Most diseases are invisible. We don’t want to see them
and so we don’t. Faces blurred with scars. A missing foot.
A scraped-off finger. The risk of infection given more weight
than the infected. Rumpelstiltskin, give me my weight
in bacteria. The last US leper colony an empty home for ghosts
still living. They had a family, a contact-borne pathogen,
a home everyone waited for them to die out of. Those with AIDS
excavated from their apartments. And in plague years, the sick
boarded up inside. The secret people keep their mouths taped up.
They wear our misplaced clothes. Their fingerprints are illegible,
their voices the dust cast off with each moth’s wingbeat.
When we say, Come out where I can see you, they say, No,
I’m already here. We’re already here. Peel back your eyes.
Taste the film on your tongue. Call 911. Are you where you belong?