It was an honor to delve into and read the work of Allen Barnett for this year’s World AIDS Day. Except from the short story “The Times as it Knows Us.” The release of his short story collection is available here.
Give sorrow occasion and let it go, or your heart will imprison you in constant February, a chain-link fence around frozen soil, where your dead will stack in towers past the point of grieving. Let your tears fall for the dead, and as one who is suffering begin the lament… do not neglect his burial. Think of him, the one you loved, on his knees, on his elbows, his face turned up to look back in yours, his mouth dark in his dark beard. He was smiling because of you. You tied a silky rope around his wrists, then down around the base of his cock and balls, his anus raised for you. When you put your mouth against it, you ceased to exist. All else fell away. You had brought him, and he you, to that point where you are most your mind and most your body. His prostate pulsed against your fingers like a heart in a cave, mind, body, body, mind, over and over. Looking down at him, he who s dead and gone, then lying across the broken bridge of his spine, the beachhead of his back, you would gladly change places with him. Let your weeping be bitter and your wailing fervent; then be comforted for your sorrow. Find in grief the abandon you used to find in love; grieve the way you used to fuck.
