Risa Denenberg
Of Countless Deaths

Of countless deaths today,
I’ve witnessed three. To witness
any death is to feel desperately
alive. To discern that one’s own
body lingers at the border between
here and not here. To experience
the shock wave of foreboding. To slip
into a moment of groundless grace.

And if you ask, as many do, why
I chose this job, this charge of sitting
by the bedsides of the dying, I will
only say, because I can. What else survives
the secret love I have for the act
of witness is mystery, even to myself.

Risa Denenberg is the author of A Slight Faith, forthcoming in 2018 from MoonPath Press. She lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state where she works as a nurse practitioner. She is an editor at Headmistress Press, an independent publisher of books of poetry by lesbians.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Write a poem about having sex with awareness of HIV. Write from your own perspective, or from that of a persona who knows that they are HIV-positive or knows that they are HIV-negative or does not know their HIV status at all. Try to get inside the mind and body of the speaker. Try to get inside the sexual experience. Is it sex with a spouse? Sex with a non-spousal partner? Sex for money? Sex for drugs? A hookup? A one night stand? A casual thing? Sex with a condom? Sex without a condom? Is it raw? Is it bareback? Is it kinky? Is it boring? Etcetera? HAVE FUN WITH THIS POEM! Don’t be all gloomy and doomy about HIV AND SEX. No handy link to information online to help you with this one. Do your own research. Use your imagination.

Darius Stewart
“Tests Have Proven This Is Not a False Positive”

in this diagnosis we don’t name names
he is he & she is she      period              do not disturb

the status quo  he is a person of color             so is she
we all are some shade of off-white

if not it’s best not to incite confusion
suggesting that options for race or ethnicity matter

that reasons to have Hispanic / non-Hispanic
as option on medical forms matters    in fact

there are no options for categorical characteristics that matter
including religious beliefs        sexual orientation

etcetera should be the only given box available
anything otherwise is a private affiliation

best kept tight-lipped   as in mother’s maiden name
make & model of first car       date we lost our virginity

breed of favorite pet    probable city to be exiled
in other words what we use to establish

password protection    secure tax information
bank balances              any interior knowledge

to bring comfort so we can rest easy at night
in light of aforementioned diagnosis

we must use in order to survive the future
point blank     period

Darius Stewart is author of The Terribly Beautiful (Main Street Rag, 2006) and Sotto Voce (Main Street Rag 2008), each an Editor’s Choice Selection, and The Ghost the Night Becomes (2014), winner of the 2013 Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. His work has appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Callaloo, Meridian, Chelsea Station Magazine, and the Good Men Project, among others. He holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where he was a James A. Michener Fellow in poetry. He presently tends bar at an award-winning seafood house in Knoxville, TN, where he lives somewhat comfortably with his dog, Fry. In Fall 2017, he will begin the MFA program in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Iowa.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Write a poem about “viral load” (the amount of HIV in a sample of blood). Consider the lived reality and poetic potential in terms like “undetectable” and “viral suppression.” Work with these concepts either from your actual first-person perspective, the perspective of a first-person persona, or in the second or third person. For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out this page on viral load.

Sam Avrett
To the death

Greeks and Trojans fought to the death.
Vicious nasty battles on the Aegean,
Broken bones, bloody wounds, shouts of pain.

Those wars are remembered in smooth white marble.
Simple stories with a nice clean arc.

Memory protects us, clears the ugliness, trims the thorns of trauma.
What it felt like to fall, the pain of the bone break, the struggle to stay alive,
somehow we only remember the outlines.

A memorial is dedicated in New York to the plague years. It was.
A bad time, too many ambulances in the night, too many people we never knew.

Idealized pure lines, simple and grand.
The pain barely shows through.

Sam Avrett works with The Fremont Center, a collective of HIV program and policy consultants who support good grant making, program management, and policy and strategy development for health and human rights.  Sam is also a member of the International Committee of the Netherlands organization Stop AIDS Now!, a Board member of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC), and a volunteer emergency medical technician on an ambulance in his home town of Fremont, New York. Prior to becoming a consultant in 1999, Sam was a co-founder and first Executive Director of AVAC and before that worked with Gay Men’s Health Crisis, New York Blood Center, and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.

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If you want 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.

We invite you to 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)

Write a poem about starting antiretroviral therapy (HIV meds) in 2017, either from your actual first-person perspective, the perspective of a first-person persona, or in the second or third person. For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out this page on the basics of HIV treatment.

Roger Ian Rosen
Gary, I Don’t Remember

He was so thin. No, skinny.
Too skinny.
Funny. And wonderful in a way that I didn’t understand
That I understood.
Then he was gone.
Replaced by a fat guy.
They were very different.
But then not.

I have written his death with
Wisps of cancerred glitter.
Disco balls, decapitated and lying in
Slivers at his bare feet.
I have seen him pulled under,
Drowned in a sequin of shimmering quicksand.

What happened? I don’t know.
My fictions are likely kinder
Than the splintery hands and serrated fingers
That reached through him,
Ripping him away in chunks.
1981…2? wasn’t kind.
But I don’t know.

I never knew
Why he disappeared.
I remember him
Sitting. Head down. Conserving.
Or maybe that’s another fiction. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t remember.

I know I didn’t know.
But he was wonderful in a way that
I didn’t understand
That I understood.

It wasn’t until high school.
I asked my mother,
“What ever happened to xxxx?”
I didn’t remember his name. I had to look it up. Had to find the program from the show from a
theater long gone. Age-burnt and separating at the creases. Visible fibers stretched thin.
Too thin.
Gary.
I didn’t remember.

He got sick.
They’d never told me.
He was wonderful in a way that
I didn’t understand
That I understood.

Roger Ian Rosen writes so that his husband might ever experience silence. He is author of Backdoor Bingo (a melding of gay pulp fiction and social media ~ over-the-top camp, sex, and silliness…with audience participation!), which is unfurling on Instagram #backdoorbingo (_roger0nimo_ on Instagram and @Rogeronimo_com on Twitter) even as we speak. Roger is currently working towards a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College in Vermont. (Editor’s note: I could not help myself from posting a link to this video of Roger at work/play.)

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If you want 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 PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis against HIV infection) in 2017, either from your actual first-person perspective, the perspective of a first-person persona, or in the second or third person. For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out this page on PrEP.

Laura Secord
As Far as Heart Goes (V)

When she resurrects to our awe,
and they pronounce her fit to leave,
she picks Jamal up from school, grouts tile,
paints the hall, and teaches him to read.

Under the starry ceiling
she stenciled, she tells him,
God, who made the world, promised she’d live
till Jamal could manage without her,
and one day they’d meet again.

She lasts till spring, when doctors
attempt to resurrect her, giving chest
compressions once again, but none has strength
enough to mend her warrior’s heart.

Laura Secord‘s poems have appeared in the Birmingham Weekly, A&U Magazine, The Southern Women’s Review, PoemMemoirStory and Passager. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada College and has been an offset printer, union organizer, health care activist, teacher, and a sex-educator. For thirty years, she combined the life of a writer and performer with a career as a Nurse Practitioner in HIV care. She is the co-founder of Birmingham’s Sister City Spoken Word Collective.

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We invite you to 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)

Write a poem about receiving the news of a NEGATIVE HIV TEST in 2017. Write a poem that captures that sense of relief combined with that sense of “What if…?” and that sense of “There but for the grace…” or whatever you think it would mean for you or for a person you imagine yourself to be. For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out this page on testing negative for HIV.

Kristina England
Painting the Early 1980s

Lesions emerge
into stained tailspin.
Red drowns
art pieces within.

Hogwash men blame homosexuals,
scrawl on billboards,
radio transmit own perpetual
lies into line-blurred

facts. Society trusts, gets sick,
abstracted disease progresses
into collateral chaos epidemic.
Hogwash men realize own mess,

take action. No apologies given.
Leave canvas-cracked skin.

Kristina England‘s poems have appeared in New Verse News, Silver Birch Press, and Topology. She lives in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she is a writer and photographer. Follow her at facebook.com/kristinadengland.

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If you want 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.

We invite you to 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)

Write a poem about receiving the news of a positive HIV test in 2017. For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out this page on being newly diagnosed with HIV.

James Casey
Pills and Bills

Pills and bills, currency for sanity.
ECT and cups of tea
Electro-Darjeeling if you please
Tantrums of thumping and vibrating
My sister twirls her hair with OCD abandon;
When can I throw her switch?

Digital pixel-pusher by trade
My oeuvre exists in electric circuits
Twisted representations that wind up
lining bird cages!

And dreams are dreams
whether shocked or shilled.
Poverty of emotion from the chemical warfare
in my brain.

Some day, in a manic bliss
I will go to Paul Stuart:
“I’ll have 12 of those—no cuffs please—pleats please!
Peridot and periwinkle pinpoint oxfords.
Cashmere and argyle with herringbone and tweed.”
Haberdasher for the great crash,
When the zenith breaks
And the valley looms
And everyone pulls back and disappears.

And there is no God on the road to Dibrapore
But at a wedding I went to He seemed to reappear.
Love declared over wine and dancing, who wouldn’t join in?
Love is hard to find while tending the flames of loneliness.
Caged by the fire and burned to the quick.

James Casey writes: I studied Literature and Communications at Benedictine University back in the late 1970s and it indulged my love of reading and exploring the writing process. I love poetry that reaches deep into the soul and explores the ironies and struggles of life. I also am a film-o-phile who loves Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman movies. I spend a lot of time watching Turner Classic Movies and following the classics. I share my apartment with my cat, Sophia, who is a loving tonic to life.

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If you want 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.

Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Write a poem about getting tested for HIV in 2017. For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out this page on HIV testing.

Scott Chalupa
Big Roy

How many queens had to help you
overturn and burn that cop cruiser
on the second day of riots? I assumed

you just made it up, and so I never thought
to ask any of those nights when you held court
in the receiving room at Houston’s

Pacifica affiliate. The show was After Hours,
Queer radio with attitude, and you
had shade in spades. You were proof

gay men could live past fifty—some miracle.
You’d prance around the conference table,
rub your Retrovir belly while you recalled

your Stonewall ho-strolling twenties,
then moon over the time you were eight,
having just seen Dino, when you announced

from the back seat of your father’s rattling Ford
that you were going to marry Sal Mineo.
It seems all I do these days is write

about the dead, and I haven’t yet figured how
to write you back into existence. I wish
I’d thought to ask how many girly boys it takes

to set police blue ablaze. I imagine
the cruiser rocking on its crushed roof,
fire pageant-waving from each tire,

you edging the wreckage, Sal on your arm.

Scott Chalupa haunts a marginal attic in Columbia, SC, where he is finishing an MFA at the University of South Carolina. He is winner of the inaugural Graduate Student Creative Writing Award in poetry from the South Atlantic MLA. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in South Atlantic Review, Tupelo Quarterly, tap literary magazine, Jasper, Oxford Comma Review, and other venues.

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

Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Write a poem about being at risk for HIV infection in 2017. For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out this page on who is at risk for HIV.

Michael Mackin O’Mara
Dreams in Black & White

Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!
— Charles Baudelaire

My friend, You are dying. Not like the rest of us who think we are
dying every day. Each day the warden walks You through a
darkened hall. Each evening, in stark shadow, the reverend father
Mea Culpas, while the sweep hand of the large white faced clock
lurches, second by second, as it does in every film-noir. Through
each sedated night, You wait.

You wait.

There’s a mob at your door. They clamor like passbook holders in
a Pottersville bank run. They wish to cash in your promises, and it’s
the 80s all over again and your room’s gone retro & tighter than
Studio and since we can’t pass the doorman’s velvet rope we find
ourselves in extended imaginary conversations

where each moment, real or dreamt, is dissected, re-edited
frame by frame, replayed forward and back like a time-lapsed
sunrise.

All around You, as they wake to the moment, are lost in rerun
expectations of every Doctor Gillespie who ever glared intently at
a test tube raised between thumb and forefinger while from
across his forehead beads of perspiration tick, tick, tick like a
relentless clock. They corner your doctor till his god mask
shatters. They create hopes for a new doctor with his god intact.

—the door opens, the door opens again, I lock it,
in the dark, from these dreams, I startle to the soft
click of a door again opening, I see colors I think I
shouldn’t see, the red fabric of the wall, purple dark,
each sun, moon, and star of the printed cloth glows
golden,

for more than a moment I am afraid until
Welcome, I say aloud,

sleep reclaims me as the room
fades to everyday night.

In this dream You’ve become the priest reciting the last rites, in a
gold lined pouch next to Your heart You hold the last Eucharist; in
a crucible, the blessed oils, with Your thumb You smudge the sign
of salvation across my brow. In this dream we weave a tale of
spirit souls swimming a violet sky. In this dream, when You say
You are ready, I whisper: Take me with You.

And, for a time, it seems You do.

Michael Mackin O’Mara lives and works in West Palm Beach, Florida. He is the managing editor of the South Florida Poetry Journal.

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

Here is today’s prompt (optional as always):

Write a poem about being at risk for HIV infection in 2017. For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out this page on who is at risk for HIV.