after two strokes
with her hands over her head
raised to the sky god
Dancing.
A TALE OF TWO PANDEMICS
The headline in yesterday’s news blared A Tale of Two Pandemics
Shocking Inequities in the Healthcare System
what got me was use of words shocking and two
Those of us who lived through through the 1980s early ’90s AIDS crisis already knew about the existence of two New Yorks
Two twenty thirty forty fifty Americas maybe more
Depending on age race class citizenship status
Entirely different systems for those who aren’t white straight
middle class
Those of us who saw our brothers friends sisters die at the hands of system that shunned
Refused to treat
Threw away the unwanted
Still can’t forget a gay friend waiting
For Medicaid to treat HIV
He got sicker and sicker.
I asked why Medicaid took so long
He said they’re waiting to see if I’ll die first
That wasn’t the America I learned about in elementary school
I was instructed to put my hand over heart
and salute
That wasn’t the free America we sang of
People who are LGBTQIA already know there are two Americas
A doctor who kept forcing me to take a pregnancy test
Even after I insisted at the time
I only have sex with women
I saw his scorn/still a test
He made me pay for
And those women who were forcibly sterilized
Had wombs their life force taken
Left dry barren by doctors
who never even stopped to explain
Felt entitled to take scar women’s bodies
Breasts cut off no options or consolation given
Women who aren’t rich and white already know invisible lines you can’t cross
With no insurance or Medicaid
Forced into black markets for drugs
A land of botched care botched procedures
Black people already know
separate doors
separate entrances
treatments
options
Existing long after Jim Crow
And I have kept waiting for this moment
This time of a medical #MeToo
When those who’ve suffered from botched procedures and the indignities
Step out from shadows
Speak and name the atrocities committed
medical malpractice
I won’t blame all doctors
some are good
just middlemen like so many in a broken system doing what they can
and I’m grateful for the good ones in this pandemic risking
their own lives
But the image of medical researchers that we see in movies and on television who understand a complex problem
pour through medical books and science journals
Stay up all night burning midnight oil to find a cure
Who weep with concern
are mostly false
rare like ones who find cures
and refuse to patent
or personally profit
Those days have become myth
what’s replaced them are businessmen
wanting status amongst peers
entry to country clubs and power
Gaslighters hustlers actors like Trump
There is a doctor at Mount Sinai
star of his field
charged with drugging and raping his patients
No one believed til it was proven
his victims
were only Black women
the rest he left alone.
I CAN’T BREATHE
I suppose I should place them under separate files
Both died from different circumstances kind of, one from HIV/AIDS and possibly not having taken his medicines
the other from COVID-19 coupled with
complications from an underlying HIV status
In each case their deaths may have been preventable if one had taken his meds and the hospital had thought to treat the other
instead of sending him home saying, He wasn’t sick enough
he died a few days later
They were both mountains of men
dark Black beautiful gay men
both more than six feet tall fierce and way ahead of their time
One’s drag persona was Wonder Woman and the other started a Black fashion magazine
He also liked poetry
They both knew each other from the same club scene we all grew up in
When I was working the door at a club one frequented
He would always say to me, “Haven’t they figured out you’re a star yet?”
And years ago bartending with the other when I complained about certain people and treatment he said, “Sounds like it’s time for you to clean house.”
Both I know were proud of me the poet star stayed true to my roots
I guess what stands out to me is that they both were
gay Black mountains of men
Cut down
Felled too early
And it makes me think the biggest and blackest are almost always more vulnerable
My white friend speculates why the doctors sent one home
If he had enough antibodies
Did they not know his HIV status
She approaches it rationally
removed from race as if there were any rational for sending him home
Still she credits the doctors for thinking it through
But I speculate they saw a big Black man before them
Maybe they couldn’t imagine him weak
Maybe because of his size color class they imagined him strong
said he’s okay
Which happened to me so many times
Once when I’d been hospitalized at the same time as a white girl
she had pig-tails
we had the same thing but I saw how tenderly they treated her
Or knowing so many times in the medical system I would never have been treated so terribly if I had had a man with me
Or if I were white and entitled enough to sue
Both deaths could have been prevented both were almost first to fall in this season of death
But it reminds me of what I said after Eric Garner a large Black man was strangled to death over some cigarettes
Six cops took him down
His famous last words were I can’t breathe
and now George Floyd
so if we are always the threat
To whom or where do we turn for protection?
WHY I CLING TO FLOWERS
I was trying to think of what it means
why I keep painting and posting flowers and trees in the pandemic
I know they’re beautiful
And they assert amidst any chaos and confusion
Life on the planet
Every spring
Despite climate change every natural disaster
Purple crocus push up out of the ground determined
I’m fascinated by their colors striped purple violet and white
Red blue and yellow
I love that some humans place wire nets over them to protect their growth
so they don’t get trampled on
I sometimes think of Brooklyn streets as fashion runways
All the flowers model for humans trying to look their best
in various poses showing off their blooms
Each trying to outdo the other with fabulousness
Like Black women on Easter
wearing an array of hats
I love pink purple magenta magnolia blossoms
How each bulb occupies a separate branch looking and pointing to the sky like an elegant candelabra
I love the daffodils red orange yellow faces
and one daffodil that I pass each
