Dave Bonta's "Antidote" is a fragmentary memory of a cold, abandoned landscape, and of a feverish state of mind that has since passed. The opening images are slow and numb: half-frozen flies, a bullet-scarred bucket, a pond choked with duckweed. Against this stillness, the speaker recalls what it felt like to move "like a flame" among prized objects, perhaps the spoils of some raid, and to feel a fever break as a treasure hummed in the palm. The poem doesn't say exactly what the treasure or the raid is, so those details stay mysterious.
The speaker's feeling is a quiet, distant wistfulness. "I have only muscle memory / of this now" admits that the intensity is gone, leaving only a bodily trace. The ending pulls the poem back to the cold: a hooded falcon, bare oaks like a ribcage, the speaker passing through. The mood is hushed, wintry, and a little haunted, as if the speaker has walked out of one state of being into another.