BLOOD
How is it that I find myself
standing in a covered meat market
seven months into the crisis, my nose
hole-punched by the quick, savoury smell of flesh
prepared for sale? It’s dark
and a truck as pale as a bar of soap reverses.
The men wear white protective clothing.
One opens the back door on to a wardrobe
of carcasses and the mass of yellow fat is
deafening. They were animals,
just as the people were human.
In a makeshift medical centre across
an ocean, staff wear boots, gloves, facemasks
and goggles. Their gowns crackle and the patients,
struck by the new language
of compassion, are too tired to articulate
their confusion. Whenever were the dead
so choked with life? In boxes of earth
overhung by stiff foliage, shoelaces of the virus wait
to inhabit new hosts
LAST PLACE
P B Hughes’s poem, LAST PLACE, is published in the November issue of HARK magazine. Read it here.
