Category Archives: Online Projects

Na(HIV)PoWriMo ± April 8, 2017

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Darius Stewart
“Tests Have Proven This Is Not a False Positive”

in this diagnosis we don’t name names
he is he & she is she      period              do not disturb

the status quo  he is a person of color             so is she
we all are some shade of off-white

if not it’s best not to incite confusion
suggesting that options for race or ethnicity matter

that reasons to have Hispanic / non-Hispanic
as option on medical forms matters    in fact

there are no options for categorical characteristics that matter
including religious beliefs        sexual orientation

etcetera should be the only given box available
anything otherwise is a private affiliation

best kept tight-lipped   as in mother’s maiden name
make & model of first car       date we lost our virginity

breed of favorite pet    probable city to be exiled
in other words what we use to establish

password protection    secure tax information
bank balances              any interior knowledge

to bring comfort so we can rest easy at night
in light of aforementioned diagnosis

we must use in order to survive the future
point blank     period

 

Darius Stewart is author of The Terribly Beautiful (Main Street Rag, 2006) and Sotto Voce (Main Street Rag 2008), each an Editor’s Choice Selection, and The Ghost the Night Becomes (2014), winner of the 2013 Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. His work has appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Callaloo, Meridian, Chelsea Station Magazine, and the Good Men Project, among others. He holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where he was a James A. Michener Fellow in poetry. He presently tends bar at an award-winning seafood house in Knoxville, TN, where he lives somewhat comfortably with his dog, Fry. In Fall 2017, he will begin the MFA program in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Iowa.

 

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Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books (HIV Here & Now is a project of Indolent Books).

Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Write a poem about “viral load” (the amount of HIV in a sample of blood). Consider the lived reality and poetic potential in terms like “undetectable” and “viral suppression.” Work with these concepts either from your actual first-person perspective, the perspective of a first-person persona, or in the second or third person. For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out this page on viral load.

What Rough Beast | Poem for April 7, 2017

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Ashleigh Allen
Seems to be the nature of it

Midnight never used to fall apart like this. On balconies in dissimilar neighbourhoods people are bored with the morning’s extravagance and blanket the trains with inner plea. Citizens and animals are sad and lonely like you and count with their ruined fingers. Days sit shawled next to fugitive rivers. Forgotten charm of seasides for a moment, the Minister of Health advises with muddled famous words, the living room is a gift shop meant to repel the sadness of friends. Someone’s sting distinguishes our religious aptitude. You can’t smell the blood rust on the TV, the gay song at sea. Inadequately prepared for the life you crave; fastened to an apology, somebody pays for the inconvenience of falling in love on a bridge, at a bus stop, in your sleep, where you have sublime aspirations for marine. The comprehensive experience of discomfort or defeat cracking open your chest, like a walnut, bare and resembling a chicken cavity with the oyster sought after and devoured first.

Years ago your father’s hands offered the essentials with a new moon crawling up behind him. Back then there was room for you in the sky. On Boogie Street there’s a hospital where you cure an illusion. The wisdom of the path isn’t on the map, but there’s nourishment lying in bed with someone new who’s lipstick chic and handsome. There’s longing, there’s a bitter standard, and we suffer from the inability to close our mouths when not even famished. Go about collecting knives and other consistencies. You dislike the fashionable drugs and have learnt to fondle tricks that clear rooms, to recover you twist up and into yourself like a yo-yo. There’s the discipline of sleep, turning an unlatched doorknob, the widest sense of a life in a movie theatre reporting back to the interior reeking of the disorder of the streets, then going overboard when the deck comes up spades not hearts. Stumble over German verbs and the last decade, build a dining hall, clear the dirge, and gather sticks for striking. Revenge the outbursts by the canal; the boats beside where you fell in love are the only things that gather nowadays. When you pull your hair back, it breaks away. Days separate and recede. They aren’t in order anymore. Just last week, you lived three Thursdays in a row. Chickens, saints, and the sun rise without fat. You leave half of everything you touch behind. It’s impersonal affection on the floor; altruistic palms wave in the trees, neglected sisters swat and volley the sky, as hands become rackets. You’re overlooked by formal tenderness. You’re broken open and off. The search was what you were seeing, grateful and relaxed, resolute and dark though late. This life makes you double trouble, big city heart leave, craving coast or cavern. It’s ultimately you and these little things that reveal your penchant for prayer, your capacity to steer.

 

Ashleigh Allen‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Contemporary Verse 2, Tethered by Letters, The Literary Review, and the Best American Poetry blog. Her essay on Apollinaire’s “Zone” appeared in The Operating System. She holds and MFA from The New School and has taught a variety of writing courses at colleges and community centers in New York City and Toronto since 2010.

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Na(HIV)PoWriMo ± April 7, 2017

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Sam Avrett
To the death

Greeks and Trojans fought to the death.
Vicious nasty battles on the Aegean,
Broken bones, bloody wounds, shouts of pain.

Those wars are remembered in smooth white marble.
Simple stories with a nice clean arc.

Memory protects us, clears the ugliness, trims the thorns of trauma.
What it felt like to fall, the pain of the bone break, the struggle to stay alive,
somehow we only remember the outlines.

A memorial is dedicated in New York to the plague years. It was.
A bad time, too many ambulances in the night, too many people we never knew.

Idealized pure lines, simple and grand.
The pain barely shows through.

 

 

Sam Avrett works with The Fremont Center, a collective of HIV program and policy consultants who support good grant making, program management, and policy and strategy development for health and human rights.  Sam is also a member of the International Committee of the Netherlands organization Stop AIDS Now!, a Board member of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC), and a volunteer emergency medical technician on an ambulance in his home town of Fremont, New York. Prior to becoming a consultant in 1999, Sam was a co-founder and first Executive Director of AVAC and before that worked with Gay Men’s Health Crisis, New York Blood Center, and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.

SUBMIT to Na(HIV)PoWriMo via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of HIV Here & Now, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

We invite you to join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books (HIV Here & Now is a project of Indolent Books).

Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Write a poem about starting antiretroviral therapy (HIV meds) in 2017, either from your actual first-person perspective, the perspective of a first-person persona, or in the second or third person. For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out this page on the basics of HIV treatment.

What Rough Beast | Poem for April 6, 2017

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Laura Winkelspecht
Meanwhile in the Heartland

Rural electrification
brought longer days
game shows
Rush Limbaugh,
but it didn’t stop
the highway bypass
the mill from closing,
or the resentment
spreading like rust.

 

Laura Winkelspecht‘s work has appeared in Clementine Poetry Journal, NEAT, and One Sentence Poems, among others. She is a poet and writer from Wisconsin who writes with the hope of finding some lightning among the lightning bugs. Follow her on Twitter @lwinkelspecht.

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If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

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Na(HIV)PoWriMo ± April 6, 2017

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Roger Ian Rosen
Gary, I Don’t Remember

He was so thin. No, skinny.
Too skinny.
Funny. And wonderful in a way that I didn’t understand
That I understood.
Then he was gone.
Replaced by a fat guy.
They were very different.
But then not.

I have written his death with
Wisps of cancerred glitter.
Disco balls, decapitated and lying in
Slivers at his bare feet.
I have seen him pulled under,
Drowned in a sequin of shimmering quicksand.

What happened? I don’t know.
My fictions are likely kinder
Than the splintery hands and serrated fingers
That reached through him,
Ripping him away in chunks.
1981…2? wasn’t kind.
But I don’t know.

I never knew
Why he disappeared.
I remember him
Sitting. Head down. Conserving.
Or maybe that’s another fiction. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t remember.

I know I didn’t know.
But he was wonderful in a way that
I didn’t understand
That I understood.

It wasn’t until high school.
I asked my mother,
“What ever happened to xxxx?”
I didn’t remember his name. I had to look it up. Had to find the program from the show from a
theater long gone. Age-burnt and separating at the creases. Visible fibers stretched thin.
Too thin.
Gary.
I didn’t remember.

He got sick.
They’d never told me.
He was wonderful in a way that
I didn’t understand
That I understood.

 

Roger Ian Rosen writes so that his husband might ever experience silence. He is author of Backdoor Bingo (a melding of gay pulp fiction and social media ~ over-the-top camp, sex, and silliness…with audience participation!), which is unfurling on Instagram #backdoorbingo (_roger0nimo_ on Instagram and @Rogeronimo_com on Twitter) even as we speak. Roger is currently working towards a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College in Vermont. (Editor’s note: I could not help myself from posting a link to this video of Roger at work/play.)

SUBMIT to Na(HIV)PoWriMo via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of HIV Here & Now, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

We invite you to join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books (HIV Here & Now is a project of Indolent Books).

Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Write a poem about being on PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis against HIV infection) in 2017, either from your actual first-person perspective, the perspective of a first-person persona, or in the second or third person. For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out this page on PrEP.

 

Na(HIV)PoWriMo ± April 5, 2017

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Laura Secord
As Far as Heart Goes (V)

When she resurrects to our awe,
and they pronounce her fit to leave,
she picks Jamal up from school, grouts tile,
paints the hall, and teaches him to read.

Under the starry ceiling
she stenciled, she tells him,
God, who made the world, promised she’d live
till Jamal could manage without her,
and one day they’d meet again.

She lasts till spring, when doctors
attempt to resurrect her, giving chest
compressions once again, but none has strength
enough to mend her warrior’s heart.

 

Laura Secord‘s poems have appeared in the Birmingham Weekly, A&U Magazine, The Southern Women’s Review, PoemMemoirStory and Passager. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada College and has been an offset printer, union organizer, health care activist, teacher, and a sex-educator. For thirty years, she combined the life of a writer and performer with a career as a Nurse Practitioner in HIV care. She is the co-founder of Birmingham’s Sister City Spoken Word Collective.

SUBMIT to Na(HIV)PoWriMo via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of HIV Here & Now, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

We invite you to join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books (HIV Here & Now is a project of Indolent Books).

Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Write a poem about receiving the news of a NEGATIVE HIV TEST in 2017. Write a poem that captures that sense of relief combined with that sense of “What if…?” and that sense of “There but for the grace…” or whatever you think it would mean for you or for a person you imagine yourself to be. For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out this page on testing negative for HIV.

What Rough Beast | Poem for April 5, 2017

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Matty Layne Glasgow
To the President of the Ames Community School Board

who said this proposal is just a political statement,
who said they will call this district a sanctuary,

& we sang education is a kind of refuge,
& we sang knowledge is a stained-glass window,

so let the sun shine that colored light on all our children,
& if they come for one of them, let them come for us all.

You see, I’m learning that a school board proposal can be
like a poem in some ways, because I’ve known men

who’d say this poem is just a political statement, too.
& they are white & straight & cis-gendered, like you,

& they tell us this is not the time or the place,
& they tell us art is no political animal, to put our fangs away.

& it’s kind of funny how you all use the word political
when it’s not about your child, & then you go on talking

about a multimillion-dollar natatorium years in the making,
but I’ve walked into a classroom, eyes fixed on an empty desk

that drowns in all that colored light, & I imagine
how they came for that child in the night, or the mother,

or the father, but we will never know. Have you heard
of America’s disappeared, the students we never see again?

This poem is for them. & it might be a political song,
but we will sing it through our fangs No subpoena? No dice, ICE.

& it will echo through those hollow desks, over stained-glass
broken in every color, & in that empty, empty light.

 

Matty Layne Glasgow is a queer pixie of a poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals here and there, including The Blueshift Journal, WILDNESS Journal, Rust+Moth, Flyway, HIV Here & Now, & The New Verse News. He is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State university, where he serves as the Poetry Editor for Flyway and teaches social justice rhetorics.

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If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

We invite you to join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books.

What Rough Beast | Poem for April 4, 2017

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Elizabeth Macklin
The Virtues of Red Dragon–Hard

Shanghai Mahjongg@coastclick.com

No language for a minute, no language at all for a minute
or minutes on end—no trope of any kind! That goes for any
language—any language at all.

Just sight—by sight—when you sit back, suspense or sadness, wordless,
and like Dream–Very Easy and Towers–Easy and in Cloud–Normal
there in Red Dragon–Hard are the Flowers and Winds, the Winds

and the Seasons. Remembering glancingly—that’s what the drug’s for.
I don’t like to think what we’re thinking, think what I’m thinking
as the reefs bleach, fact of the matter.

I’m glad I went out tonight and ran into a philosopher.
You’ve gone and you’ve got some done, he said. So enough for now.
Why not scout out priorities in Red Dragon–Hard—

once learned, it’s second nature? But don’t believe me.
The new game is always a new game, I thought. Nothing’s the same
as it was. But there with the tiles on the table—

Circular, Bamboo, Character—no language needed.
And the new algorithms make change—a relief!
Resisting the easy “Sad!” Finally, the score is immaterial.

But I’m here resisting every task I was given, I said.
Despite algorithms, you cannot predict the future, he answered.
All you need to do this minute is resist easy.

Thich Nhat Hahn was at peace in wartime, if only for minutes.
Suffering’s not enough, he suggested. We don’t need
to go to China to enjoy the blue sky.

Sovereignty over ourselves, he called it.
Not drowned in forgetfulness.
Finally, whatever the score was was immaterial.

And there’s no way to replay the game.
You can’t get bored, since it never repeats.
No way to replay a game.

I said I heard they did it just like this on the prairie,
back when teamsters had teams, with their round of days.
And that made this day different.

But the perfect sadness of why they are now unable
to even conceive, can’t stand to believe, and cling
to the same damned previous game forever.

Of course they blame the vaccine,
pushed by that gene in the air
to avert—turn away—what could help them.

But now: Flowers Any, you’re blessedly left with patchwork
to look at—a ship, blue-violet Sparrows for sails. The whole
unfortunate layout. But now you get to say the, at least.

It’s a definite article, and it’s the!
After the hours of calling unlimited minutes—
It’s was, and the crowd are going wild!

Hardy in Python, Roth on Louis—
it could work in the streets, if bottled:
just do the best you can with what you have.

 

Elizabeth Macklin is the author of the poetry collections You’ve Just Been Told (Norton, 2000) and A Woman Kneeling in the Big City (Norton, 1992). She translated the Basque poet Kirmen Uribe’s Bitartean Heldu Eskutik (Meanwhile Take My Hand), published by Graywolf in 2007. Her work has appeared in The Nation, New England Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and The Yale Review, among others. Her awards include the Ingram Merrill poetry prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and a PEN Translation Fund Grant from PEN American Center.

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Na(HIV)PoWriMo ± April 4, 2017

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Kristina England
Painting the Early 1980s

Lesions emerge
into stained tailspin.
Red drowns
art pieces within.

Hogwash men blame homosexuals,
scrawl on billboards,
radio transmit own perpetual
lies into line-blurred

facts. Society trusts, gets sick,
abstracted disease progresses
into collateral chaos epidemic.
Hogwash men realize own mess,

take action. No apologies given.
Leave canvas-cracked skin.

 

Kristina England‘s poems have appeared in New Verse News, Silver Birch Press, and Topology. She lives in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she is a writer and photographer. Follow her at facebook.com/kristinadengland.

SUBMIT to Na(HIV)PoWriMo via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of HIV Here & Now, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

We invite you to join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books (HIV Here & Now is a project of Indolent Books).

Here is today’s prompt

(optional as always)

Write a poem about receiving the news of a positive HIV test in 2017. For some information that might help your poetic process on this topic, check out this page on being newly diagnosed with HIV.

What Rough Beast | Poem for April 3, 2017

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Lisa DeSiro
Hashtag Millennial

At night the sky was white and full of crows
instead of stars and each beak offered a shiny prize.

They goaded:
Buy a scratch ticket. Can’t win if you don’t play.

Those lucky enough to pluck one
turned into loons and flew underwater.

We carried buckets bare-knuckled,
sanitized our hands.

Before masturbating we turned the family photos
face-down on the bureau.

They urged: Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

The weather kept getting weirder until
the seasons got scrambled.

We were all thumbs on our dumb phones
texting everything verbatim.

LOL OMG WTF TTYS
They twittered:

This event occurs in the past.
Replies are no longer required.

 

Lisa DeSiro is the author of the chapbook Grief Dreams (White Knuckle Press, June 2017). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Commonthought, Friends Journal, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and other journals.  Along with her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, Lisa has degrees from Binghamton University, Boston Conservatory, and Longy School of Music. She works as a production and editorial assistant for C.P.E. Bach: The Complete Works and is an accomplished pianist.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.