But it was winter anyway
meaning less mosquitoes,
malaria pills abandoned
in the orange, pharmaceutical
container, more worried about
centipedes chasing one another
across the tiled bedroom floor
or lizards climbing the shades
above your bed, or the mouse
in the chest of drawers
leaving brown pellets
across the folds and wrinkles
of your clothing, some parasite
living and dying inside of you,
la flaca, while you ate toast
and water, then nothing at all.
You haven’t forgotten
long evenings alone,
a tributary buried along the coast
emerging into the Pacific,
you sat on the dock and read
about a medieval monastery
where murder after murder
Benedictine monks disappear
and some lingua franca,
simulacra and signs
are the key to solving the crime
while you, in the stranger tale,
watched pavos reales strut
down the long, wooden pier,
and sometimes an albino
emerged, plumage behind him,
sweeping the air white with his
inscrutable, feathered scrawl.