"Gram Negative" by E. I. Pruitt

winter 2003 vol. 55, no. 1

These loose flu days are like a long,
long story about a place I’ve never been
as illness has its way with me,
and I try to have my way with it.
My clothes hang posed in the closet,
the hallway to the bathroom suddenly

an unnavigable voyage.  I’m never sure
how this will end.  I understand
strange things in bed—the motion
of quarks called charmed, the difference
between absinthe and absolve,
why marriage fails and loneliness

succeeds.  You may call it fever
or two hot toddies to the loop,
but I am, for a moment, my cat
with the feather toy, growling deeply
in the pursuit of ancestral knowledge.
How do we go without it?  We the living

embody the failings of we the dead.
And this present weariness is perhaps
not grandfather ache, not a mystery
of blood, but only bacterium
playing the old games with meiosis, mitosis
and me with a headful of ether and fire.

cquarter@unc.edu
 © 2003 The Carolina Quarterly