In perpetuity, a basin of water, light, shuddering with its own
Extravagance, gone dull from keeping constant company with relentlessness.
By north, this was when thinking was dwindling and the economy was scarce.
By south, in heat, aluminum buckets of cholera fed to a colony of children
In the camps, those who don’t own shoes or roofs or relatives.
The less the light the more the discontent in dark.
Inside a mango candle burns all night.
An apparition bunched: the cholera slops in pails from bed to bed, sickling
On one child at a time.
If the water had been potable, so easily—
What more is it that you never would have wished for than this is?
Figs ripen from the inside out the way a living patient does and dies.
You deserve a better luck than this.