rashadsays

The media is only perpetuating ignorance and inciting false hope by blowing up with articles and stories regarding the first person being “cured” of HIV.

Here are the facts:

1. The person in question is a toddler. A baby girl. She was infected by her HIV-positive mother, who didn’t receive the proper, recommended care for her condition during gestation. 
2. She wasn’t cured. She was functionally cured. And that, in itself, was a medical fluke — not a marvel. More on that below.
3. She was administered a highly concentrated cocktail of three antiretroviral drugs within her first 30 hours outside of the womb. Before the HIV lab test results even came back. 
4. Two tests were done an hour apart from each other shortly after birth, and the baby was positive, but with a fairly low reading of 20,000 copies per milliliter (c/mL) of HIV RNA. But the fact that she tested positive so early in life was indicative of the time of her infection: likely to have been in the womb, rather than during delivery.
5. Her atypical treatment regimen was prescribed in an effort to suppress the virus before it progressed to tissue/cells colloquially referred to as viral reservoirs…anatomical areas where latent viral infections are at the peak of their persistence. 
6. 2.5 years later, the anonymous baby girl tested HIV “negative” — due the fact that her viral traces are so low, they can’t be picked up by standard clinical tests. She’s been off treatment for over eight months. This is the definition of a functional cure. 
7. Researchers as well as the virologist who treated her made it a point to stress that her current state is largely attributed to the intensity and the timing of the treatment — in absence of prophylactic measures.
8. This is the second reported case of an HIV “cure.” In 2007 a man famously known as the “Berlin patient,” Mr. Timothy Brown garnered the media’s attention. He was battling both Leukemia and HIV, when he received a bone marrow transplant to treat the latter. The bone marrow he received was from a person with an HIV-resistent mutation, one only found in 1% of the caucasian population. And thus, he is now HIV-free.  

What does this all mean? There still isn’t a medical cure for HIV. And that girl, as well as Mr. Brown are no more than fortunate and blessed. 

Fortissimo Possibile

I want to
pore over your pores
and study your skin,
send shivers
down your spine
and open you up.

Course through
your contents,
tracing them,
tenaciously,
with the tips
of my fingers, 
taking a lock 
of the sunset
in your hair;
(whispering
what was to come,)
and tucking it
neatly, behind
your right ear. 

I’ll slip you out
of your covering
and hold you
against my throbbing
                                 heart—
no longer bound by 
the confines of my chest.

My lips exploring
the galaxies within you;
forging marks,
connecting their favorite parts,
adorning you
as the constellations do.

I’ll recite your passages aloud,
my            pupils          dilating,
mouth                       widening,
our
     hearts
              racing,
                        eyes shutting—
savoring
             the suspense.

Perusing the pages
of your ambrosial anatomy
with quivering hands,
as though they were penned
by the angels,
committing every chapter
                                       (every strand
                                        of hair,
                                        every mark of
                                        beauty, every
                                        curvature)
every 
        inch
to memory.

Delving deeper
as you concert yourself
around me,
tasting the tension
transgressing, the
further I went.

I’ll compose you
a cadenza
in the key of C,
and feel you crescendo
beneath me;
ƒƒƒortissimo possibile.

Peering down,
my fingers traversing
the universes
in your hair,
with locked lips;
as your eyelashes
start to kiss;
I’ll hold you close,
and watch
your
       denouement
                           come
                                    to a close.

Fireworks

I didn’t know
what to say
or how to feel
or why
w h y 

my heart was racing
as fast as it was.

Wavy locks
of dark auburn hair
draped down your left shoulder— 
a gorgeous grin grew 
enveloping your face 
as I neared closer. 

I held your chair out
and watched you side-step
out of sheer confusion,
as I made my way
against the wall.

Admiring 
the way 
your eyes lit up 
each time 
they met mine.

Attempting not to stare,
I lowered my gaze
seeking refuge
in the silverware.

Savoring
each and every second;
far more than the
minute mouthfuls
I took;
regaining composure,
and satiating my true appetite
between bites,
with the most delectable
thing in the room.

I craved, terribly,
to drink you in, 
to sip your soul, 
to taste your troubles,
your vices
your virtues
you
     r being. 

The weary sun
soon evanesced, 
shrouded entirely
by our city’s trees,
and we watched
the sky
as it crimsoned above us,
to a bewitching 
reddish-brown.

I expected
it’d retreated
for the night,
until my fingers
found it once more
nestled safely, within 
the strands of your hair.  

They slipped down your side
only to be stopped at your waist; 
my lips caressed your shoulder, 
as your body finessed its way
onto mine. 

I pulled you into me
closer,
attempting—and failing
to remember
that breathing
was compulsory.

I was in a state
of waking apnea,
but all that mattered
was your preeminent
presence; 
that you chose
to be there
with me,
you chose. 

Sharing smiles,
and synchronous
heartbeats 
in silence— 
interrupted only 
by the jazz saxophonist 
practicing chromatics.

But not a single word
was necessary;
we felt exactly 
what the other was thinking, 
we knew exactly
what the other was feeling.

The tips of my fingers
traced the insides
of your thighs, as the clock’s
hands extended to twelve,
and nine;
fireworks ignited the night
and I introduced your lips
to mine.

You never really expect them, you know?

The cognitive ability to dream is among the most transcendental, nonpareil privileges bestowed upon us as humans. One that’s often taken for granted. Dreams can be beautiful, beautiful experiences; illusory escapes from reality, states of superior sentience, sources of unprecedented insight. But to dream is also to be at one’s most vulnerable. Because who’s more proficient and better-equipped to destroy you, than yourself? They can metamorphose into night terrors within seconds, inflicting levels of affliction very few parts of the waking world can match. For as long as you’re asleep, at least.

Dreamers of the night wake by dawn only to be disappointed (and on occasion, relieved), realizing what they believed was real was no more than a mere fabrication of the mind. But dreamers of the day belong to a class of their own. Of our own. As intelligent beings, there’s an intrinsic, sui generis sense of control we experience when daydreaming. While there is no conscious ability to intervene or manipulate the events that transpire, we do influence them. And we do so with open eyes.

There’s a magic in dreaming while the sun’s still out. She was that magic.

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She was like the last twenty-two seconds of a song I never wanted to end. Unlike anything I’d heard before. Especially not like the trash that frequents the radio. There were no lyrics; at least not ones I could discern. Just a mellifluous musical denouement. She was as infectious as the riffs of a pop song, but possessed all the class and composure of a classical composition. As intricate as a piece composed by Liszt himself, as haunting as Chopin’s twenty-one nocturnes, as sublime as Beethoven’s fifth. He was her favorite.

She was mine.

The Collapse of a Species

If I told you that pizza as you know it could very well drop off of the face of the earth within the next decade, how would you react? What about ice cream? Or persimmons, apples, pears and strawberries? If you’re from New York, that first question alone might’ve given you a heart attack. My apologies.

The staple cheese on pizza is mozzarella. Mozzarella is made from milk, which comes from dairy cows, specifically dairy cows that graze on alfalfa, a plant pollinated by three species of bees. Nearly a third of all food consumed by humans in North America is the result of pollination by those very creatures. That constitutes a $12 billion industry in the United States alone. So what’s the problem?

Within the last decade, 60% of the American honeybee population has died. The figures become increasingly alarming as we approach the present. In the winter of 2006, 32% of the population died. The following year, 36 percent. To put these numbers in perspective, picture a million beehives.

Now picture them all dead.

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An Acquired Taste

Your name tasted like dark chocolate as it rolled off of my lips.

Bitter. Bitter with desire. Bitter, because it was leaving. Bitter because it made me miss you. Bitter, because for a moment’s time, it was gone. 

But sweet. Sweet with euphony. Sweet, because it was yours. Sweet because it embodied everything about you. Sweet, because I couldn’t say it without smiling.

Sweet, because dark chocolate’s our favorite.

The blood of stars flowed in her veins.

There she stood across the room, a meager five feet tall. Her hair fell much like the way snow did in winter. Flawlessly.

Was that her?

Of course it was, I’d seen photographs. It had to be.

But why was my heart racing? Almost tachycardic. Skipping beats in protest of my hesitation.

Open the door, you don’t have all night.

Her eyes widened as she looked up at me. Her face brightened; not like a child’s on Christmas morning, no. But as our eyes met for the first time, it was illuminated. Everything was.

Hand her the coffee in your hand, idiot. What are you waiting for? Say hi. Don’t. Forget. To. Say. Hi.

So I did just that, and ineptly made my way to the rear of the store.

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Well over five octillion atoms comprised her tiny anatomy. That’s twenty-seven zeros. All symphonically coalesced into individual compounds, structures and substances; some of unfathomable complexity. Seamlessly amalgamated into one living, breathing, gorgeous being. To call that amazing would be an understatement. To call her amazing, an injustice.