…this sort of disease like a tide of death
carrying disaster (Lucretius), this disease’s
genetic material entering the human cell,
copies of it multiplying, exploding bundles
of new nucleotides, plaques ripped open,
tissues rotting, writhing clots, poisons throughout
the heart, brain, kidney, liver, impaired flow
of oxygen, lungs filled with pus and dead cells,
it doesn’t feel, it doesn’t think, it has no moral agency,
it becomes what it is, if it’s evil it’s an evil of nature,
the line for food twenty blocks long, the trailer
on West Twelfth outside Lenox Hill Hospital
a morgue, one mass gravesite could be the potter’s
field where prison labor buries the dead, masked,
this Sunday morning, Liberty Street, a body
before me on the sidewalk (the precise word
what? garbling?) garbling sounds…

 

 

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Lawrence Joseph’s most recent book is A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). A new book, Precisely Now (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), will be published this September.

 

 

 

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash