Influenza
Poem by Claudia Emerson •
Photo by Steve Rice
 To it, fertile as gossip, this is a thick, crowded seedplot of the easiest exposures; each month opens and closes already in the quiet synchrony of their bodies. They turn in fevered beds, the infirmary overrun. To the one nurse, pale as her apron, all is suspect—doorknobs, washcloths, glass rims, even the surely sterile thermometer, mercury rising under each new tongue. Invisible knife they will have gone under, it sharpens itself in them and will pass on, convalescence coming behind it, balmy, shared as weather. Previously published in The Cincinatti Review. |