Stand in the morgue and listen
to the hush between last breaths and statistics,
where silence weighs heavier than data points,
certainty is measured in empty homes and

call medicine poison.
Let mistrust metastasize like mold in flood-ravaged cities,
watch fever slip through cracks in your rhetoric while
ruin joins it in drought-cracked soil because

disease is the freest thing of all.
Cross borders without papers,
flourish where protection is oppression,
because risk is a personal choice

until it isn’t.
When breath is debt,
numbers are names, 
and hands reach and close around empty air,

listen to silence settling in lungs already still.

Rachael Brooks is a PhD student in Epidemiology at the University of Michigan. She was raised in Alabama and spends far too much time looking at code and not enough time reading or writing. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Neologism Poetry Journal, NonBinary Review, and elsewhere.