The Body Fights Twice: When the Struggle for Health Becomes a Struggle to Belong
An award-recognized poem by Joseph Santiago asks a difficult question: Why do we sometimes make it harder for people to receive the very care that could save their lives?
There is something unsettling about the idea that our bodies might be more accepting of us than the people and systems around us.
When someone becomes ill, their body doesn't stop to consider whether they have made good decisions, earned enough money, have the right relationships, or live in the right neighborhood. It responds as best it can. Cells recognize threats. The immune system goes to work. Medicine, when available and effective, helps interrupt the processes causing harm.
Outside the body, things can become much more complicated.
A person might have to explain why they missed an appointment, why their insurance changed, or why they couldn't afford transportation. They might have to decide whether telling someone about their diagnosis will cost them a relationship. They might even begin questioning whether they
deserve the help they need.
This contrast is at the heart of The Body Fights Twice, a poem by writer and Crown Legacy Program Executive Director Joseph Santiago.
The poem recently received Honorable Mention in the General Category of the 2026 International Conference on Stigma Art Contest. It has also been adapted into a cinematic spoken-word film, bringing its message to audiences who might never encounter the written work.
We're sharing it here because it raises questions that extend well beyond a single diagnosis, and because we believe creative work deserves space to challenge how we think about the world around us.
A Poem About HIV, but Not Only HIV
If you've never encountered this work before, The Body Fights Twice begins in an unexpected place: inside the human body.
There are no hospital administrators, insurance companies, politicians, or social judgments there.
There is a virus, a cell, and a biological process unfolding.
Then the poem moves outside the body, where people are already assigning meaning to what has happened.
Santiago writes:
The virus does not know who you sleep with. People do. The virus does not knowyour race. People do.
It is a simple comparison, but one that becomes increasingly uncomfortable as the poem continues.
HIV is a medical condition. Yet from the earliest years of the epidemic, it has also carried enormous social meaning. Fear, misinformation, discrimination, and moral judgments have influenced how people living with HIV are treated, sometimes with devastating consequences.
Much has changed since those early years.
Today, effective HIV treatment allows people to live long, healthy lives. People who maintain an undetectable viral load through treatment cannot sexually transmit HIV, a scientific finding known as Undetectable = Untransmittable, or U=U.
That's an extraordinary achievement.
But imagine being told that the science has changed while discovering that some of the attitudes around you haven't.
Imagine having access to treatment in theory, yet struggling to navigate the requirements, costs, transportation, or other circumstances necessary to receive it.
Or imagine becoming healthy enough to plan a long future while still wondering whether someone will pull away when they learn your HIV status.
These are the spaces the poem explores.
Its title comes from a recurring passage:
The body fights twice. Once in blood. Once in daylight.
One battle happens biologically. The other takes place in the everyday world, where dignity, opportunity, and access are not always distributed equally.
The Part of Stigma We Don't Always See
Some of the most affecting moments in the poem have little to do with medicine.
Instead, they concern what happens when people begin seeing themselves through the judgments of others.
Consider how often someone can hear that they are irresponsible, difficult, undeserving, or a burden before those words begin to feel familiar. Eventually, they may not need another person to repeat them.
As Santiago writes:
Stigma becomes powerfulwhen it borrows your own voice.
That line deserves some attention.
We often think about stigma as something one person does to another. Someone makes an insulting remark, refuses a relationship, treats a person unfairly, or denies them an opportunity.
Those actions matter. But stigma can also become internalized. It can influence whether someone seeks assistance, enters a relationship, speaks openly, participates in community life, or believes that better circumstances are possible.
This is where the poem reaches beyond HIV.
Many people understand what it feels like to be reduced to a label, judged by a circumstance, or made to feel that their presence is somehow inconvenient. The situations may be very different, and those differences matter, but the underlying questions about dignity and belonging are recognizable.
What happens to someone who repeatedly receives the message that they are too much trouble?
What happens when they begin to believe it?
And how much of that harm do we fail to notice because the person is still standing in front of us?
Why We're Sharing This Through Crown Legacy Program
Crown Legacy Program was created around the belief that people's voices, experiences, and creative contributions deserve opportunities to be heard, developed, and remembered.
That includes work that entertains us, makes us laugh, preserves a memory, or introduces us to something beautiful. It also includes work that makes us uncomfortable enough to reconsider an assumption.
Poetry can do something interesting in that space.
A research report might explain how transportation barriers affect access to healthcare. A policy discussion might explore eligibility requirements or the consequences of funding decisions. Those
are necessary conversations.
A poem can ask what it feels like to be the person waiting for a ride that never arrives, hearing that
a prescription isn't covered, or standing outside a door that used to open.
It doesn't replace the research. It brings us closer to the person experiencing what the research describes.
We also want to be clear about the connection to this particular work. Joseph Santiago, the poem's author, serves as Crown Legacy Program's Executive Director. The Body Fights Twice is his independently written creative work, not a poem commissioned by the organization.
We're featuring it because its recognition offers an opportunity to share a meaningful piece of writing and to demonstrate something we hope to encourage among other creators: the willingness to use art to examine difficult subjects and invite people into conversations they might otherwise avoid.
We want this space to celebrate creative work from a range of artists, including emerging voices, our fellows, collaborators, and people whose perspectives may not always receive the attention they deserve.
Sometimes the work will be joyful. Sometimes strange. Sometimes deeply personal. And sometimes, as with this poem, it will ask us to confront something about the way we treat one another.
All of those stories have a place here.
Watch The Body Fights Twice
Following its recognition at the 2026 International Conference on Stigma Art Contest, The Body Fights Twice was adapted into a short cinematic spoken-word film.
The video offers a concentrated interpretation of the original poem, combining selected passages with narration and visual storytelling.
Whether you're familiar with HIV advocacy or coming to this subject for the first time, we invite you to watch it with a question in mind:
What obstacles have we come to accept as normal simply because we aren't the ones required to overcome them?
Watch the film: The Body Fights Twice
One of the things we appreciate about this work is that it doesn't ask viewers merely to feel sympathy for someone living with HIV.
It asks them to consider their own place in the story.
Perhaps you work in healthcare, education, government, or community services. Perhaps you've helped develop a policy or administer a program. Perhaps you've been on the other side of a counter trying to explain why you need another chance.
Or perhaps none of those situations describe you, but you know what it means to want to be accepted without having to justify your existence.
There is room for all of those perspectives in this conversation.
What Does It Mean to Help Someone Live?
Near the end of the poem, the focus changes.
After describing the barriers people encounter, Santiago begins naming ordinary acts of assistance:
A ride. A test. A prescription. A meal. A room. A phone call. A person who does not flinch.
These aren't grand gestures. Many are things we scarcely notice when they are available to us.
But for someone who needs them, their presence or absence can change the course of a day, a relationship, or even a life.
The poem also asks us to think beyond whether someone is technically alive or medically stable.
Can they make plans for next year? Can they imagine growing old? Can they fall in love without assuming rejection? Can they walk through a door and expect to be treated as a person rather than a problem?
Those questions are worth asking because they remind us that survival is not the entirety of living.
Toward its conclusion, the poem offers words that are remarkably simple:
I believe you.AND…I believe in YOU.I will help.Come inside.Sit down.You belong here.
There is no complicated intervention hidden in those lines. They describe the kind of human response many of us hope to receive when we are vulnerable.
And perhaps that is part of what makes the poem worth sharing.
It reminds us that the work of building healthier communities doesn't belong exclusively to medicine, government, or any particular profession. It also happens through the ways we respond to people, the decisions we make, the assumptions we challenge, and the barriers we choose not to leave in place.
The final words of the poem are:
Maybe one battleis enough.
We hope you'll watch the film, consider the questions it raises, and share it with someone who might see something different in it.
We'd also like to hear from artists, writers, and storytellers exploring subjects that matter to their communities. What experiences are you trying to make visible through your work? What conversations do you hope to begin?
At Crown Legacy Program, we believe those questions are worth exploring together.
About the Artist
Joseph Santiago is a writer, researcher, public health planner, and Executive Director of Crown Legacy Program. His creative and professional work explores human behavior, culture, institutional systems, and the ways people experience the communities around them.
His poem The Body Fights Twice received Honorable Mention in the General Category of the 2026 International Conference on Stigma Art Contest.
View the film: https://youtu.be/qwXiKBx0hMg
Explore Crown Legacy Program: https://www.crownlegacyprogram.org
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