Poem / Party For You

Everyone is invited

The party:

My birthday is June 19th & to celebrate my 29th birthday I want to extend an invitation for people to write their own poems for: who knows! A place, a time, a feeling, a memory, a circumstance, a person, a color etc. Twist your head around. Where do you receive love? Give a poem back to whatever that may be.

Are you worried that you're "Not A Poet" & therefore can't come? At this party, everyone is a poet & everything is worth falling in love with. What's a poet anyway if not someone who wants to give a feeling. Yr poem can be 2 lines or 29 pages for all I care. Just love something hard & do language to it.

No RSVP: just email me a poem before June 19th at storiesandnoise@gmail.com

The after-party:

I will compile all the poems sent to me in a nice PDF published under a Creative Commons license for anyone to download free of charge—something warm to keep & return to. A kind of party favor in cyberspace.

Don’t want your poem included in the PDF but still wanna participate? Just make that known in the email when you send yr poem along! I still want to read yr poems :)

Some context:

AIDS IS / AIDS AIN’T 40 PARTIES are ever-unfolding events hosted by members of What Would an HIV Doula Do? as part of the AIDS IS / AIDS AIN'T 40 series examining and troubling the numerous ways HIV gets historicized, ignored and shared in contemporary culture.

Each party emerges out of a line of my Poem for an Anniversary, which is itself a part of my ongoing project, Poem For You.

Poem / Party For You is based on line 29: "Nobody really knows what for."