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.
Photo © Victoria Manzoli. All rights reserved. 
