Mark Ward
Freddie,
I remember
I was eight,
alone in the big living room
where I made worlds
and the news
people said
you died.
I sobbed,
the hurt shuddering out.
I didn’t understand the word
‘AIDS’ but knew what they meant
by ‘complication’. I didn’t know
how to name the pattern
recognition. I didn’t know
why I was crying like
life had killed me too.
Mark Ward is the author of Circumference (Finishing Line Press, 2018). His work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Skylight47, Assaracus, Tincture, The Good Men Project, Storm Cellar, Studies in Arts and Humanities, Off the Rocks, The Wild Ones, Vast Sky, Animal, Headstuff, SCAB, and Emerge, as well as in the anthologies, Out of Sequence: The Sonnets Remixed, (Parlor Press, 2016), edited by D. Gilson; The Myriad Carnival (Lethe Press, 2016), edited by Matthew Bright; and Not Just Another Pretty Face (Beautiful Dreamer Press, 2016), edited by Louis Flint Ceci. He hails from Dublin and is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, a journal of LGBTQ+ poetry.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Today’s poem, like our poem for April 1 (“Kaposi Something” by Victor Alcindor), is inspired by a childhood memory of HIV/AIDS. Write a poem based on your own childhood associations with HIV/AIDS. Alcindor wrote about a harrowing documentary he remembers seeing on PBS as a child; Ward remembers learning of the death of Freddie Mercury and writes about his own pain and confusion at this news. There are so many things you can write about if you were a child during the 1980s or 1990s. You could end up writing a whole sequence of poems!