Craving a plague to explain the malaise of a

frog slowly boiling in a pot of climate change

some punishment to pay debt piled to the moon

a reason to march to a death we can understand

together

                holding hands

no matter how much DNA we sequence

we can’t make medicine to cure what ails us

until we develop a microscope that

               peers

               deep

we strap on masks and can’t quite hear

               the muffled mumbles 

like tourists who don’t speak the language

                     we read eyes

we swim in the stench of what unites us

               afraid to take a breath

This poem by Mike Wilson recently appeared in Hitchlit Review, Vol. 3, Issue 2, Autumn 2020