Russell Jackson
Power Lines
The procession
runs parallel
with miles
of green corn,
black bird laden
power lines
and dry red
dirt ditches.
Another prodigal
son returned
to the cornfields
from San Francisco
or New York City.
Too young
to be dead,
locals shake
their heads.
Another mother
thinking—
It’s not natural
to bury my child.
Another father
sits at home
with Johnny Walker
boycotting his fairy
son’s funeral.
The obit reads
something about
losing his battle
with cancer,
but whispers
suggest it was
that “gay cancer.”
The pastor
the mother
finally found
is from three
towns over—
Episcopalian.
Her son
will be lowered
in a hole
fifty miles away.
Russell Jackson’s work has appeared in Donut Factory. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and an undergraduate degree from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Jackson is a co-editor of poetry and a blog contributor at South 85. He lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Today’s poem once again addresses HIV without mentioning HIV. Rather, it refers to the funeral of a young gay man who died of AIDS (and it refers to “gay cancer,” a term used to refer to Kaposi’s sarcoma before HIV was identified as the causative agent of AIDS). Write a poem about HIV that does not mention HIV but that refers to a defining moment—a positive HIV test result, a routine blood draw for lab work, an opportunistic infection, an AIDS diagnosis, disclosing one’s HIV status to a friend, family member, or intimate partner, going on a date with a person who does not know one’s HIV status yet, etc. If you are a person with HIV, of course you are equipped to write such poems from your own experience. But even if you are person without HIV, you can imagine something analogous in your own life. Two poems from the HIV Here & Now archives that play with euphemisms for HIV are “Becoming Turquoise” by Roberto Santiago and “Virginia is for Lovers” by Nicole Sealey.