And Now, A Word from Our Sponsors

PAUL JUHASZ

April 10, 2020

During the commercial break, twenty-six people died. CNN is keeping score, a metastasized number posted in the lower right corner.

Before the commercial break, a president bragged about his press conference ratings. After the commercial break, he’ll preen about how good a job he’s doing, because the dead don’t vote.

During the commercial break, someone plans their Spring Break, someone decides to hold a church services or a virus party, indifferent to ripple-effects or exponential growth.

During the commercial break, a woman writes a grocery list she’ll be too scared to use. Every person in the aisles suspect. Are you the person who’ll kill me? Am I the person who’ll kill you? 

During the commercial break, a nurse inventories N95 masks and implications a second time.

During the commercial break, bus drivers, garbage collectors, drive-through window-workers, gilded in new-found essentiality, offer themselves up in our stead.

During the commercial break, Verizon and CapitalOne want us to know we’re all in this together, as long as you pay your bill, as long as you send your stimulus check their way.

During the commercial break, a man thinks of his youngest son. They haven’t spoken since the divorce. Sometimes the father fears they’ve exchanged their last words but didn’t know it.

During the commercial break, an empty orange juice bottle, blown by an Oklahoma wind, wobble-skips across a parking lot. Its wind-moan, its hollow thunk, a dirge.

During the commercial break, a brace of deer flit across a weed-grown infield, kicking up forgotten chalk.

During the commercial break, three minutes and thirty-five seconds elapsed.

During the commercial break, twenty-six people died.

PAUL JUHASZ has read at dozens of conferences and festivals across the country, including Scissortail and the Woody Guthrie Festival. His work has appeared in bioStories, Red River Review, Voices de la Luna, Dragon Poet Review, Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way, and Speak Your Mind, and his comic journal, Fulfillment: Diary of an Amazonian Picker, chronicling his seven-month sentence at Amazon, has been published in abridged form in The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, then serialized in Voices de la Luna. He currently lives in Oklahoma City.