200words.

Infected with self,
Conflicted in our efforts
To express everything
Inside—all the chaos,
Agents, and diseases—
Wanting to share
All that we are
Simultaneously
Blocking out each individual
Voice, creating a cacophony
Of I’s vying
For attention.
Is it the loudest
Voices that we hear?
The most unique?
It’s not clear,
Which is why we all scream
Out and hope to be the chosen.

Maybe they’re trying to tell us something. The infections. We are turning the Earth into us. Are there more of us than anything else? What if we go by mass? Six billion times 50 (kilograms, this is science) equals 3 x 10¹³ kilos of us. Let’s see, each kilogram of mass equals 21.5 Megatons of TNT, so if an “average” person were converted directly into energy, that would be a 1075 Megaton blast. So, the next time you think you aren’t powerful, remember: If you were converted directly into energy, you’d give off more power than every bomb and gun ever fired in every war (including atom bombs).

So, let that be a lesson to you! Do not convert yourself directly into energy. If you were thinking of doing it, just forget it. The results would be catastrophic. The first bomb at Hiroshima dissolved a fetus worth of matter at a mere 12-15 kilotons… Let’s do the math: 15 kilotons (We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt) equals .015 Megatons. This equals 430 grams of mass. That’s typical of about week 20 of preganancy. At this point, it would have fingernails, but not fingerprints. So, let’s say, you get pregnant, you carry the fetus to week 20, and then BAM! It suddenly turns into energy. That would be a Hiroshima sized Nuclear Explosion.

It was locust season. Ma was finishing up the dishes and Pa was teaching Jehosophat how to whittle the baby Jesus. I was layin on the ground, scratching the dirt with a stick and thinking of Willard Pete, who’d tickled me in the schoolhouse today when the little ones were getting their alphabet lesson.

“Jumpin and Jehosophat!” Ma called. “Be fixin’ to rally home that Bess!”

I sat up and looked down the front of my pinafore. The dirt hid the pink gingham and what lay underneath in a pleasing way. “Jehosophat can go alone!” I called out. “There’s a rattler out there, everybody at school says so, and I’m too old for trompin around at night lookin for that ol hank o jerky!”

Instead of sassing me back my mother paused for a moment, and it was that pause that sealed my fate.

“Lawd!” By brother crowed. “Is this to do with Willie Pete sayin’ you
got tits?”

I was up faster that my mom’s holler flying toward his little form but
without a warning to the world I turned and skipped into the woods.

Well, it was darker than a wolf’s mouth. And I walked and called and
hollered through the trees and the treefrogs and when I finally heard
that bell down by the river that’s where the snake seized me, sunk its teeth in my arm like a ship in the deep blue sea.

Fuck.

I stumbled home by the grace of God. In the meadow of our cabin I fell. My family rushed. They cradled my pink and dirty body. My father sucked and spit, sucked and spit the venom.

“Disinfectant,” my mother intoned. “We’ll put set off the infection,
then someday she can write about it, with urban people, over computers.”

“Oh, Ma, you’ve lost it,” I whispered. Pa looked about ready to cry.

“I see you,” Ma went on in a singsong voice I couldn’t quite dislike. “I see you in a land of skyscrapers and martinis and brown people.”

“Come along, Ma,” Pa said, and we rose from the yard and went inside to prepare for bed.

The words left her lips easily. “This infection is going to kill you.”

He sat there looking tired. His face swollen from the round and slack jaw, to the protruding lips that were too large and weak to keep the saliva back, to the dull grey circles under his pleading eyes. There was a crater in his neck left by the ravenous cancer. It drained thick and putrid. The nurse had to stuff moist gauze into that cross section of a neck to create a substitute for flesh, in hopes of protecting the veins and arteries that should never be exposed.

A picture of him and his school age daughters on last year’s vacation sat on the piano. Their smiles screamed of the injustice and tragedy that was taking place. He wrote, “I want CPR if I start to die.” She answered, “It won’t work. You’ll die anyway.” I sat there listening and biting my lip, holding back the tears that would eventually burn my cheeks.

Two days later, I heard how it happened. Death came by means of that weak artery, too long exposed to air and infection. The blood escaped and he was gone.

 

something somehow flickers on
like the lights on Mother in the first Alien movie
conditions conspiring
synthesizing something that wasn’t before
(that’s weird
the psychological arrow of time
the evolutionary arrow of time
a cog that cannot be backed up past)
a switch flipping on
and a bulb, pop
     but dim
     but on
          terrifying
          or unnoticed
and once something happens
it can happen again a little more

or ga ni sm
four syllables if you ask me
and multiplying as we speak
at once multiplicand, multiplier, product
and rolling
timesing time
at once dividend, divisor, quotient
and telescoping
fracturing fractions
parts spinning suspended
independent and interdependent
extending multi-dimensionally
folding back into
innumerous numbers
some simple math
some simple machines
some simple machine
one long equation
I am teeming
with legions
the composite of a slow architecture
and yet I contain nothing
     all membranes are permeable
     all space can be fallen through
I am swimming with bacteria
I’m swimming bacteria
no more than a cloud really
we’re a team
fighting infection on a daily basis
an orchestra
of fission and fusion
very chemical
a halo
a glow of fizz and buzz
one long equation
shifting continuously
balancing hourly
knocking you out like Rocky Balboa