Steven Cordova
What Shall Poor Cordova Do?
Tragedy?
Love, like poor Cordelia, and be silent?
Be, like mad Hamlet, not to be?
Get his ass to a nunnery, now?
(The quality of his meds is not strained, you know.
It droppeth as gentle rain from Gilead
on the gays beneath. Oh,
If you prick him, doth he not bleed?
Oh,
If you pickle him, doth he not keep?)
Or should poor Cordova try his hand at history?
He wasted time and now Triumeq wastes Him?
(O! for a cure of fire that would ascend
Cordova’s brightest heaven of transgression!)
Now does the winter of his discontent
Throw merciless shade upon this sun of (New) York.
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 invokes a well-known work of literature, music, or other art or performance medium. Today’s poet riffs on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. What about the films Apocalypse Now! or 2001: A Space Odyssey as HIV poems? What about an HIV poem that recalls Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition? Tchaikovsky’s Swann Lake? Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2? The possibilities are endless!