His name was Celeste. We molded like wax.
It was merely a matter of vanishing; 
and after, I felt the long blossom and hush 
of smoke uncoiling. But then, in a whisper 
of such sweetness, he told me he had HIV.

I fell through reflections and landed 
before I was born. It was 1992. My mother 
stood weeping over her brother. He lay 
in a hospital bed dying from AIDS.
Perhaps, he was so pumped full of morphine
he couldn’t feel his necrosis; perhaps, his skin 
flaked like old paint when the nurses changed his gown.

My mother only mentions him after drinking, 
tells me how sarcoma mottled his face, how gauze
was shoved in his wounds to absorb the blood
that killed him. He died alone in that hospital,
she said. He was twenty-seven, body so whittled
they had a closed casket. 
					       In my room, 
an unopened condom lay on my nightstand. 
I had missed a call from my mother. 
Celeste had left. I sat on the edge of my bed
as night bled darker, as rain began to fall
like thousands of needles. I got up,
went to shower, watched as water trickled
down the drain, felt soap sting a fresh cut.

Alexander Lazarus Wolff‘s writing appears online in The Best American Poetry website, Poets.org, the North American Review, Cherry Tree, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. A recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize, he teaches at the University of Houston where he is the Inprint MD Anderson Foundation Fellow and assistant poetry editor for Gulf Coast. You can read more of his work at www.alexanderlazaruswolff.com.

Appears In

Cagibi Issue 25