Noah Stetzer
results
with my hands wringing my hands and my skin
wet with bad news sweat — his come to jesus
tone of voice, with the matter of factness
of his face I stumble fast to keep up,
to fit his square cliche into the round
hole in my head, to square this flat lit room’s
offensively humdrum utility
with this out-of-the-blue comet strike hit —
the satisfaction of hearing confirmed
what I fear submerged in the cold water
that what I fear’s the worst—the room’s too small
for this, his sad face takes up too much space.
Noah Stetzer’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Horsethief, Vinyl, Bellevue Literary Review, and the New England Review, among other journals. He is the author of Because I can See Needing a Knife (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016). Stetzer has received scholarships from the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBT Writers and from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. Born and raised in Pittsburgh PA, Stetzer now lives in the Washington DC area and can be found online at noahstetzer.com.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Today’s poem is about receiving an HIV-positive test result. Write a poem in which the speaker receives an HIV-positive test result. You do not have to be HIV-positive to write a poem like this. It can be a persona poem, a poem in which the first-person speaker is not the same as the poet. The speaker can be completely imaginary or you can write in the voice of an actual HIV-positive person (you just want to be careful about confidentiality if the person is not public about their HIV status).