Katie Manning is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review and an Associate Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She is the author of Tasty Other, which won the 2016 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and four chapbooks, including The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman. Her poems have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, New Letters, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and many journals and anthologies. Find her online here. ---------
Pandemic: A Love Poem
We swore
we’d love each
other in sickness
and in health
when sickness
was sterile,
something far from
here. Sickness
was nothing
more than bright
cubes—red, yellow,
black, and blue—
scattered across
a game board
in neat, precarious
piles. But
I have held
your bag
of vomit,
washed bile
from your face
and shirt.
I have seen
your body seize
and fall
to the floor.
Your stacks
of bone and
flesh are faulty,
dear, but
I would swear
again to love:
red death,
black plague,
yellow fever,
you.