"Fever Curve"

A new poem: "the soundtrack of crackles and rhonchi"

Author’s note: While I don’t think it’s usually necessary to know the backstory of a poem to enjoy it—or worse, to attempt to help a reader “understand”" what the poem “really” means (a larger issue I’m sure I’ll take up at some point)—some backstory can nonetheless serve a useful purpose. I wrote this poem in June 2020, during some of the bleakest days of the Covid-19 pandemic. I had just read a pretty graphic NIH report comprised of several doctors’ accounts of witnessing over a dozen of their patients die after they’d been on mechanical ventilators for weeks—hooked up to those machines in abject futility, as it turned out. This is “Fever Curve.” —Oliver

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FEVER CURVE (2020)
by Oliver Sheppard

The body sags, a marionette with cut strings.
     Petechiae speckle limbs
     with their own kind of roseate maculate,
macabre blooms on skin mottled black

as ground-glass opacities mar lungs
     where alveoli drown in sputum’s wash
     of clotted pinks swirled with scarlet streaks.

Look here—
     a gasping fish with rolling eyes.
     It flops a jig on its gurney
to the rhythm of the ventilator hiss.
No working gills for poor homo-piscis.

Muscles fail; the slow surrender begins:
     Ptosis shrouds the eyes
     to the soundtrack of crackles and rhonchi.
Microthrombi, confetti of death, celebrate

the viral exanthem of hypoxemia
     as pulmonary edema's frothy bloodtide reminds
     that flesh always ends up feeding earth,
a cycle that won’t be denied.                           

                                    —               

Words copyright © 2024 Oliver Sheppard. All rights reserved.

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