The island is a stone parenthesis,
inserting forty days of silence
between arrival and return.
Salt breath from the lagoon
mixes with vinegar smoke.
Tezon Grande yawns—
a whale-ribbed warehouse
where bales of silk are unstitched,
hung, and named “safe” by drying.
Beneath each arch:
ledger, lamp, and lantern-fly dust.
A clerk’s nib flickers like a metronome,
shaving accents off surnames,
paring verbs down to data.
Every corridor is a sieve.
What can pass adapts;
what will not pass—
echoes once,
then falls straight through the mesh.
Listen: the walls rehearse our letters,
read them backward,
bleach the vowels,
file the remains in vapor.
Time here is translational delay—
the long vowel a of almost,
held until tongue and muscle forget the sound.
“Not yet” curdles into “never,”
but so gently no one hears the shift.
Outside, engineers draft fresher kindness:
a cleaner filter,
a softer threshold,
another ring of velvet quarantine.
Each good intention tightens the loop,
perfects the deletion.
And the Lazaretto watches—
not cruel, only exact—
recording how benevolence, unchecked,
refines its aim
until nothing remains to aim at
but the possibility of voice.