SELECTED FOR
July 30, 2012 Coldfront
This Morning Feature

Ancient Roman Bones Reveal Malaria: A Love Song

BY Amy Beeder

How like a hive, his body — so busy with rigor,
with languor & sweats: his spleen my arena,
his spine my near vicus, encampment. Ague
as opiate: I have bequeathed him thick visions
of wings, my crepuscule sulks, a fever & tremor,
a ribcage too meager to scaffold a temple
or cistern of piss. Citizens, I’ll never leave him —
not while forests are cleared by your hunger
for villas, for mainmasts, flagpoles & bonfires.
We’ll wax as we dwindle, gut-swollen and rank.
What will be left for the Gauls? A cattail garden.
Shards & a damp palm’s mark on the parchment.

 

Biography

AMY BEEDER is the author of Burn the Field (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006) and Now Make An Altar (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, AGNI, and other journals. She lives in Albuquerque and teaches poetry at the University of New Mexico. She has worked as a freelance reporter, a political asylum specialist, a high-school teacher in West Africa, and an election and human rights observer in Haiti and Suriname.

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