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Small Gestures
Mosquito larvae "may be the leading impediment to economic
growth in the developing world."—New York Times,
July, 2000.
i)
It begins with small understandings,
then rises to the size of Ganesh's phallus.
You are at a dim cafe. Lightning splits the sky.
You are eating spiced olives with someone you desire.
The door is open but she doesn't love you.
A white streak burns into your retinas.
The taste of cumin and paprika salt you with a shriveled pain,
you have bought it and you must pay.
ii) The Mosquito
It begins with a billow of evolutionary hubris,
then sweeps the body with encephalitic fevers.
Larvae hatching in old tires
don't threaten anyone
busy behind their screens.
But she's a democratic insect and she insists;
she sips blood in
to gestate her young,
for this gift she repays in flames
shooting in yellow fever, malaria,
encephalitis:
a vast swelling, transnational,
the sting and buzz of generous disease.
The democratic insect. Fair exchange.
iii) Mayan Scribes: the Red Murals
It began with a talent for figures, gestures,
then grew into civil war.
In victory, the Mayan scribes were drunk with their King,
wrapped in long scrolls of their work
and rolling around the palace.
In defeat their fingers were ritually broken
in front of their enemies,
their genitals gashed
and their fingernails torn out.
In the Mayan dictionary "fingernails" means lament:
"I have no fingernails; I am no longer the person I used to be.
I no longer have power or authority
or money. I am no one."
iv)
It begins with simple gestures,
then swells to the size of Nietzche's madness.
The mosquito either infects
or it doesn't.
The scribes are either drunk
or they are dead.
She either loves you
or she is lightning.
There is great thirst, even as the bloom is on the larvae.
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