In his latest book of poetry, 13th Balloon, author Mark Bibbins remembers the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, and offers an intensely personal elegy for the loves and losses of his generation. The book-length poem was released in February 2020, and is excerpted here courtesy of Copper Canyon Press. — Public Seminar
From 13th Balloon
What might anyone have made
of you and me as babies
born into the mess and ferment
of the late 1960s
Working-class babies born to parents
who themselves were babies
during World War II
Were they worried already
about Vietnam or about some other
monstrous hand that would grab us
from our cribs by our feet
and throw us
into the war that would be
the war after that
They could not have known
that our war because everyone
lands in one
would be with a virus or that one
of the hands that failed to close
quickly or tightly enough around
it to stop it from killing you
would also belong to the state
At the beginning of every war
every baby is replaced
with a picture of a baby
In every eclipse the sun
is replaced with an x-ray of the sun
///
What is it they say about water
something about it seeking itself
and how did jokes like this one move
so quickly through the world in 1983
What’s the hardest thing about having AIDS
Convincing your parents you’re Haitian
Did they spew out of fax machines
were they blurted over happy-hour beers
by somebody’s uncle
who worked for the state or by another’s
brother who worked in a garage
their jokes attaching themselves like leeches
to the swollen host of suffering
ugly but not useless
in order that we might endure
whatever side of suffering we’re on
What does GAY stand for
Got AIDS Yet
How many other acronyms crossed the membrane
that separated my rural high school
from the rest of the world and entered
the gym one afternoon
filling it like a syringe Which boys
among us had just been watching
our friends in the showers
imagining their bodies
sliding against our own
like water seeking our own water
Which boys then saw the word aids
on the blood-filled test tube
on the cover of Newsweek
while other boys hooted and passed
the magazine around the locker room
Its own level that’s what water seeks
and which of these boys
was it only me which of us
among any of these boys thought
now I know now I know how
I’m going to die
///
Mark Bibbins is the author of four books of poems, including 13th Balloon (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and teaches in the graduate writing program at The New School. @markbibbins From 13th Balloon, copyright 2020 by Mark Bibbins, used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.
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