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Blackwater Fever
- Southern Illinois University Press
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Blackwater Fever They didn’t find it in me until months later— just likeVallejo who died on a rainy day far from the heat rising over a garden in silvers and reds—far away from the din of buses, tobacco vendors, cows that overran the streets with their holiness. Laid on the surface of the Ganges, the thin shells reflected light, clamored against the current. Far from the Atlantic, farther still from the Potomac. Same color of night, dull dawn. The fever should have churned my blood into tight fists while the sunset stretched across the sky like an open mouth. Everything was splintered heat. I’d awake to winter in D.C., find streets covered in snow, the words of some ancient language blooming under my ankles like a song, a mantra called home. I could trace it like a geography of someone I had once been. How to explain the hum of mosquitos in my ear, sensual and low, nothing like the sound of rusted-out engines, police sirens, a train’s whistle. How easily I’d lost the taste for that water, opened my legs to their hot, biting mouths. ...