Social Distancing: Week Six
RICHARD MCALISTER
May 6, 2020
On the side of the road a few miles from Ute Lake
lies a lonely little piece of my ear
that shriveled in the sun & turned to dust
or was a meal for the belly of a bird or snake
or a morsel for a hungry coyote.
I wore a neck brace for months
because of classic adolescent fantasy:
It could never happen to me.
I could drive at twice the legal speed limit
and I would not bounce my 280Z through the air
like a boy's Lego thrown across the living room carpet.
That same adolescent fantasy
inhabits Sling TV on the tablet
mounted next to my PC monitor: WFH
Governors re-open restaurants
and people stroll sandy beaches arm-in-arm
barefaced, gloveless, while
Johns Hopkins' map turns redder and redder,
Reporters question a tiny gravel-voiced doctor—
a novel Don Quixote tilting at a novel virus—
who stands in the looming shadow
of the pretender-pumpkin-in-charge of plagues.
.
Ice-rink morgues in Spain and Maryland.
Abandoned nursing-homes in Madrid,
empty but for beds cradling
grandmothers who exhaled their last
with no one to hold their hand.
In New York, sheet-shrouded corpses
line ER hallways, zippered bags fill semi-trailers,
and workers in vinyl hazmat suits
stack
neat
white
rectangles
in a corpse landfill.
The bulldozers work at night.
Blocks and blocks and blocks
of middle-class cars line streets waiting
for a bag or box of canned beans, rice, and pasta
from a masked, gloved volunteer
in the new drive-thru soup kitchens.
And tea-party protesters
bring pickets to the south
instead of Boston.
Hungry, unemployed, wondering:
Starvation vs COVID-19—
Six feet of separation—
Does it really matter?
Nero fiddles. Rome burns.
And a chunk of adolescent ear decomposes.
Leave the tanning bed light on for all of us
in this Motel 6 full of cockroaches bearing novel coronavirus
to the breakfast buffet in New Normal, U.S.A.
RICHARD MCALISTER is a husband, a father, an English teacher at Boys Ranch High School, and a poet whose work has appeared in Lyric magazine.
