Argument for Living
--after Dr. Raven the Science Maven’s twitter survey on viruses—alive, dead, or it’s complicated

If viruses showed up on Mars
We’d scream life.

They look like lunar landers.
Their shells are shatterproof.
They build capsids in milliseconds 
which snowflakes never do.

My god, if sea jellies
are mostly water without heart, brain or lungs
then viruses are
alive, I yield my time.

If viruses are alive
then so are the DNA minipreps
behind the carton of fresh plums
in my laboratory freezer.

Babies fuse cells into a sac
to dwell in, thanks to a gene
a virus left behind.
Without it we’d be laying eggs.
The architect of pregnancy—alive.

I’m afraid of air.
Can a dead thing
grand mal itself across the world 
for two years and be sequenced ten million times?

I breathe your breath
And in that moment,
loving you
is an argument for living.

Jill Neimark:  I’m an author of adult and children’s fiction and nonfiction, and have published poetry, reviews and essays in Cimarron Review (nominated for a Pushcart 2021), Construction Literary Magazine (finalist in contest 2020), Blue Nib, The Rumpus, Aeon, Los Angeles Review, Borderlands and Massachusetts Review.