A poem a day by a different poet leading up to World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, 2018
Roger Ian Rosen Haiku for World AIDS Day Drug and disease free. What a strange combination Of disparate things. Growing old’s no curse. Considering history, It’s a privilege. You freaked out when he Told you he was poz? Then why’d You wear a condom? We ain’t gonna fuck. Not because you’re poz ~ because You … [Read more…]
Ina Roy-Faderman someone told me today that i got lucky your bones crumble tiny stellates hung from threads of memory spicules of pain concentrate in the heart catching on fibers hanging next to desiccated words “you got lucky” the blue-scrubbed nurse i still hear the twenty years gone in each beat absent of you and … [Read more…]
Jarred Thompson Handcuffs ground down history into masses of meat, all stumps and eyes, gawking at the back of a police van. try it on, lover whispers, clicking away freedom to an immobile channel: watch, react, yank, give up touch to be touched, used. incense of cabbage and sacraments of gnawed tattoos blesses a man-to-metal … [Read more…]
Rob Jacques Interrogation He’s older, impartial, somewhat benign (but not entirely), this stethoscoped man in his starched, white coat, and he sets himself down in front of yet another one, this time you, his three-fifteen appointment, idiopathic, an adult male patient presenting nondescript symptoms, and he throws a stern glance your way; that is to … [Read more…]
Jarred Thompson The Power of Chronic Illness Every day is a poker game with a hooded figure who’s always silent. Every day you pound away the sickness with weights, treadmills, steam rooms, salads, protein, pills. Every day you kiss and hug and touch coddling their fear in your hardened hands. Every day you live beyond … [Read more…]
Rob Jacques Prayer for My Caregiver …don’t let him lose his willingness to stick with me, to make love and to make love work… —Tim Dlugos Please don’t let his endurance break on the stone-hard core of my failing. Let him soldier on remembering things damn hard to remember now in the contumacious blossoming of … [Read more…]
Jarred Thompson Numbers They’ll be printed on a page, scribbled down margins, confirming your deepest fears. With every extra zero and every digit that countdowns To withered hands and skeleton faces Unreal results, faces that rush you from Room to Room: Rows of smiling teeth shaking hands two by two. A thousand miles away I … [Read more…]
Rob Jacques HIV/AIDS 1980s I’m thinking of the life of a man looking back who asks was any of it real, now that he’s locked inside his history. — Stanley Plumly The imperative to love is the imperative above all else. One should not die because one eats, breathes, or loves. Nature is blind in … [Read more…]
Jarred Thompson Telling When I utter those words And the air vibrates with meaning between You and Me, then you will hear and decipher, and the plagues of Moses will be unleashed upon your body: rivers of blood, plagues of toads locusts to feast on your brain your first-born-self taken in the night by a … [Read more…]
Robert Carr Soldier and Commander We are the timeless fuck in skinless dark. We slide shining-smooth surfaces inside each other. You’re my loved fat woman, peach-breathed boy, bone-broke man. I am your wife, beast-beloved, chameleon -husband, whisper-girl. Release of shit in a death-bed, spread of blood shaken over birth. Salt of first cry, sugar of … [Read more…]