Willa Carroll
SCORE FOR BODY AS THIRST SUIT
Supply chain of dreams | wake me wet in the night | sucking the cold teat of fear | Lady Madonna wears a blue hazmat suit | Helicopters head to Queens | doctors suit up in garbage bag smocks | tigers cough in the Bronx | crowded towers fevering | In the potter’s field | unclaimed bodies laid three deep | we sing for thee | humid vowels fall from our mouths | swaddled to hold | down the count | Praise our grandmothers | born in the year of Spanish Flu | mine in shut down St. Louis | not in Philadelphia | open then for death’s business | For survival she credits her mother’s milk | thin rivers laced with mercury | in a young century