Michael Broder
Triolet for Bed-Stuy
While these boys on Grindr look for generous men,
their cousins spit “faggot” in the street as you pass them.
Taste the champagne piss and caviar semen
of the boy you find on Grindr looking for generous men.
Smell of weed strengthens as the shadows darken,
as you touch the soft warm lining of his rectum.
Is that your bae on Grindr looking for generous men?
Do you kick faggots in the street when you pass them?
Author’s / Editor’s Note: I did not have any submissions I felt comfortable posting today. And the intention of this project is to feature work written within the past 24 hours or as soon as possible thereafter—it’s more a project about generating new poems than revising them or perfecting them. And I’ve been intrigued by the triolets written by HIV Here & Now contributors over the years. I’ve never written a triolet. So I just wrote the one above. It reflects my own experience living in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, which has among the highest incidence and prevalence of HIV anywhere in the US or, for that matter, in the world. (Perhaps I should note that Grindr is a queer hookup app; “generous” is used to refer to men who will pay for sex; and “bae” is a term for boyfriend that was first used by young black gay men but is now used by younger queer people more widely.)
Michael Broder is the author of 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.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Today’s poem does not mention HIV. Instead, it talks about some of the social conditions surrounding HIV, including risky sex, sex for money, drug use, and antigay violence. Write a poem that implies HIV without mentioning it or referring to it directly.