from Passiflora by Juliana Spahr

The politics of the island in the middle of the Pacific were something else altogether. They were a part of the island that bit into them and those around them with bladelike, piercing mouthparts that stabbed through the skin and then injected a saliva that teemed with digestive enzymes, viruses, and anticoagulants. This bite often left behind an annoying itch, a reminder that things were not both the one and the other, could not be both the one and the other because both made no sense because there could not be both colonialism and sovereignty. The uncomfortable itch did not last long, but the bite left in their bloodstream a troubling, a questioning, some new sort of information, some prickly new cells that attached themselves to their blood cells and reshaped them, something that their immune system had to deal with that it hadn’t dealt with before. more..