The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) responded to a hantavirus outbreak reported on May 2. The outbreak resurfaced panic and fears from the COVID-19 outbreak of the 2020s. Despite reactions, global health organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) assure the risk from hantavirus to the US is low.

There are few things as ordinary, and simultaneously as powerful, as words. A single word, an ordinary phrase, can carry enormous energy—not unlike a uranium fuel pellet, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, yet dense with potential. That energy can be harnessed to power something lasting, or mishandled in ways that cause profound harm. Words, too, carry that kind of force. A few words can comfort, persuade, invite, wound, exclude, repair, or remain with someone for

When I read “The First Water Is the Body” in 2020, after Natalie Diaz’s book, Postcolonial Love Poem (in which the poem appears), won the Pulitzer Prize, my consciousness felt diverted like a river around a boulder. I struggled to grasp another poem as this one settled, alive, into my body. Perhaps it didn’t settle at all, like the settler I am in Canada. The poem helped me remember the river that I, too, already am.