Steven Cordova
Poz Ken
HIV-Positive Ken—or Poz Ken—is way more woke
than his HIV-negative 1993 predecessor, Earring Magic Ken.
Earring Magic Ken came complete
with a purple mesh shirt,
a matching purple leather vest,
and the silver cock ring he wore out
and proud round his neck!
Everything about Earring Magic Ken screamed
I party! I can afford to party!
Poz Ken wants to make it less about
what he comes complete with
and more about what he doesn’t come complete with:
a healthy immune system,
an absent viral load,
a day without a script.
Thus Poz Ken allows himself to be sold
completely naked,
the better to show you—
the financially-hard pressed consumer—
that he’s unlike the various and sundry HIV-negative
Kens from back in the 90s—
Earring Magic
or Glitter Beach
or Total Hair Ken—.
which is to say Poz Ken
is not as ripped or as conventionally handsome,
but—here’s the best part—it is to say
Poz Ken doesn’t want you
to buy him anything, not even
a drink (as he’s several years sober).
No, Poz Ken doesn’t want you
to open up the holes in
your pocketbook,
or your soul. “No,
Poz Ken likes to say:
“You can’t buy love.
I just want you
to see me—me!—
Poz Ken!—
standing here—tall!
in a box!—smiling, staring,
staring, smiling.
Steven Cordova is the author of the poetry collection Long Distance (Bilingual University Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in Art & Understanding, The James White Review, Evergreen Chronicles, and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, among other journals, as well as in the anthology Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (Wesleyan University Press, 2000), edited by Agha Shahid Ali. Cordova won the 2012 International Reginald Shepherd Memorial Poetry Prize and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Write a poem that addresses HIV through one or more pop-culture references, as today’s poem does with the Ken doll. For more inspiration, you can also read “HIV Barbie,” by Dustin Brookshire, which appeared on HIV Here & Now on April 5, 2016.