H1N1
By Robyn Schiff
God knows how our neighbors manage to breathe.
No one is allowed
to touch me
for infection is a hazard of mercy
I will not transmit
as Legion transcribed from the mouth
of Error into his body
and sent into a herd of swine
who sent it to the sea
who’s been trying to return
to earth since creation
and nearly succeeds every day.
I just took my temperature.
98 degrees. I am better than healthy.
I am cooling even as earth
heats, even as it meets the sea
further inland and negotiates
distance from increasingly
disadvantaged position. I
am cooling because nothing
touches me.
Others may go to the petting zoo
and country fair
but don’t even tell me what they touch
there. I’m taking my temperature again;
my thermometer is digital and pink
and its beep is my name
being read from the book of life,
which is available on Kindle
and allows me to avoid the public library
but contains peculiar punctuation
errors and is transcribed by
evangelists while they wait
in line at gates you can’t see from here. 98.5.
Still cooler than life. I have another
glass of water, and feel you turning in me,
my little book, flipping over and over,
it’s time for bed little sow, little sow.
The book of death is open on my bedside
table and is called The Pregnancy
Countdown, and contains “advice from the
trenches” about how to level
the enemy the body.
It’s time for bed, little bee, little bee. I open my window
and find ten dead between the pane and the screen
which apparently has tears big enough
to enter and I leave them in state
in a pile and watch
the wind lift their
mighty wings in deathly
aspiration. It is the beginning
of flu season, Rosh Hashanah.
Every tear is recorded. I say tear
to rhyme with the chair by my window,
not tear to rhyme with the fear of God
here at the Fair of God
where the just
leer at the milk cow
and brush up against
captivity and slaughter
in the name of zoonosis
and the vector. Nothing touches me,
little scale, little scale
I will not be meted I will
not give the mosquito
her share even though the blood meal
is all she has to nurture her eggs
and mother to mother I hear
her flight even as she’s drawn
to my breath by fate and nature,
which are one and as interchangeable
as babies in soap operas. Dangerous angel,
I will not lie down
with the lamb who is
contagious. I will not
hear your name recalled for I
have not named you and fear
tempers my love of the letters
of this world which are as
pins through the body
while the wings flail, but I
will not fail to meet you
when you get here
with your shadow
attached and your
failure a promise
entering the success
of your first breath. On what
grounds, on what faith,
dare we aspire
together where Legion
hears the ventilator
and enters the wire?
