Julene Tripp Weaver
You Ask That Question: Isn’t AIDS Over?
No simple answer I speak from my heart with deep intuition like grass between my toes on a hot summer day quiet lying in a field gazing at a blue sky with Columbus clouds a stalk of wheat sweet against my teeth this earth I love. A promise to travel light to not need wealth or glory to make a soft impact, to know beauty on our worst or best day without makeup or stockings. The raw material a day gone right with a garden to pick vegetables to chop and a world filled with virtue no conclusions to rush to no easy answers no cure. No, it’s not over. But, you ask, everyone’s okay now, right? I mean, people can live a full life. Yes, if you must end what is a much longer conversation, it is well enough for some but everything is not right. Back to my original point there are no simple answers but let us watch a movie escape into a video with its resolvable problems. I will keep on living with this disease stable, while we talk and you do not have it in your body we assume, and I understand you must pace yourself like I did when I learned there is so much to know but little we understand.
Julene Tripp Weaver is the author of a chapbook and two full-length collections. Her latest, Truth Be Bold: Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS (Finishing Line Press, 2017), was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction, and won the Bisexual Book Award for the Best Bisexual Poetry Book, as well as four Human Relations Indie Book Awards. Her work is online at The Seattle Review of Books, Voices in the Wind, Antinarrative Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, MadSwirl, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice. Weaver is a psychotherapist in Seattle, WA. You can find more of her writing at julenetrippweaver.com.
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