It’s as welcoming as a mother, but none of this was personal.

When a tsetse fly

–

chews your skin with its scissor teeth, through delicate capillaries for the sweet stain of red, it does so completely in earnest.

–

It ushers in the flagellate protozoan Trypanosoma brucei gambiense. Those misshapen parentheses swim — and they must swim — through passageways, the secrets of your body. The tsetse fly is long gone by the time your central nervous system starts to stutter.

–

A child catching her breath over the steep hill of a consonant.

–

What the doctors call sleeping sickness is to the tsetse fly nothing more than the squeal of a hawk catching a barn mouse. Life carrying itself out.

–

Take comfort when you lie awake at night, terrors marauding through brain tissue before the coma, devoted as a mother, arms reaching wide, comes to claim you.

–

None of this was personal.

–

–

****************************************************

Mari Pack’s work has appeared in Yes, Poetry, Quail Bell Magazine, and others. The Description of a New World, her first chapbook, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2019. Mari is an editor for Guideposts.

***********