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Journal of the Plague Year, Redux

Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

(after Daniel Defoe, 1665)

1. Invention of men, gathered from the letters: things, the distemper, did not spread

instantly, though ordinary burials increased in number. A single season felt like a slow

drag around the sun. Terrible apprehensions were among the people, especially the

weather being now changed and growing warm, and summer being at hand.

2. Infected houses and teeth began to swell, their neighbors shunning and refusing to converse with them, to

preserve their me in the midst of all the death.

It was a kind of flying from God.

3. Now indeed strangely altered: I mean the whole mass of buildings, city, liberties,

suburbs,

I mean the whole massacre of beliefs, civilities, libraries,

subversives,

I mean the matador of decency, humor, libidos, suicides.

4. The infection came at length to spread its utmost rage and violence, yet certain it is that

all sorts of villainies left their souvenirs. Filled everybody’s mouths with one preparation

or other.

5. Might well be said to be all in tears, the mourners did not go about the streets indeed. The

fears of the people were young: they’d forgotten the centuries that made them. The fears

of the young were people. Then rash and foolish conduct. Terrible apprentices in

togetherness.

6. Some indeed paid for their crass boldness with the price of their lives; an infinite number

fell sick, and the physicians had more work than ever. Sweated kindly in these fevers.

7. It was really a wonder, the whole body of the people.

8. A blazing star or comet appeared for several moons before the plague, their motions and

even their revolutions calculated. For better and worse, we had become so very

calculated, prone to universal remedy.

9. These public things were the dreams of old women.

10. The living would not be able to bury the dead.

Everybody began to think of their graves,

everybody began to think of their gravediggers,

everybody began to think of their gravities.

11. The city had a new face, so the manners of the people had a new appearance. For how

long? It was never a common calamity. Though death stared the world in the face.

12. Being observations or memorials

of the most remarkable occurrences:

we, audacious creatures so possessed with the first joy,

a visible summons to us all

about the writer

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, Colombian/Latinx, poet, artist, scholar, & activist. Her poetry collection The Inheritance of Haunting was selected by Ada Limón for the 2018 Letras Latinas Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize & was published by University of Notre Dame Press in March 2019. A 2019 CantoMundo Fellow, and 2018 VONA alum, her poetry has been published in Poetry, Academy of American Poets, Raspa, Feminist Studies, & Huizache, among other places.