These houses on stilts are for bats
or birds—and the teenage lepers 
built them in shop class
because the doctor loved his Lord 
and metaphors, swore every sore suffered
its sticky gum so He could fix there
feathers—after—they’d stopped believing 
it did some good to keep them 
contained in the mythic contagion—
touching—but only a little, in secret, 
under the smudge stick of dusk, the wings 
of the fan beating off the bugs
while birds and bats zoomed homeless
hungry whirligigs above.