Oh, this poem. When I first read it my long-ago friend Marty shimmered up in my mind, small thin Marty who came to the creative writing classes I taught at the Minnesota AIDS project when I first moved to Minneapolis. I used to bake muffins to pass around and Marty loved them, blueberry especially.

Once, when he and I were in the parking lot talking after class, he reached out and filched a third muffin from the basket. It wants to be free, he said, with that sly smile of his, I’m just liberating it. You’re long gone now, Marty, along with so, so many others from back in those pre-medicine days, but I promise I still see you, and every time I bake blueberry muffins I think of you.

72 Corona Transmutations (excerpt), by CAConrad

                                                my friend

                                                Rex told me

                                                when he was

                                                dying of AIDS

                                    promise me every day of 1993

                        will be the best day with or without me  

                                                27 years later

                                                the promise

                                                still kept 

For more information on CAConrad, please visit their website.

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