Coronavirus Cento
LISA TOTH SALINAS
March 31, 2020
with lines by Texas poets
In a crisis of quietness,
the chasm widening between our bodies,
separation is an illusion.
How long can a heart begin the day
raging at the window
to the world from our cloistered realm,
tuning in to silence juxtaposed against the steady rhythm of this still self-sufficient heart?
A city rises skyward, each slab and brick
wondering why
we will only wave as we pass by
across sidewalks and driveways.
And I look across an apocalyptic evening:
the expanse of grass emptied of students on break,
walls of a world crumbling from fault-laden cracks,
the same quiet that closes
as if every dead and dying thing
lay on a bed of white hospital sheets.
Some nights it burns at the center, this quiet.
Misery, we know, is too much company.
It's a tear-clogged throat, a white tombstone grave.
Not one alone can carry it.
Everyone else's tragedy is mine.
All the danger
is the same in every language.
Your healthy & sick cells
accumulate one sunrise at a time,
those circlets overlapping, life to life
stretched to breaking with the heaviness
in the midst of all this heat and death.
Although the will to stay is growing weak,
if it has to be this way –
pulling in and falling back to an unthinkable "If" –
it’s not all bad. Hell has its comforts.
It is a sad, sweet, brief delaying.
The blue umbrellas side by side, the people looking away…
That is a kind of hope.
How they reach for something greater than themselves:
the path of sunlight through leaves, birdcalls beyond,
how to work harder, together with compassion,
to shelter in the usual,
to mend and overcome these scars.
LISA TOTH SALINAS is a poet and genealogist. She is author of Smallest Leaf (2015), awarded the Eakin Manuscript Prize by the Poetry Society of Texas. Her poems have appeared in Presence, Encore, St. Austin Review, mater et magistra, The Houston Chronicle, and elsewhere. Lisa is a featured poet within the collaborative poetry and visual art exhibit Color:Story. Follow her on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/lisatothsalinas/ and Twitter at https://twitter.com/smallestleaf.
1. Jan Seale, "Straight Pin" 2. Katie Hoerth, "Poem in Which I Feel Ripped From My Mother's Arms" 3. Sandi Horton, "We Are Family" 4. Loretta Diane Walker, "Of Long and Longing" 5. Diane Glancy, "Everything You Must Do Be Bible" 6. Melissa Studdard, "Tithing - for Hildegard of Bingen" 7. Cassy Burleson, "A Poet Is Never Alone or Lonely, Even Somewhere Way Out Here or There" 8. Robin Davidson, "To Speak of Rivers" 9. Michael Owens, "Hospital Room" 10. Rosemary Catacalos, "La Casa" 11. Anne McCrady, "Lament" 12. Frances Treviño Santos, "She, the Owl" 13. Aaron Brown, "The Calling" 14. Charlotte Renk, "Rocking from the Irrawaddy to Walmart" 15. Octavio Quintanilla, "Gregor Samsa's Sister" 16. Aaron Brown, "I don't know anything about suffering" 17. Sheila Fiona Black, "Mercy" 18. Bruce Bond, "Host" 19. Bruce Bond, "Narcissus in the Underworld #29" 20. Loretta Diane Walker, "A Soldier's Postcard to the Future" 21. Diane Glancy, "Register of Departures" 22. Christine Boldt, "Venn Meditation" 23. Sasha West, "Husbands are Deadlier than Terrorists" 24. Budd Powell Mahan, "One Sky Above" 25. Terry Jude Miller, "How to Survive Radiation Treatments" 26. Courtney O'Banion Smith, "Up Early" 27. Christine Boldt, "Venn Meditation" 28. Jenna Pashley Smith, "The Night Garden" 29. Katie Hoerth, "How to Love in the Borderlands" 30. Valerie Martin Bailey, "A Reluctant Farewell" 31. Diane Glancy, "St. Bo-gast-ah Hears the Confession of the Deer" 32. Charlotte Renk, "Rocking from the Irrawaddy to Walmart" 33. Bruce Bond, “Narcissus in the Underworld #9” 34. Melissa Studdard, "Barefoot Rondelet" 35. Rosemary Catacalos, "Picture Postcard from a Painter" 36. Susan Maxwell Campbell, "Toward a Light" 37. Loretta Diane Walker, "Snapdragon, Passion Flowers, and Cabbage" 38. Naomi Shihab Nye, "Farming" 39. Charlotte Renk, "Sting and Swell of Hive" 40. Budd Powell Mahan, "One Sky Above" 41. Barbara Blanks, "Trinity"
