HIV Here & Now Contributors
Cento for 35 Years of AIDS I

What is ever truly without a breath of foreshadow?
In the mirror, I was going to tell you the story
of a friend who died, but he was not my friend;
he let me tell you about my friend.
I give my cousin my hand & think:
brushed late nights on paper,
so many candles—white fat columns.
A few days into my last trip home,
in the narrow elevator we shared,
membranes meet, my outside and yours, my cell is an ocean.
In my most recent future, I am young & beautiful & dead—
one joy one rock one fight one song one noun one shirt.
Remember the first house you can remember
with the certainty theologians claim for the salvation worked by Christ.

This poem borrows lines from the first ten poems published on the HIV Here & Now website. Poets include Michael Broder, Julene T. Weaver, Merrill Cole, Sarah Sarai, L. Lamar Wilson, Joan Larkin, Risa Denenberg, Steven Cordova, Eileen R. Tabios, Joseph Osmundson, Danez Smith, Daniel Nester, Jennifer Michael Hecht, and Patrick Donnelly.

Chad Kenney
Blue

Neon pink taxi
door slams
shutting out the heat and humidity
settling in the back seat
starring blankly out the window
the foreign landscape
my temporary home
passes unnoticed—
though absently unaware
through the gap between us
catching just a glimpse
through the rear-view
the driver’s features
almost profile
taut skin over prominent
forms; orbital ridges
nasal folds
temporal bones
cheek and chin
all in sharp relief—
at the wheel the wrist
protrudes
the sleeve
drapes as cloth on a line
veins stand out boldly
on the gripping hand—
aware
not to stare
just glancing back
to see the fuller man –
eyes appraise
examine closely quickly
all available form
at the familiar
brown skin aside—
a flash of recognition
knowing
understanding
reflected in the window
my own features—
we are one

“Oh my wasted face!
Do you scare people on the street
or just me?”

I am more frail
taking great care
not to fall into the street
before a taxi or hurtling
motor bike—
in the dim light
struggling
to see the broken sidewalk
which undulates along
haphazardly inviting a crash—
in a world so young
everywhere
old people are seemingly
left behind by cells
and text messaging—
as the pace is fast
the language sings along
so foreign to my ear
rapid-fire staccato
all lacking comprehensible form—
I am isolated by my age and language
largely ignored by everyone
but the street vendors
who desire little more
then to sell or dismiss me
as not a consumer of their goods—

devalued—
I am silent
I am alone

Chad Kenney received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Washington and finished a graduate degree in social work at Denver University. An AIDS activist since 1985, Chad has lived with HIV and AIDS for 30 years.

This poem appeared in Cornbread, Fish and Collard Greens: Prayers, Poems & Affirmations for People Living with HIV/AIDS (AuthorHouse, 2013), Edited by Khafre Kujichagulia Abif.

Jacob Hardt
Tenderloin Prayer

Sometimes I wonder if heaven can hear me
I whisper my prayers into the sky, breathe the silence
await the word, but the only sound is something like
raindrops, divine tears touching everyone
everywhere sadness echoes through the land,
hate claims the heavy air like an evil, bloody fog
nightmares fill my lungs and the same damned demons
carry me from dreams into the light of day I wake up screaming
Across the rivers of the wealthy your children are dying of thirst
A mutant plague threads a quilt stretching longer than the most ancient rivers
twisting, bending, winding around gnarled victims then crushing them like play dough
the shapes of the shamed shunned undesirable
I am trapped here wearing the 21st century scarlet letters
lost in this maze of places, faces, some sad
some angry or confused, most just gone mad
from fear of things that hurt enough to hide
frightened children beneath the urine stained stairwells, jail cells,
stuck inside these tenderloin hotels. Now I’m wired taut and stung and
here on these tar stained tire-treaded streets people lie in rows
piano wires waiting to be struck for song or glory everybody wants more
Across the river the town crier cries two a.m. and all is well
But he’s another dope fiend! looking to heaven
and I wonder if god listens to prayers from the Tenderloin.

Jacob Hardt was born in Grand Junction, Colorado, but grew up on Santa Monica Boulevard  in LA and Polk Street in San Francisco. Working with the AIDS Office of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Jacob spoke on behalf of the Wedge Program, the first HIV educational program in existence that brought people with AIDS into classrooms (the program ran form 1988 to 2002), and Health Initiatives for Youth (Hi-Fy), an agency that provides health workshops for at-risk youth throughout the San Francisco Bay Area (his poetry and photographs have appeared in Hi-Fy’s Reality Magazine). Jacob currently lives in New York City where he pursues writing, painting, and photography.

This poem is not previously published.

Noah Stetzer
Shadrach

But if you do not worship, you will immediately be cast into the midst of a furnace of blazing fire; and what god is there who can deliver you out of my hands?
—Daniel 3:15

Tied at my mouth, tongue knotted with my tongue,
this stone this knife this bitter herb—older
than Easter with rusty thumbnails digging
into the skin on the sides of my chest—
exhaled stale breath into my lungs, pushing
sand and hot and grit inside inflating
until I hovered halfway between floor
and ceiling my lips blistered with cold sores.

When two doctors cut into my chest—one
on each side, at the same time with scalpels
ignoring my clenched-teeth closed-mouth screaming
as they shoved plastic tubes into the space
outside my lungs reversing the collapse—
the air—cool water—at last, filled me up.

Noah Stetzer is a graduate of The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He has received scholarships from the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBT Writers and from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. He was a winner of 2015 Christopher Hewitt Award for Poetry and the 39th New Millennium Award for Poetry. Noah’s poems have appeared/are forthcoming at Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Nimrod, James Franco Review, The Good Men Project, A&U Magazine, The Collagist, The Volta, Tinderbox, and Phantom Press. Born & raised in Pittsburgh PA, he now lives in the Washington DC area.

This poem is not previously published.

Susan Brennan
Ode to Turquoise

I always forget what that rock is supposed to mean
Blue shock like a bit of ocean lost in the desert

Desert as in once a mountain of rock shaved down
By hundred year storms, dying species, erosive heat

Deserts with their secrets
Bones, cactus fruit, shivery lizards

Even bolts of river that they weep up unexpectedly
Like when your own bodily flood

Seeps down the back of your throat
And you taste it. Part salt. Part sweet.

And what rock is that from?
In the middle of the night

In the middle of a divorce – what treachery –
I hauled heaps of my belongings

To the doors of a church. I left them there and
In one box, my mother’s turquoise jewelry

Thick heavy 1970’s silver flaked with greening blue –
Who can carry everything from one life through to another?

And oh, how she loved those earrings, that necklace
She should have been buried in those charms

Emblems of her desire to see Arizona
To tie a knot with some clipped bloodline.

To meet, she imagined, a wilderness
Of Native Americans hammering out bits of sky

Until chips shuddered down from clouds
And lumped like that in the sand.

How I knelt, lost and lost like a wave
Frozen in its dictated motion

How I held out the little box to the night air
There was a desert in that box

A willful dust, so I laid it down in a bed of grass
At the feet of a stone faced Hail Mary

Susan Brennan is the author of numinous (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and Drunken Oasis (Rattapallax Press, 2011). She curated poetry programming at Wilco’s Solid Sound Music Festival at MASS MoCA, and is staging her poem about George Seurat’s last days.  She has written film scripts, a 1 million hit plus award winning web-series and pitched film stories, premiering at Venice and Tribeca Film Festivals.  See what she’s up to at www.tinycubesofice.com.

This poem is not previously published. In fact, it was written expressly for The HIV Here & Now Project. Thank you, Susan.

Francesca Lia Block
poet l.a.ureate

my lover is los angeles
like this city i haven’t even begun to know all of him
he’s as far away as inglewood from the san fernando
valley where i grew up
burning my skin in the smogged sun
enticing as that fallen star skyline as glamorous untouchable
and yet i’m touching him
curled up naked against the cellphone in his back pocket
“calm down” he tells me “breathe”
cradling my neck in his hand holding me so i can see us
he’s the dodgers he’s a palm tree
he’s the mountains surrounding me
that brutal sun
and a large dark sea waiting at the horizon to engulf
and cool
i get lost on his freeways
his lights blind me doubling my vision
red green and yellow blurred by cataracts in my eyes

i see a rainbow on the 405
a house with room for everyone
there are little children dancing all around us
trees are inexplicably purple
sky defiantly pink
music in the hillsides
and wild animals roaming the periphery
a drunken girl wandering the underworld looking for her orpheus
she’ll find him if it kills her
all she has to guide her
are her words

Francesca Lia Block is the Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award winning author of more than twenty-five books of fiction, non-fiction, short stories and poetry, including Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books and her most recent novels, The Elementals and the psychological thriller Beyond the Pale Motel. Francesca has published stories, poems, essays and interviews in The Los Angeles Times, The L.A. Review of Books, Spin, Nylon, Black Clock, Bullett and Rattle among others. She teaches fiction workshops at UCLA Extension, Antioch University and privately in Los Angeles. Learn more at www.francescaliablock.com.

This poem appeared on Love in the Time of Global Warming.

Rangi McNeil

Three Poems

Sections of the AIDS memorial quilt on display on Governors Island August 2014
Of the crowded ferry’s paying passengers, I was the only person
of discernable color; having the choice of Gustav Mahler or Dolly Parton,
as accompaniment to the thrum of the dun-colored waters

of Upper New York Bay, I chose the simple over the symphonic.
But what was I rightly to do with these (my) narrow hands
in that vast, green field, almost, fully aflower in grief?

My mother wakes & calls for me by my middle
name. She says, I had a piece of paper in my hand

& I twisted it; it smelled like ginger.
Ginger! O, Lamar, you would have loved it.

Her hands are limp & empty. Her heart
could well be wrapped in cotton, its beat is so faint.

If not failure at its most exquisite – a Polish cavalry
assailing German tanks – then what is it, this quickness
reduced to an eternal stillness?

The dead outnumber & litter the living. They mingle,
in daylight & darkness, with the dust atop framed photographs.
The flavor of root vegetables. And those of winter.

She was an agile, swift skiff.
My Excalibur.
My yoke everlasting.

Rangi McNeil is the author of The Missing (Sheep Meadow Press, 2003) and Occasional Poems (The Song Cave, 2015). He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

These poems are not previously published.

Joanna Cleary
blood

my veins are fat with greed
and my body is bloated with
blood, distant, naked like a prayer.
i want, i need, i always begin
while hastily rubbing my skin
until it is rough and concave
and there is nothing left but
rubbery silence that spends
hours stretching itself out
until i hear something tear.
it is a hollow sound filled
with open mouths and pauses.
my blood is childish, always
crying give me, give me, give
me, and curling itself slowly
into confession. my blood is
saturated with scabby words
that ricochet like breath off
bones and belief. my blood is
swollen, waiting. none of us
are immune to hope and i am
no exception. the heart is a
hymn that plays achingly
onward into the murky night
until my skeleton is red like faith
and the raw unanswered sunrise.

Joanna Cleary’s poetry has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Cicada Magazine, Inklette Magazine, Glass Kite Anthology, Parallel Ink, Phosphene Literary Journal, and On the Rusk. She recently became a Poetry Reader for Inklette Magazine. When Joanna is not writing, she can be found reading, eating various forms of chocolate, and, of course, thinking about writing. Joanna currently attends the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

This poem is not previously published.

Don Yorty
5

When I think of all the lovers I’ve had
it’s a blur, I’m afraid, of quantity
but there was quality in quantity
angels found in the common crowd, riffraff
whose amorous wings, far from this fact called earth
took me up in heavenly abstraction
from the orgy really to the action
of orgasm when remembered or birth
or flame or premonition, Adam Eve.
Who can tell us what has been? For love you
have to wait, be as chosen as a Jew.
Love’s not Godot though and fortunately
when I think of Love’s smile softly I can
remember those lips. Whose? I’ve forgotten.

Don Yorty is the author of the poetry collections A Few Swimmers Appear (Philadelphia Eye and Ear, 1980) and Poet Laundromat (Eye and Ear Downtown, 1983) and a novel, What Night Forgets (Herodias, 2000). His work appears in Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project 1966-1991 (Three Rivers Press, 1991). Don has a BA in Latin and Greek from the City University of New York and an MA in TESOL. A poet and garden activist,  Don lives in New York City, works on sonnets, and blogs at donyorty.com.

This poem is not previously published.