Zero Hour

I heard celebration       sex     in the shadows

violence     pandemonium       I wanted what they had

but my luminous body            hijacked          by a virus

clamored in my cells     Governed by ruin

my blood ran away     from the plot of my life

I drove all night believing       I could ____

this body that won’t be cured     Sealed kisses

in the distance     Desert sky stretched

into the new year     Part of me died

in the soft pink delusion of clinking glasses

People of industry   exiled     from beauty and state

Someone said                it’s getting real

and it did                       this life

of empty gestures          would never be the same

Credit

Copyright © 2026 by Dare Williams. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 22, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“This poem employs memory in an attempt to chart the physical and emotional fissures that occur during the process of seroconversion. Details arrive in volcanic sensations. In a way, I tried to render a kind of movement away from the time and place where it happened—New Year’s, the desert—and toward the psychic realization of being indoctrinated into a new kind of citizenship within a coterie. As [Susan] Sontag writes, ‘The night-side of life,’ changes my blood, my body, my history, my politics, and my poetics forever.”
—Dare Williams