Malaria

after reading Love in the Time of Cholera

Love makes Florentina Ariza cunning, it makes me helpless.
Love makes him mad with a pen, it makes me mute with desire.

Does cholera commit the lover to lifelong devotion
to the one loved? I don’t know. I only know malaria,

the Kenyan sun branding the flesh inside out,
the icy river swirling round the crossing cattle,

and the mottled darkness inside the mosquito net
hanging like a ancient wedding veil over me.

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