Poem For An Anniversary

I wrote “Poem For An Anniversary” in February 2021 during an organizing session with the What Would An HIV Doula Do? collective as we began planning what would eventually become AIDS IS / AIDS AIN’T 40—a series of social actions intended to trouble the dominant narratives & notions of “timelines” with regards to AIDS in the United States. You can read more about that project at the link, but here is some insight from the project page as to what part my poem plays:

AIDS IS / AIDS AIN’T 40 PARTIES are ever-unfolding events hosted by members of What Would An HIV Doula Do?.

The parties are happening in public, in private, online, offline, in groups of various sizes, including one on one or even just one, between April and June 2021.

For us, party is a process, an offering, and a way of practicing how AIDS is and ain’t 40. Our parties originate from Constantine Jones’ “Poem For An Anniversary,” that serves as a shared location from which all the parties emerge and take form. Like the poem, the parties will trouble linear ideas of time, comment on normative ways the history of AIDS often gets told in the US, and a initiate the bringing together of people together to celebrate or commemorate—over and over again—in and about time and AIDS.

“Poem For An Anniversary” is a document attempting to process our impulse to commemorate not just AIDS but anything, and to ask why, culturally, we feel obligated to mark time like this—with holidays, birthdays, memorials etc. In framing this poem as an invitation for others to plan their own anniversary parties, we hoped to offer an outlet for folks to articulate how they would like to celebrate or be celebrated; to express their own care and their desire to be cared for in return; to provide the space, permission, or even excuse we all may secretly be looking for, especially when we feel embarrassed or hesitant about making that ask.

While some of the parties documented in the lines of the poem center AIDS deliberately, others don’t necessarily have an obvious or direct connection to AIDS at all. We hope that each party, like the poem, can be another act of dissolving the confines of linear / historical time in favor of a more expansive experience of any given moment. Let’s say that all anniversaries are arbitrary, and no celebration needs a reason. Let’s say that absolutely everything is worthy of commemoration. Let’s say that a party, then, is a political act—a call to activation of joy, rather than sorrow, as a radical communal activity.

Will you come to the party every time? You know you are always invited.

You can interact with the poem-as-party-index by following the link in this line. You can visit the event page for my own Poem / Party For You at this link. You can also read more about our process interrogating the nature of anniversaries at this piece published in The Body. Finally, you are invited to read the poem as handwritten by myself on a roll of receipt paper in the gallery below. However you engage, here is Poem For An Anniversary in its entirety.