If God Is A Virus

09-29-20 // Poetry - California

Seema Yasmin

Phytoplankton drips down her thick thighs as she stirs a primordial ocean with her toenail
Striped fish slap in God’s ankle bracelets along the coastline she drags a tangled seaweed braid
If God is a virus she is naked
Shed her nucleocapsid when salamanders grew legs now she is two strands of missense RNA
Acid ladders reaching to the heavens God is in your fever in your dandruff between your teeth
crying in the permafrost massaging her way out of a mammoth’s trunk a bison’s tailbone she is
Having sex
God is making babies in your tender lymph nodes giggling when you prod the swollen knots
God is pregnant
Parasitic fetus suppressing white cells God is an infection
Her incubation period as long as three sermons on the mount
Replication rate amplified by saline sweat and fear
A virus gave you a gene called SYN so you could grow placentas
SYN fuses baby
To mother fuses uterus to placenta
A virus blew air inside your drowning baby’s pigeon chest put some respect on her phospholipid
membranes
Watch God’s fat molecules shimmer
Her flagella undulate
If God is a virus we are over
Over & over again
Reborn absent pinky toes and coccyx
Spines seven degrees more erect
Praise the holy fevers pray for split-brained migraines

Seema Yasmin

These poems are unpublished and from my debut poetry collection, If God is a Virus, forthcoming from Haymarket in December 2020. If God Is A Virus is a collection of poems about the 2014-2016 West African Ebola epidemic. I am a medical doctor, poet and journalist and this collection combines documentary poems based on my original reporting from Liberia during the largest Ebola epidemic in history. I am an Emmy Award-winning journalist, a Kundiman Fiction Fellow, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize in 2017 for breaking news reporting. My chapbook, For Filthy Women Who Worry About Disappointing God, won the Diode Editions chapbook contest and was published in 2017.