A Plate of Pandemic
Published Quarterly on the Solstices and Equinoxes
Creativity in Times of Crisis
hot summer day flaunting its distractions sings a siren song of temptation through the open windows of boredom and alone come out and play! warble boardwalks beaches bars in three part harmony on breezes stirring leaves of memory the perfume
How many times she almost destroyed herself, How she was nothing but molten, constantly flaring, combustible- How she just kept erupting under the weight of her own gravity How alone she felt in what she thought was the darkness between
-after one year in isolation/Feb 2021 We often rose before the light, Mornings after a dream-adorned sleep had calmed the day’s swelter, or the hushed world became encased in snow. We drank black coffee with grace, gently
Twelve-hours shifts in the ICU watching Covid-19 patients take their last dwindling breaths, unmasked people standing vigil outside the hospital insist their relatives on ventilators only have the flu. If the hospital claims otherwise, it’s to get more federal dollars.
Nobody still resembled their familiar selves exactly so friends and acquaintances wearing masks were a relief to me. Each person had been transformed to a potential vector: furthering the pathogen’s aims intentionally or not. These individuals thus differed from who
In February, when the days are beginning to bloom again, I praise: all light and the ice hard-scattered riverside and skaters in homemade clearings scratching across the cold pandemic time that flows without end. I praise: the barren pin
I first waved my wings as an angel lying in fresh-fallen snow near Minnehaha Creek ln time when New York City called I took flight from home eked out a living with an Olivetti read beat poetry by candlelight
The world’s reduced to squares of little nows: a patch of backyard mends the bedroom wall; the street zips floor to ceiling, and allows the ghost cars past our kitchen, down the hall. And in a garden struggling to