Na(HIV)PoWriMo ± April 15, 16, & 17, 2017

Michael Broder
All the men I like to get fucked by

All the men I like to get fucked by
Are dealers
T mostly, G too, but usually they want me
To parTy not do G
I’m still tryna lose my G cherry
I was about to, now, with The Dark Lord,
But he asked me if I’d had any alcohol and I had,
I’d taken a swig of red wine right out of the bottle
Right before I left to come here (to the Dark Lord’s place)
Just as a little treat & to get the coffee taste
Out of my mouth

 

NOTES:
T=methamphetamine, the drug you may remember from Breaking Bad.
G=GHB or gamma-hydroxybutyrate, the drug you may remember from The Black Party.

 

Michael Broder is the author of Drug and Disease Free (Indolent Books, 2016) and This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. He holds a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from New York University, and a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Broder lives in Brooklyn with his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and a backyard colony of stray and feral cats.

Due to the arrival of tax day, there has been a delay in posting new NaPoWriMo poems. The board of directors and entirely volunteer staff of Indolent Books apologizes for this inconvenience and suspects it will happen again.

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Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Notice how in today’s poem, Michael Broder writes about party drugs. In 2017, HIV is not just a virus or a disease. It touches on every aspect of the life of those at the highest risk: men who have sex with men, transgender women, people of color, people who are poor, homeless, unstably housed, or engaged in sex work, among others. Write a poem from the perspective of a speaker who is a member of one of these groups, whether or not that is who you, the poet, actually are. Go ahead; it’s okay—we here at the HIV Here & Now project still believe that poetry is a way into identities other than our own, a way to empathize with the plight or fate or experience of others.