Under the Skin

           cw: disease, epidemics

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I'm sitting down to write a third poem about yellow fever. I was just saying I've always loved disease stories, studies mapping deaths black and blue and yellow. [Let me identify them: Yersina pestis, bubonic plague. Vibrio cholerae, cholera. Flaviviridae, yellow fever.] I can't forget my fascination with the Red Death too, holding his illimitable dominion. In fiction. Il- limitable. Ill-limitable: most of the stories are about vaccines or scientists' efforts to stop the spread, mitigate the risks. They all show the suffering, of course, give symptoms in [sometimes] bloodless detail. The anguished faces of the sick, the precise descriptions sit innocuous in monochrome. They scrape like a scalpel over an open wound, shock surely as insufflation, suffocate: Darkness and Decay and all that. I can't watch slasher flicks, so I'm not sure why this gore is not only acceptable but absorbing. But it is. It's the distance, I think. I'm looking at the faces of the dead and thinking I don't know why I'm drawn to things that would destroy me, only that I am. Diesel fumes and a dancing flame. Bacteria dividing in a dish, in a body. You don't need to tell me I'm morbid; I know. I'm just glad to be drawn to things that cannot love me back.