Shitala
Ma
–The Modern-Day
Story of the Goddess of Smallpox
Inspired
and informed by The Demon in the Freezer by Richard
Preston
In a locked box in
Atlanta, Georgia, a goddess
sits slumbering, her
home a distant memory.
Perhaps her skin is
like night, galaxies swirling
across the surface,
stars exploding crimson
instead of light.
Perhaps it is an ocean, boiling
from within, pushing
pearly pustules upward,
outward. Perhaps she
sits, knees up, in that tiny space,
too small for an
epidemic to fit comfortably in.
It is so unlike the
temples she knew in India,
both stone and flesh,
before eradication.
It is cold and cramped
and sterile,
except for her. She is
alone.
Immortal.
Her arms are longer
then her captors imagine,
fingers extending past
Russia, past safety,
beyond control. She is
a goddess, incorporeal
without a body of her
own, but she is patient,
arms outstretched,
searching in her sleep,
fingers wide, looking
for a careless draft, an airway
upward, outward, a
portal to a body. She escaped
once, escaped in
Birmingham, through a breeze,
through an air duct,
through a woman, through her lungs,
their tissue spacious
for a goddess now used to a box.
She knows why they keep
her here, In case,
they whisper, just in
case, their voices acrid
with unacknowledged
fear. Like a prayer,
they repeat it to each
other, repeat it to her.
She understands that
this metal box is a temple too,
locked away and
protected, she, a goddess here
as much as anywhere.
Here, where Fat Man
and Little Boy, like
Smiling Buddha at home,
were born, where they
understand the very
nature of her and hers,
and pray and pray
and pray that she
continues to sleep.
But they open the box
occasionally to feed her
monkey flesh, tributes,
just in case, and her eyes
part sleepily,
hungrily, and she stretches her arms,
constantly watching
these new priests of hers,
so
confident in their white hazmat suits.
*Leigh
Camacho teaches composition at Southeastern Louisiana
University. Her poems have apeared in Outside the Lines
and Gambit. She lives in Hammond, Louisiana with her
two cats and her fiance.
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