Cannot Be

the map of fifty
looks like a torso covered
in German measles
or painful shingles, this is
the spread of the big box store

the map looks like a
graph without correlation,
or one with a low
spread coefficient, the kind
that creeps out statisticians

even the map's hues,
yellow dots against a blue
backdrop gives it the
appearance of death from a
layman's or novice's view

when compared against
the other four maps on the
wall, the outbreak is
beyond viral and even
far beyond bacterial

in five decades, the
viral or bacterial
spark has spread through memes
and genes and it cannot be
quarantined as a hazard