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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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)

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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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)

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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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 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.