It is fitting that the first voice for our new page is that of Andrew Sutherland. Andrew is a founding member of The Writers’ Collective and says, “I feel personally uncomfortable with my own positionality in regards to writing and/or appropriating the genocide into poetry. I wrote this for Storyfest and I feel best in keeping it with that as its catalyst and having it live with TWC.”
Here is the poem, along with a link to the Intercept article that inspired it.
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/13/israel-gaza-war-hiv-aids-medication/
as reported by Afeef Nessouli and Steven Trasher for The Intercept on January 13 this year.
I write this, following Jasbir K. Puar and others’ formulation of homonationalism: the ways in which queer rights and communities are co-opted into the violence of empire, not because queer people or PLHIV are any more or any less deserving of life than any other person, but because I cannot take my own medication as PLHIV without thinking of the ways in which it is weaponised, pressed into the work of genocide.
to ES, in Gaza
Your self-portrait shows a shadow with your walker.
Debility is a method.
When Butler writes
ungrievable life –
There is nothing to conserve.
You fear more than your health deteriorating.
Your wanting to be free.
Fluid, like –
I see a tweet from someone in the USA whose backpack had gotten soaked through with rain,
and their entire supply of PrEP pills dissolved and remoulded together
a formless, doughy mass.
This waste. Homonation
queer in empire drop with empire.
Pharmacoporn, this mass
awaiting moulding, shaped
to hand; to rise.
When depression set in, you write, one of the first things you did
was start wearing colourful clothes, instead of all black. Eyebrows bleached.
And yet my friend, yesterday, sends me a photo of bread
in a Naarm market with the letters P e P
baked into the loaf. Post exposure prophylactic grain, he texts.
And there is no more bread.
If anyone knows, there’s gonna be an apocalypse.
One of your artworks, background deep blue, with a thin orange form flying the direction of a beam of light: yellow, red, orange. Behind the body, three planets, or moons – heavenly constellations, the same three colours. The head of the body is an oval with a cross: something like medicine.
Tenofovir and lopinavir / ritonavir.
The first a common medication, the second, hard to come by, even among Poz people.
And if the virus is a thread
of solidarity, and though our virus
is the same, its strains and its mutations, not.
The burst of colour. The cost.
Tenofovir, a white coloured pill.
Australia: $31.50 for a month supply.
USA: $1852.44. Gaza: medication denied entry.
Mine, Biktarvy. A dimmer purple.
Australia: $31.50 for a month supply.
USA: $4411. Gaza: denied entry.
Lopinavir / ritonavir. A pale yellow.
Denied entry by the state of Israel.
A forever loophole.
Medical stores targeted as if
they house weapons, your doctor writes.
As if weapons dissolving into body, day to day to day.
Body, body, body. The future is
tomorrow’s pill. It’s better to be cut off,
doctor says, than to ration, split, or mix.
A ritual, at this
point. Silence equals
plus, or minus –
precarious life
The last doses in the north.
For the past ten months, you were lucky.
You respect it, you write. Accepted surrender to it.
And the beach, where you feel most at peace.
Fluid, like your queerness –
I read your words and want to tell you, non-urgently, that years ago, in a meeting with the peer counsellor at WA AIDS Council, he told me his most recent project had been to take a group of longterm survivors to the beach and convince as many as possible to swim in the ocean. A lot of them, he said, had not gone in for years, even decades. He couldn’t articulate why, or why it felt important. I cried after the meeting. The salt in a tear I don’t know, salt in the ocean, I don’t know.
I didn’t ask the result, because I imagined it to be transformative.
It is problematic, I know, to think of your relationship to a shoreline and map it to my own. It is true, I know, that when I think of you on a beach in Gaza that it is not Floreat Beach, North Beach, not Scarborough, not the beaches I think I’m on when I think of you and your peace. It is true, however, that this is the fight I’d want you in, that let’s argue over which beaches are better. We get so proud of this, in Perth. To win. To win. To go on. Undrinkable sea.
To get three months of medication through.
You report: No matter how tirelessly Israel works to ensure that nothing works for us who are suffering in Palestine, the magic and power of God defy those efforts. It’s in the small mercies – the kindness of strangers who expressed concern and offered help, and the miraculous arrival of my medication through a plan I could not have foreseen. These acts of grace are what keep us steadfast in Gaza.
I would like to say, if the virus is a thread
of immortality. To remember
to cut your foot in salt water,
and do not die.
