David Schimmelpfennig
The Road Forever Traveled

Not the type of road I’d otherwise pick.
No forks like Frost’s: just dirt, rutted and unkempt.
Meandering out to the main one
that sticks out on maps.
To the smooth tarmac that isn’t devastated
every time the donga’s get upgraded.

How many times have I walked this road?
Really a foot trail wide enough for a car.
Ever since I was three, one way or the other.
This time back toward my family.
Away from the bus stop,
electricity, telephones, running water.

Toward the hut, the village, our kraal.
No longer my hut or kraal—
I’ve made peace with that turn I chose to take.
Away from home and kraal,
probably that time when the bus was late
and the offer so inviting.

A momentary pleasure behind the store.
A turn taken never to be undone.
The cost was cheap, but who really pays?
Did I or is it them?
How are they without me?
I must go back and see them, minus me.

It’s not far away,
I can see the smoke from evening fires
sliding over the veldt.
Cooking smoke that lingers above the grass.
Not as hot as brush fire smoke
that hurries up into the sky.

I can see the breath of a few young men that pass.
A chilly night, but no steam passes from my lips.
Follow the footprints into the village.
The prints tell a lie, no new ones left behind from my steps.
Our hut’s door is open and dark
Do I need to sneak, ashamed how I made them cry?

My dearest Evelyn is easiest to see,
closest to the fire
kneeling in front of her
dented aluminum pot,
teetering on a grate over a fire
cooking pap for six.

Why all choked up, now that it’s meaningless?
I was seldom home for this.
Hardly ever enough for everyone;
a good enough reason.
Now without me they have even less.
She turns the white porridge to keep it from burning,
steam joins the smoke rising
through the hole in the thatched roof

We have four children together.
Blessed by almighty.
The eldest are boys, seventeen and eighteen,
working separate jobs in the city.
They send home money in a single envelope,
and look out for one another.

Our eldest daughter is fifteen
and will be married soon.
Such nimble fingers and strong back.
I got most of her lobola but it went too fast.
She fetches the water for most dinners
and brings enough in the plastic drum for breakfast.

Our youngest is twelve.
She does well in school and
builds up a big appetite on the running team,
always in the podium mix.
That makes three,
but this pot will shortly feed six.

Evelyn’s brother also rolled the dice with HIV
and had even better odds than me.
At least she had a regular job at the Hy-Vee Mart
But like times before kissing dice in town, he lost.
Two of his six will stand at their posts by this pot
and share space on the floor of the hut tonight.

AIDS also took my youngest brother.
There’s no Xhosa word for brother-in-law,
just her husband’s brother.
Our families are close,
even more so as they get smaller.
One of his boys waits feeling guiltier than the others,
not too far from the aluminum pot.

He’d rather be out of the hut;
beyond the village,
out in the quiet half-darkness lit by the moon.
So since, as usual, there’s no rain,
he’ll make a ball for his pocket out of his serving,
and head out for as long as he has courage.
No money for school; no curfew

The pap is starting to slowly thicken
as stomach’s ache in anticipation,
and after some sleep and breakfast tomorrow,
Evelyn’ll strain her back and collect firewood again.
Carry it home on her head in a tied-up-heap.
No one cares that parafin is subsidised and stoves are cheap.

They’d all say the same to anyone,
mieliepap cooked over a wood fire,
is number one.

David Schimmelpfennig’s work has appeared in Science and National Geographic. He holds a BS in industrial management from Purdue University as well as an MA and a PhD, both in economics, from Michigan State University. He was a senior Fulbright Scholar at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, in 2002 and a principal investigator on Rockefeller Foundation projects assessing the impacts of genetically modified crops in South Africa from 2000 to 2008.

SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day run-up to World AIDS Day 2017 via our SUBMITTABLE site.

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.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books, the publisher of HIV Here & Now.

Barbara Rockman
Ladder of bone rungs a love poem

I could barely get a finger hold      slender chest 
I fell against     impossible height to him
wraith of a man    corpse I insisted on    I had no foothold  
how his concave met me    oh barely-there man   
my body greater than      A girl wants linear and light-filled  
the length of tracks that tightens at the horizon  
Even his arms were see-through   his thighs were rigging 
for what would never sail      How hungry for kindness    
he was sapling     my prowling orchard      his long fingers 
hovered but did not hold    His burnt thumbs    stubs I pocketed 
I traced his skeleton collapsed from hanging    joints and 
hinges splayed     we rearranged    he  my half-heart   I  his already-sung
beautiful ridged man and the pandemic so far off 
it might be cloud over the street lamp we stood under   
those nights before autumn’s long windows    
before book spines cracked beneath us    
before ashes wormed and hung 
as the shutters of his chest closed       
as he turned toward what would kill him 
and still     I clung 

Barbara Rockman is the author of Sting and Nest (Sunstone Press, 2011), winner of the New Mexico-Arizona Poetry Book Award and the National Press Women Book Prize; and Into Moss and Singing (forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press) .Her poems appear in Calyx, Bellingham Review, Cimarron Review, Louisville Review, Nimrod and bosque. Rockman lives and teaches writing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is Workshop Coordinator for the Wingspan Poetry Project, which brings poetry to victims of domestic violence.

SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day run-up to World AIDS Day 2017 via our SUBMITTABLE site.

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.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books, the publisher of HIV Here & Now.

This poem first appeared in Askew.

Roger Ian Rosen
Bloody Fingerprints on an Innocent

Is it true that I still crane my neck,
Try to be noticed,
Try for some form of acknowledgement
At the mere sight of a gay man woman trans couple queer family bi nonbinary.
Yes, me too. Me too, I cry out in glances.
I’m here. We’re here. Together. I see you. Do you see me?

Growing up under the Reagan regime,
Listening to them
Decry my life not worth living,
Pounding pounding pounding away at their daily message:
My life worth death. Painful and alone and tossed
Both fickly and purposefully into heaps of other garbage.
Deserving of all ills real and imagined, figurative and
Literal.
A slow dawning as the door of normal slammed in my face
In the mirror one horrifying morning.
Oh, look. A faggot.
Me. Faggot. Death. Deserving. Me. Alone. Abomination. Me.
Disease itself. Me.
Pouring into me, through me, souring.
This host beautifully hospitable, giving the disease of condemnation a fertile ground to
Infect and cancer.
I had no choice—knew nothing else. There were no options of knowledge.
But I found them. Hungry and sick and
Desperate for a cure, I found them.
They were chemo, AZT. I ingested word after word,
Idea after idea, rant after rant.
Seeking an unlearning of things I didn’t know I’d learned.
Unconscious acceptance of the never questioned. I got high
On their questions. And strong. Each thought a piece I could
Pick up and glue back with glitter and lavender glue.

So much has faded, allowing the pulsing
Rage of still unanswered questions to flow and bloom in semi-automatic words that
Rapid-fire from these lips.
But so much remains.
Because I know it’s weird that after all this time
I still crane my neck to notice and to be noticed noticing.
You too? Yeah, you too. Me too, too.

But it is me now.
And I hold it close, lest I forget
Where I come from and who made me me,
Whose inhumanity stared back at me in that mirror.
Who stuck their thumbs into my still wet cement and left
Their bloody fingerprints on an innocent.

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 over-the-top camp, sex, and silliness…with audience participation!), which continues to unfurl on social media #backdoorbingo (_roger0nimo_ on Instagram and @Rogeronimo_com on Twitter) even as we speak. Roger is currently working towards an MFA 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.)

SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day run-up to World AIDS Day 2017 via our SUBMITTABLE site.

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.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books, the publisher of HIV Here & Now.

Robin Gorsline
A Seminary AIDS Quartet

First, there was Mike,
young, skinny, creating wonders
of liturgical truth,
not ever accepting
even the existence of a box
into which the chapel worship had to
fit.

And then Kevin
Roman Catholic theologian
who talked and wrote
openly, honestly,
about that which the Vatican fears most,
sex.

Stephen came to seminary
to untangle the mystery—at least to him, an atheist—
of why HIV/AIDS,
the virus he knew he carried,
freaked out so many good Christian
folk.

Finally, it was Norman,
later-in-life clergy student
keeping his sexual life
a secret until the virus
invaded, took him home
dead.

These four, among the finest men
I have known, part of an army
of men-loving-men New Yorkers
dying as so many
struggled to get the world
just to notice.

I see yet how it might have been,
the world graced by their gifts—
Mike hanging blue bunting
across the globe for all to know
Christ is not only dead, risen, coming again,
but already and always here;
Kevin leading papal panels
on sex, gender justice;
Stephen publishing the poems
bursting from his strong, hallowed hands and soul;
Norman preaching God’s truths
to a flock, a city, nation even,
hungry for different lives and world.

What might have been
can only be
what we carry of them
beyond our tears—
In vows to end the pandemic
still striking too many
good women and men, especially
Black men kept back and down—
in prayers of gratitude
for these four and so many more
whose too brief sojourns among us
leave us yearning for more.

Robin Gorsline is a late-in-life writer, claiming his passion after a varied career in public office and service, non-profit administration, religious leadership, and LGBTQIA and anti-racism activism. He writes several blogs, including SexBodiesSpirit and The Naked Theologian. He is a father of three and grandfather of two, lives in Greenbelt, MD, with his husband of 20 years and their standard poodle.

SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day run-up to World AIDS Day 2017 via our SUBMITTABLE site.

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.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books, the publisher of HIV Here & Now.

Risa Denenberg
the night we tossed your ashes

mingled with rose petals
into the whitecaps at Cherry Grove

can you see us

standing at the eastern edge
of sand at midnight
and the others, your friends
stampeding into waves
at high tide butt-naked
calling to me

come in come in come in

because of you
I have ebbed
into a bystander
the rest of my days
without buoyancy or grace

Risa Denenberg is the author of the poetry collections Whirlwind @ Lesbos (Headmistress Press, 2016), In My Exam Room (The Lives You Touch Publications, 2014), blinded by clouds (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014), Mean Distance from the Sun (Aldrich Press, 2013), and What We Owe Each Other (The Lives You Touch Publications, 2013). Denenberg lives a quiet life in a place of stunning beauty on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state and earns her keep as a nurse practitioner. She is a co-founder and editor at Headmistress Press, a publisher of lesbian poetry.

SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day run-up to World AIDS Day 2017 via our SUBMITTABLE site.

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.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books, the publisher of HIV Here & Now.

Laura Secord
For Women Living with HIV

Survivors with spindle arms and sofa bellies,
whose lovers died when they were young,
who toiled and raised their kids in isolation.

Some grew the extra neck of choking fat
the early meds gave. Some cannot retire,
sunk so deep in drug debt’s mire.

Most dismissed many years ago, any dreams
of sensuality, and struggled daily to keep
their status secret. Here’s to the women

who nursed their families, unbeknownst,
keeping church offices, doctors’
practices afloat, who made art, built monuments

to heroes, saved their schools, rescued
baby turtles, but turned from love,
fearing rejection from disclosure.

They balanced books, were fantastic cooks,
nursed our dads in ICU,
saved lives, went home alone.

They sang soprano in choirs, fed shut-ins,
counseled addicts and braided hair.
Some told their families, and were demoted

to a lonesome paper plate beside the Christmas china,
despite working nights to fund a niece’s tuition.
Here’s to survivors no one praises,

who lived in hiding―
and to those who broke their bonds of silence,
who stepped outside,

inspired others to live freely,
no longer censured by self,
no longer hostages to HIV.

Laura Secord’s poems have appeared in the Birmingham Weekly, Arts and Understanding, The Southern Women’s Review, PoemMemoirStory, Passager, the HIV Here & Now project Na(HIV)PoWriMo April 2017 online feature, and the Burning House Press poetry blog. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Sierra Nevada College. 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, and an editor of their upcoming anthology, Voices of Resistance.

SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day run-up to World AIDS Day 2017 via our SUBMITTABLE site.

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.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books, the publisher of HIV Here & Now.

Greg Marzullo
Refugee crisis

They ran to their boats,
heaving off the gravelled shore into cold Aegean, where we
flailed, shoved, climbed one another.
Charon would surely reach us first
eyes flashing in the gloom.

Ferocious
they plowed the sea, the waters
cowed by their glare,
calloused hands gripped the oars,
unremitting.

Famished sirens, we
clawed at the hulls
wept into the waves;

they never faltered,
those women hauled their
brethren aboard and
sped back to Lesbos:

Aphrodite’s temple turned
charnel house,
love goddess wreathed with dead laurels.

—For the lesbians without whom we’d all be dead
 

Greg Marzullo has worked for the Washington Blade and the Phoenix New Times, among other publications. Winner of a Society for Professional Journalists award for arts criticism, he was a semi-finalist in the 2016 Tucson Festival of Books for his poetry.

SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day countdown to World AIDS Day 2017 via our SUBMITTABLE site.

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.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books, the publisher of HIV Here & Now.

Elizabeth Wilson
from The Collection of Izzy Mac

“It’s hard to write about the details of Bob and me, but without Bob, very little of me remains.”
—Journal entry, Izzy Mac(e Wilson), June 2017

1.
Thank you
I was jaded and getting harder.
My body mimicked my emotional state.
My heart was black and hard.
Then I saw the lighthouse,
The one with the man looking out,
Waves crashing around him.
And long before I could see his face
I knew him.
I love knowing him again!

Elizabeth Wilson’s writing has appeared in both social work and women’s studies anthologies, scholarly publications, and technical publications. She blogs on the International Bipolar Foundation website.

SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day countdown to World AIDS Day 2017 via our SUBMITTABLE site.

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.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books, the publisher of HIV Here & Now.

Julene Tripp Weaver
Miracle Meds

Pharmaceutical wonders are at work
but I believe only in this moment
of well-being.
—Jane Kenyon

I refused AZT. Eventually, my T-cell count
fell to fifty, only then I agreed
to a non-protease regimen:
Epivir, Zerit, Viread and Viramune.
Their chemistry made me manic,
unable to sleep, deprived. A walking
time bomb waiting to explode.

A friend asks, Why do you call it sex addiction?
Often I want to hide from everyone—
no one comprehends—only in my own time,
with my own words and slow space is there peace.

There was no choice but to start a protease.
Hell to take meds every day with meals that must
contain fat. Surprised I survived this far
with a relationship, a man who stayed.

Eventually the pills sorted themselves out—
and I had to agree the drugs are a miracle—
but death will not stop, pernicious and cruel,
laughing it will enter, a common infection,
my skin will turn ugly, isolate me from the world,
ravish my insides, steal my energy.

There are days I forget to take my pills—
days I live normal—want to feel the breeze
without the neuropathy, enjoy a quiet moment,
sit by a window with a book
and a pen, ready to catch words.

Julene Tripp Weaver is the author of Truth Be Bold: Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS (Finishing Line Press, 2017), No Father Can Save Her (Plain View Press, 2011), and Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manager Wails Her Blues (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Riverbabble, River & South Review, Paddock Review, and The Seattle Review of Books. A psychotherapist, Weaver worked in AIDS services for over 21 years. Find more of her writing at www.julenetrippweaver.com.

SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day countdown to World AIDS Day 2017 via our SUBMITTABLE site.

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.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books, the publisher of HIV Here & Now.

Dennis Rhodes
Passing

They think no one dies anymore.
The worst is over. Time to move on
with their uninfected lives. The truth is
men have struggled for twenty years or more
trying to get their “cocktails” just right,
fearful as ever of night sweats, random sores
breaking out on their bodies. They
have been chronically underweight
and gaunt, some with walkers. Yes,
life has gone on for the many.
No one deliberately ignores the few:
they are largely, but kindly, unnoticed.
My friend Frank passed yesterday.
They think no one dies anymore.

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.

SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day countdown to World AIDS Day 2017 via our SUBMITTABLE site.

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.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books, the publisher of HIV Here & Now.