Today's poem is by Kara van de Graaf

The Greeks
       

We only remember animals
have skin when we can see it,
a fingernail's width

of silver-blue as the fur parts, or
the shock of a stomach upturned, pale
pink mottled with grey,

like something fermenting, bared
at our feet, a gesture of tameness
or willingness to be tamed.

The Greeks gave us the word
alopecia, from the root alopex, meaning
fox, meaning the bare spots

mapping the outlines of mange
they saw marring their figures.
It must have been spreading a long time

before they found the foxes huddled together
sharing the same parasite,
what looks under a microscope glycerin

clean, but bites
below, a lesion of the mind before
the eyes, what the Greeks called cutter of flesh,

which means anything we want
to scratch away: it is always
what burrows underneath that makes

the tragedy. They felt their own faults
stinging and pointed a finger
away, let some other body carry

the brunt. They used a word
to put it out of mind, assigned
it elsewhere so it grows—

a lidless poison infecting
the flesh like a dress
worn too close to the skin.

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Copyright © 2023 Kara van de Graaf All rights reserved
from Birmingham Poetry Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission