Dear Body,

Forgive me: before this message, I’ve tried
               to reach you though the customary channels.
                              I dropped a line to your business address,

                              then later, with some qualms over manners,
               your personal email, the one at which
I imagine, your close friends send chain mail.

I have a few requests; I wanted to bend
               our mutual ear, and thought it best to deal
                              with our joint interests directly, to cease

                              miscommunication through scraps of data,
               through lab reports generated by the hospital’s
automated systems. Let’s be honest: do either of us

know what to make of the milk-ghost images
               shot through with X-rays? Yet having heard
                              no reply after what I myself would characterize

                              as a civil interval, I confess that I tried
               calling you. Perhaps you were out—you let
the line ring for some minutes, no machine

catching the call. I wondered, briefly,
               whether you knew it was me on the wire,
                              whether you read our name on a pop-up screen

                              and decided to wait me out. But speculation
               is beside the point. I trust that you can appreciate
my position: after decades of working together

toward what I believe is our common good,
               I’ve been surprised by your recent failures
                              of good faith. I hope I do not go too far, but

                              I view your recalcitrance as willful disregard.
               When I desire to grasp, say, an apple—does it matter
why?—I feel I can expect your help, your closing

of fingers around the green rind. Or when I need
               the knee to hold, the joint to bend appropriately,
                              that I should not need to wonder if you’ll comply

                              or toss me to the ground. You’ve left me,
               I confess, in a spasm that looks for all the world
like a drunk’s bungling rage. I’ve tried

to appease or inspire you, shouting down
               the nerve-trip wires with pill after dissolving
                              pill, but you don’t seem cheered. I’ve considered

                              the possible dissolution of our partnership,
               but on further reflection, I do not see a viable
alternative to our continued work together.

I hope I do not seem too familiar, too cavalier
               if I say that I have grown to like you, over time.
                              At the outset of our working relationship, I may

                              have thought you a bit ungainly, and might have made
               some remarks uncomplimentary to your appearance.
For these, I am sorry: I see now that the texture

of your hair or the general curvature of your muscle
               and fat is in no way my concern, for you are
                              an independent entity. I hope that any dismissive

                              comments on my part are not to blame for our current
               state of affairs, and that we may repair the rapport
we once took as a given. Please, consider

replying to this letter. Whether by post or email
               is at your discretion. In case you choose to call,
                              I’ll be waiting with our hand on the phone.

To My Seatmate, on a Cross-Country Flight

The mask is not for you. I don’t wear it
to keep you safe from what rides with me
in Seat 17B where I’m wedged against you
through takeoff, flight, then landing.

It isn’t here, strapped behind my ears
and fogging my glasses, to shelter you
from what I emit into the plane’s
closed air-system. That’s not to say

I mind your thinking about tuberculosis
or a mutant influenza that’s rutted
in pig dung. Or that I resent the look
on your face as you contemplate

how you’d make your meeting if you caught
what you suspect I have, which clinics
flank your hotel. I’m not bothered
by your scanning for empty seats

in this too-full, body-stacked fuselage;
it’s nothing I don’t do myself, and daily,
a risk-benefit analysis as to whether to touch
the germ-riddled handrail on a staircase

or take a seat on the heaving train
next to the child with the glistening,
effluent nose. Then again, this mask
does little to help me, either. Leggy proteins

kick through paper, gravitate toward skin
in their will to replicate. See how the mask
gaps at the side? It’s a reminder that we breathe
the same air, you and I. That what you inhale

I have exhaled already, strip-mined
and sucked through lungs to feed my own
creeping blood. That though we are careful
not to bump knees or elbow the armrest

at once, we share the secret spaces of alveoli.
Our molecules comingle. That you, hale in your
wool suit and I, knuckling my cane,
we are caught up together as the plane banks hard.

“Doctors baffled about why H1N1 targets young, healthy”
                                                            

       —Global News, Canada

The flu season comes in its usual tide
of cough syrup, cherry reds and arsenic
green. Kleenex bunts the couches
of waiting rooms, drapes the desktops

in offices. News headlines pump hysteria
across the wire, make a virus’s replication
into a particular insult to healthy adults
and children. Pictures show lines at clinics

men with shirtsleeves rolled up, injection sites
bared with high gravity. The hoards look
like a pitiful regiment, ready to march to war
against viruses that threaten the American Way.

Experts appear from clavicle up,
their televised jaws slack-flapping the same
blather as always, telling us that usually it’s only
those who have underlying conditions

who die of influenza. Only us, only the few
shadowy figures barely worth mentioning.
We few, the cancer-bald. Just us, the asthmatics.
Nobody in the death-ranks but we of genetic

mutations. But when film cuts to an image
of a sweat-glazed toddler hooked to electrodes,
it’s only we with the underlying conditions
who know how to say, Oh, baby, little one, I know.