…Early Elegy: Smallpox
by Claudia Emerson
- The world has certified itself rid of
- all but the argument: to eradicate or not
- the small stock of variola frozen,
- quarantined—a dormancy it has
- refused, just once, for a woman behind a sterile
- lens, her glass slide a clearest, most
- becoming pane. How could it resist slipping
- away with her, that discrete first
Never Ending Stories: Narrating Frozen Evidence of Infectious Epidemics Past
This article is part of the series: After the End of Disease