Sonja Dahl, Messages from the Sun, 2015 (series of original cyanotype prints)
i.
With sickness the colour of rain—
when the wet season comes, you can’t keep
the roof from leaking. I put duct tape over holes
in the lanai screens to keep cottonmouths
out. Wash the mold away with bleach. After
a three-year drought, we think rain is a sickness
we want, the whole world wrapped in sky.
ii.
We look for self when self
is an itinerary, not the junction
point. You numb. You savage.
I can’t tell us apart
from the oaks dying in the yard.
The pretty gowns of Spanish moss
kill them faster. You want the sickness
to lay itself down inside you. I want
the child I was before I knew you. Before
the maps of ghosts & skin & cells. The saliva
tests. The doctors. Before
this sickness swam in me,
swam you, swam—
iii.
Before: we boarded the plane beside ruined wheat
fields, a silo. Hay bales & horses. I breathed. The baby
hardened in my belly. I pictured her, furious,
fuming. Maybe, that was the moment
of her death. That last fight to be something
realized. The flight took off & landed near
the Gulf. The blood was already there.
iv.
Repetition is distinctly human. We reach, again
& again, for our own ruin. To connect
at the damaged places we can’t touch. Again,
the tiles are torn off the roof in a tropical storm.
The power goes out for two days. The wind shatters
glass that isn’t boarded up. Again, I get out
the ladder. I replace what is damaged. The sky
swells in the distance. Again, sickness takes you
from me. I tell the neighbour we’re having a boy
this time. The terrible truth about childbirth
is it will never include you. The world
reimagines itself as water & rises.