bum rush the virus

So I’ve been traveling with these poems again, reading about sex and pussy and HIV in airports and through jetlag. I’m in D.C. now and the poems from Bum Rush take on a mind of their own. The air is thick here, and I don’t just mean humidity. I’m thinking and writing a lot about how location plays such a huge role in our reading, how location and time and contemporary influences change the way we understand a poet, take them to heart or push them away, branded.

I can’t stop reading “13” on page 126 in Bum Rush. Can’t Stop Reading It. This is a simple poem on the surface, its lower-cased letters and short form allowing all kinds of access, no matter where you start reading. I tried looking up when this poem was written to get a better sense of the political (and medical) climate in which it was produced, but no dice. The permissions in the back of the book say it hasn’t been printed before anywhere (perhaps self-published?), which is also interesting. The ease of access into this poem makes me wonder why this is the only place the poem is accessed. Why this story hasn’t been told other places. How many stories like this haven’t been told, ever.

The repetition is what keeps this poem from feeling like it’s fallen short. The repetition of “you cannot” and “he is” offsets the telling in this poem. We are told what we can and cannot do, what could or could not happen, over and over again. You cannot fall in love, it could come back, you could be hit by a taxi, he could be alive for another thirteen years.

The climax of the poem happens right on schedule, about halfway through. We zero in on the man with whom one “cannot fall in love,” see his tattoos, the way he moves. He is glorified here, in a healthy way, I think. He is made human, and this humanness is exceptional to his virus. I find it interesting that there are comparisons made between the Sistine Chapel and skin, between cloth and skin. The Sistine Chapel invokes the religious elite (the pope), and we all know what the religious elite have to say about HIV and the people who get it. The next analogy of this man burning through the speaker’s skin is equally interesting. HIV is often called “viral shrapnel,” simply because the virus imbeds in various locations within the body to set up DNA camps and start producing imposters. The line breaks at “burns like shrapnel,” allowing us to see that, in comparison to the Sistine Chapel, perhaps this man is burning or will burn in sin. When connected with the following line, “burns like shrapnel / through threads of my skin,” invokes dual meanings for me. I read these two lines as not only a visceral, physical reaction/attraction to this man, but also a moment of contact. I read this line as a safe sex line, as contact between lovers that is intense, but safe because it is felt through the skin.

That reading feels like a bit of stretch until the poem continues and there’s a shift. We find out the speaker had cancer and is in remission, that her life is equally as volatile in terms of longevity. The speaker pushes that realization to the max, saying even life can be fatal (and therefore, even life can be in remission, a state I think she’s trying to avoid by rationalizing being with this man despite his diagnosis). The poem ends uncertainly for sure, but with a realization that you only live once and that this man may or may not be worth taking a chance on. We’ve moved forward from the beginning of the poem, we’ve made progress. She sees him as more human than disease, I think.

On a more macro level, the poem is called “13.” As a poet who always writes out numbers in word form in poems (unless I want them to be taken as numbers/statistics), I wonder immediately where the intention of this choice lies. Interestingly (is that a word?) the number 13 is really significant when it comes to HIV. Statistics of folks infected with HIV are often tallied from ages 13 and up, as that has become the new national average of when young folks begin sexual contact (and they are officially “teenagers”). This makes me really curious as to when the poem was written because it holds much more power as a poem written in the last five years than one written ten years ago. Obviously this can’t be true because the book was published in 2001, but still. Cocktails are often given on 13-week schedules, life expectancy delivered in 13-year increments. Maybe all of this is coincidence. The number thirteen holds a lot of power in luck or fate, historically. Anybody else got a read on that?

Also, not totally unrelated to this poem, I’m questioning why there aren’t more queer writers represented in this book. Especially on an issue like HIV. Or sex. Or politics. Or love. Or Nature. Or whatever. Am I overlooking something?

ps: i hope somebody else writes about "extremes aint my thing as salaam alaikum" and "a poem for you" or else i might have to come back and do it. xo