Poetry | January 13, 2026

The Hard Kind

I wake with quinine in my dreams.
I wash my hands in bleach water
fold the mosquito net off the cot
and step into the sun like it’s a job.
By eight the clinic is full full full.
Mothers with babies too quiet to be well.
Boys with eyes that shine too bright
for how dull the world must look to them.
I measure doses, count pills, whisper
Tudu ta pasa—Everything will pass.
I’ve seen too many things that don’t.
A girl comes in carried like a sack of grain,
sweat soaked through her dress.
Her mother sees me as a judge
of fate, like I can sentence death
to leave this child alone.
Malária dura, the hard kind.
The kind that makes the skin tight
and the breath come shallow.
I mix saline with artesunate;
the needle sliding in the way you learn
from years of trying to get it right.
The girl murmurs N’sta kansadu—I’m tired;
this is not a child who’s been running
but someone who’s walked to the edge
and is deciding whether to turn back.
I touch her forehead, cool now. A lie
the body tells just before the worst.
At night I write her name
in the ledger with the others.
Some have crosses. She does not. Not yet.
When her eyes open on morning three
and she asks for avocado, I smile
like I’ve been holding it in for years.
Her mother claps, says N’ca ten nada ku deus—
I hold nothing against God today.
I write that in the margin too.
We send them home with mosquito nets,
with pills they’ll split three ways,
with advice that sounds like warning but is love.
And I stay listening to the groaning fan
like a woman growing old again,
telling the same story again
because it’s the one that’s true.