Imagine being nineteen again, still pimply and awkward, parroting a script from behind a plexiglass wall: Phone number, please, you say, and imagine her fingers, typing one in. You hear the click, clicking of keys on the keypad, sickening, music of the dead, you think, you’re dying.
The Enforcer
You’re maybe a hundred pounds, just a little thing, whose mask covers two thirds your fragile face, and they buried you at the door, the enforcer, instructed to say— This door, not that, and arrows, follow them, follow them, do like I do, with this cover, my voice smothered, my soul—
Wrong Way
I’m sure I was just standing there, leaning over my cart, watching my daughter shop for cards, when I heard her voice— not the enforcer, but a fellow peruser, like me, another blank face, masked, breathless, breathlessly, you’re going the wrong way, she said, you’re not following the arrows, she said, and her bony, dead finger pointed down along the ground. I followed it, and sure enough, she was right about me: Rule breaker, careless spreader of germs. The shame, the shame, she would have me feel, for facing the wrong way, disobeying.
New Normal
Fuck that. My latest mantra. Fuck that and fuck that, too. Even as I do it. Where’s the humanity in this? I want to scream. But who would hear me? We’re too busy saving lives by not living, buttressed as we are behind masks, She doesn’t even realize I’m not smiling, Or, does she? Maybe there’s something of, fuck this shit, in my eyes, the only part of me she can see, if she tries to see, but she doesn’t.
The mask isn’t merely the covering for a mouth, a nose, — it’s blanket, too, as in a morgue. Covering the dead. And I know, my time is coming soon enough, but I’m not dead yet, covered as I am, prepared for burial. Yet, still pounding on coffins, trying to pull back the heavy veil, cursing my heart away,
Wings of butterflies, a vague memory of our wings. Birdsong. We sing, as we struggle to hear the melody. Revive and persevere. Strive. We hear it. Some days, it’s easy, like today: the journey, the song, the singing
What is the opposite of the violence you witnessed, hostages to our pain, too young to know what normal should be? But tonight, all three grown, and at my side, the peace of survivors who love and forgive– because what else is there except to love and forgive.
Flood warnings, became flooded streets, a gathering of mud, and other debris, while in our yard, a branch broke, from the old birch tree, and in it, the grass nest, a family of birds, now refugees.
And, I imagine them searching, for a place to start again, free of broken, flotsam dreams, their past life, falling from this tree, as the birch continued to bud, and the grass continued to green.
We are veterans of dead bones, products of love, and its loss, memorizers of last breaths, and what letting go feels like. The front line of memory gives way, what we held in our hands, dissolves, like water on clay– muddy water, returning to muddy ground, then dust; it is a fate that awaits all of us: empty arms, encircled of sacred air, grasping at remnants of what we valued there.
I searched metaphors to describe you, the aspen’s branches beating against themselves, waving for help, like desperate arms,
but that was the work of the wind.
The coyote, who devoured all except the head, and what appeared to be a shoulder of our girl cat, and left her among the weeds,
but that was the work of hunger.
Then I thought, maybe the foal, when they drove off with his mother, her whinnying, more distant and more distant, as he crushed his tender body against the rails,
but that was the work of love being torn away.
No, in the end, I came up empty explaining your helplessness against self-loathing, our loss of hope, and leaving,
but that, it seems now, was the work of surviving– surviving the things even poems can’t explain.
