Bad Airs

Always born too late. I know I am just the type

of woman to be a consumptive beauty: more ghostly

than failure, scarlet lips of low-grade fever—

tuberculosis strung up in a valentine parade.

The test was pretty: we called it daisy. It infects me,

it infects me not. It infects me, it infects me not.

Outside the nurses’ bay an actual pile of cattle burning.

Appalling in the fashion of bureaucracy—

disgust in turning open what should be kept inside.

I wanted already to be so abstracted— the gray area

between animal and active threat red with confusion.

Could I get a lip that rosy? Could I cloud

my own meat? I want to be packaged differently.

Not all martyrs burn, not all who burn are martyrs.

It starts in the lungs, like the deep sigh I’ve worked

to turn sympathetic heads. Only deeper.