Joel Donato Jacob
Sero Discord
I may never see things through his eyes.
He, who sits with his knee
brushing against my knee
looking past my shoulder to watch
me play a word game on my phone;
simultaneously,
he stands across a shortened lifetime
of exhausted mornings,
shortness of breath,
and flashes of nausea.
I would have asked him to play,
but staring at the moving letters
make him dizzy.
So I write him short poems, in stillness.
But he can’t read for long anymore,
and that, he says, is the part of him he lost
and misses most.
Instead, I say, I want to be
on that cliff with him. Tell him
I will hold his hand and stare
at the enormity of the disease
with him, and it will shrink
in humiliation because my mortality
will make immense
this love.
But in the meantime, I do not
understand how
he would think
I wouldn’t want to kiss his frosted lips,
and hold his desert hands,
or travel the degrees of desolation
upon the torso that cages
his rogue heart. I am sad
that I do not understand him
or how happy he is, each time
the test kit says I am not like him.
Joel Donato Jacob is a member of Linangan ng Imahen, Retorika, at Anyo (Image, Rhetoric, and Form) a nationally recognized, volunteer-run, educational nongovernmental organization (NGO) in the Philippines that seeks to promote literature, language, and patriotism. Joel is also a volunteer for LoveYourself, an AIDS Service Organization (ASO) in the Philippines. He likes mountaineering and being lazy on the beach.
SUBMIT to Na(HIV)PoWriMo via our SUBMITTABLE site.
Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books, the publisher of HIV Here & Now.
Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Today’s poem is about a serodiscordant relationship—an intimate partnership in which one member is HIV-positive and the other is HIV-negative. Write a poem about an HIV serodiscordant relationship, real or imagined.