or not that is who you, the poet, actually are. Go ahead; it’s okay—we here at the HIV Here & Now project still believe that poetry is a way into identities other than our own, a way to empathize with the plight or fate or experience of others.

Michael Angelo Tata
From The Real Housewives of Nowhere

TAMEKA

My night has been insufferably
empty without you like so many
lost digits following the decimal
point of a misguided fraction
that has aspired to become
an irrational number: talk
about an identity crisis.

The confused consumption
of abstruse French philosophy,
the laundering of electric pink
and purple Armani briefs
in a community washroom
straight out of Bates Motel,
shopping for KY at Circus CVS
in the middle of the night, all
the things I do to fill the hours
we’re not kissing, those blank
and endless parentheses punctuating
the plenitude I feel when you’re
near with lovely gaps of nothingness
whose zeros I count manically.
Talked to my Mom, prepared
for a job interview, let Spotify
bathe me in funky aural
neurotransmitters. Facebook
drama here and there, saluting
Gatita in the hallway and letting
her out to forage, since she’s
eating for like sixteen these
days. I refuse to comment on her
promiscuity, but we might wanna
get her feline PrEP. Just saying.

Now I’m boiling Italian Wedding
Soup from a blue can and preparing
a hot shower to wash my dead skin
cells down the drain with a foam
of shower gel and fragmented
ironies. This misplaced jungle
cold that has blown down here
from the North is in my bones
where it turns my soft yellow
marrow to white marshmallow
fit for inclusion atop a Peepza.

Somewhere you are sleeping.
On the floor, a baby blue leather
Puma bag lies engorged with
ensembles tailored to all the places
we’ll go this week end when you
visit: the upscale Nicaraguan fritanga
with the very tall, cross-eyed waiter
whom Brendolina wants to bang,
and of course the fancy taquería
with a bar door ripped unceremoniously
from a graffiti-covered porta-potty
where all the white girls drink tequila
as they prepare for the rigors of
Insta-fame and maybe a Winter Party
practice run at that new bar everyone
is praying will stay open (it won’t).
I live for your fortuitous arrival
and will see your famous chin and
its forest of foliage so soon I can
almost taste the gustatory wonders
of this tropical crevice that dominates
my desires on an arctic night
of Eskimos licking SnoCones
in the cool methane igloos of Titan.

 
Michael Angelo Tata is an independent scholar, poet and essayist. His Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality arrived to critical acclaim from Intertheory Press in 2010. Most recently, his ongoing examination of the ramifications of Derridean thought on friendship, philosophy and materiality appears in Italy’s Rivista di Estetica. His work on Dorothy and William Wordsworth’s conjoined consciousness vis-à-vis Systems Theory was also included in the ecopoetic collection Romantic Sustainability: Endurance and the Natural World, 1780-1830 (Lexington Books, 2015).

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Notice how in today’s poem, Michael Angelo Tata uses pop culture references like Real American Housewives, French philosophy, Armani briefs, Bates Motel, KY, CVS, Spotify, Facebook, PrEP, and more. Write a poem that uses pop culture references in creative, imaginative, unexpected ways.

Thomas Goins
From Steve

Eve-less Adam—
ushered in by silent trumpets
populating a frame
of prodigious foliage—
you knew sensuality
as I did when your teeth
tore flesh from the grapefruit,
and the pink anthurium,
with its own phallus,
shielded your cock
as the rest of nature bared
you for my curious eyes
to swallow each aspect
at length:

a lean physique of a soul unsaddled
by gluttony and glistening
from divine birth.

Thomas (Thom) M. Goins is a 2016 graduate from Fayetteville State University and has a Bachelor’s Degree in English Language & Literature.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Notice how Thomas Goins, in today’s poem, writes a paean to Adam in the voice of “Steve,” appropriating and rehabilitating the conservative antigay slogan “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Write a poem that takes negative terminology—shaming, stigmatizing, pejorative, etc.—and transforms it into empowering and celebratory language.

Jason Schneiderman
Mustache

If there is a statute of limitations on sorrow,
then let me celebrate Freddy Mercury’s mustache,
which any Freudian will tell you, is sex, pure sex,
on the face, though when I delivered the news
of his death in the morning papers, I thought
he looked a little silly and gaunt, and because
there was no one to tell me, I didn’t know that
the riff in “Ice Ice Baby” came from one of his
many masterpieces, “Under Pressure.” I hope
it is apocryphal that he pulled over to the side
of the road and tossed out a passenger for changing
the radio station in his car without asking, but
who doesn’t love sex, on the face, on the chest,
in the armpit, in the crotch, in the butt, any
where, really, it can drip from, and he knew
that sex was always the icing to any cake,
even if he left the party too soon, it was his
party. His mustache. His sex.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of Primary Source (Red Hen Press, 2016), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award; Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press, 2010), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize; and Sublimation Point (Four Way Books, 2004), a Stahlecker Selection. His poetry and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and many other journals and anthologies. He has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2004. He is Poetry Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review, Associate Editor at Painted Bride Quarterly, and an associate professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

In Jason Schneiderman’s poem “The Disease Collector,” the speaker awaits the result of a test for an unnamed disease. The reader never learns what disease the speaker was tested for, nor do we ever learn whether the culture came back positive or negative. In fact, much of the poem is a meditation on the various meanings of the word “culture.” Write a poem about HIV—risk, testing, prevention, treatment, living with, living in fear of, etc.—without ever identifying the disease as HIV. To help your poetic process on this topic, check out Schneiderman’s “The Disease Collector,” quoted in it’s entirety in this review by Robert Pinsky in the The Washington Post.

Jay McCoy
Sweet Ghosts

There are sweet ghosts all around us.
—Nikky Finney

I feel
their eyes

heavy on me,
wondering

what I’ll say,
what I’ll do,

hoping I speak
truth, do right

by them & all
they taught

me. They
watch me

make wrong
decisions, hold

their breath,
sigh, pray

I’ll change
or do better

next time,
but they know,

most likely,
I won’t.

Jay McCoy is the author of The Occupation (Accents Publishing, 2015). His poems have appeared in anthologies and journals including Blue Fifth Review, Kentucky Monthly, Kudzu, Naugatuck River Review, Now & Then, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and Still: The Journal. In March, he and a business partner launched a new independent bookshop, Brier Books, in Lexington, Kentucky. Jay holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University. He co-founded the Teen Howl Poetry Series in Lexington as a venue for young poets to discover their own voice.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Since June 2015, every time we post a link to a daily poem on social media, we use the hashtags #hivtest #hivtreat #hivprevent #nohivshame #nohivstigma. We call that our HIV advocacy agenda in five hashtags. Write a poem that honors the HIV Here & Now advocacy agenda: a poem that celebrates the opportunities for honoring sexual health through HIV testing, prevention, and treatment, and that refuses to indulge in HIV-related shame or stigma. For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out these profiles of amazing HIV-positive people.

Jerry Carlin
A Note to A Young Man

after Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days

I’ll recall for you nights when the quick passed,
seeping from their wards through thick concrete walls
cold gray like fingers of summer fog
rolling in, spilling over Twin Peaks, spreading through
my emaciated city. I watched the daily disaggregation
of those who should be your faggot grandfathers.
I’m your gift, son, your small window
to what went down.
Don’t make me your Whitman.
I won’t visit hospital tents again, sit on camp stools,
breathe in the stench of gangrene or comfort
a Minnesotan mother, telling her:
he was affectionate, cradled in his canvas cot,
angels untethered his soul.

Jerry Carlin recently moved to Palm Springs from The Pacific Northwest.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

For our first prompt we suggested you write a poem about a person who died of AIDS who meant a lot to you. Let’s try something similar but from a different angle. Write about the work of a public figure who died of AIDS or is living with HIV—artist, writer, musician, dancer, choreographer, actor, activist, advocate, even a porn star you admired. Consider bringing an ekphrastic element to your poem, for example by writing about a specific painting by David Wojnarowicz or a specific film with Rock Hudson. Perhaps a poem about Amanda Blake as Kitty Russell on Gunsmoke. For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out this page on public figures with HIV/AIDS.

Nina Bennett
HIV Test, 2017

No more secret code to be remembered.
No more two weeks of night terrors, chest
pain, scribbling a list of which possessions
go to which friends. No more bargains;
please, just let it be negative and I will never,
ever get laid without a condom.

Now I sashay in to my appointment,
chat with the girl young enough to be my
granddaughter, receive instant absolution
along with a gift card to Walmart.

Nina Bennett is the author of Sound Effects (Broadkill River Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gargoyle, I-70 Review, Houseboat, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Philadelphia Stories, and The Broadkill Review. Nina is a founding member of the TransCanal Writers, a group of award-winning Delaware authors who collectively edited and published Five Bridges:  A Literary Anthology (CreateSpace, 2013).

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Write a poem about HIV risk in the voice of a member of a high risk group. Consider these facts:

• Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM) have the largest number of new HIV diagnoses in the US
• Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately affected by HIV
• Transgender women who have sex with men are among the groups at highest risk for HIV infection
• Injection drug users remain at significant risk for getting HIV

For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out this page on HIV in the United States.