20 April 2020
The Chinese woman
wearing a straw hat and black pants sings as she walks. An older
couple stops at the curb to check their steps. Bryant chants “little
roaches” as he kills them. They’re social creatures, so he
doesn’t feel great. Birds skitter over a bass line of construction
truck tires. Power tools or saxophone scales? So many musicians dying
now.
A white woman leans
out of a silver truck, clutching a sign about freedom. It’s in the
same font as all the others. A nurse in blue scrubs and a mask stands in the
crosswalk, blocking her way. “Go back to China!” she yells. He’s
protecting the ambulance route into the hospital. To
replaced from in our freedom lexicon. We are free to infect
each other. Funeral rites are difficult, what with social distancing.
It’s not the dead who scare us.
Hyper-focus on the
mossy wall to spot a lizard. Zoom in on a leaf growing through a gap
beside the lanai. Modulate your ear to hear for the shama thrush.
This is not trauma, this being alert to detail, but self-defense. We
quarantine ourselves from the news some days; it’s not healthy for
us. Our respiratory systems cannot handle another press conference. A
former colleague’s partner is in the ICU with pneumonia.
I meditate with a
group over zoom. The teacher says maybe don’t record the part where
we only sit. A slight against silence, I think. The image of silence is
still photograph, not video. Lilith and I turned the corner to
deposit her poop in green dumpster #3 and came face to face with a
hobby horse. Wonder if they ever fixed the springs on those things,
Bryant wonders. They sure could pinch your fingers.
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