Category: Culture

All of the streets and courtyards
are empty. The mayor asks citizens
to report those who break quarantine.
A boy wanders outside the Colosseum
while his mother sleeps off last night’s
heavy pour of table wine.

On the news, Italians serenade each
other on balconies, but they do not sing
in Rome because the epidemic has not yet taken
hold. There is little to celebrate when death
is coming for parents and grandparents,
a frail neighbor who smiles out her window.

A woman says it is ironic that a city
prided for its history should so mourn
its future, their only weapon another
month or two of hunkering down, and
based on neighbors to the north it will
not be enough.

She is 53 and unsure if that means she
is more or less likely to die. She says
she wishes she had visited the National Gallery
before this all started, that she wanted
to see Giacoma Balla’s A Wave of Light
one more time.

The woman in the painting looks exactly
as I remember my mother who died when
I was a girl. After seeing it for that one
and only time, I went to the restroom
and cried in a stall for an hour.

A man, a photographer, says he has only left
his house for groceries and to put out
the trash. I thought about taking my camera
on my walks to the store but there’s something
spiritual about the emptiness of Rome
I do not want to upset—a serenity
that you cannot capture in a photo.

The boy has returned from his walk, his
mother will soon wake and make him toast
with a thin layer of strawberry jam.
He is getting too old to be waited on,
he knows as does his mother, but for now,
they will each play their respective roles.

Outside the city limits, a nurse returns
with amended protocols. There will not be
enough room to treat the coming wave so
most people will need to be treated at home,
only those deemed serious or young enough
be admitted to the hospitals.

A doctor asks about the ventilators
that were sent north. When will they be
returned? No one knows. When he calls
the person he coordinated with, no one
answers. He leaves a message and returns
to his empty desk, everything filed
and organized in anticipation.

For those who believe, this is the time
for prayer. For those who do not, this
is the time for waiting.

This poem appeared on Rattle, April 2020.

Since the pandemic, no parties, no people
on the street waiting for the ball to drop,
just my husband and a couple of friends.

We drive to our cottage near the beach
to celebrate new beginnings
someplace new, at least to get away
from the sameness that has begun to suffocate:
the same four walls, same floor and ceiling,
even the Amazon boxes that collect weekly
in the recycling.

Here the walls are a different hue, the floors
more even and a tad darker, everything is slightly
not the same. The grocery store nearby sells
similar things, but in different arrangements:
bread, milk, bananas in different corners.

We scroll through TV channels for a host different
from years past, this one just as chipper
but less recognizable. He will do for the alchemy
we require this year.

A toast to something different: a vaccine
for the people, a sip of normalcy in which
dinner at a restaurant doesn’t seem so reckless,
where a movie on Friday night seems
an escape and not a risk, no jumping from a plane
tethered to an instructor for a steak and a salad.

I tick the boxes in my head: no more shutdowns,
no more masks, no more line in the sand
for political factions. I want the variety
of small shops open on Main Street,
a heated mall in which to circle inside
during winter, a place where restaurants
are all open and at capacity, even the bustle
of rush hour traffic as people travel
to and from actual jobs.

But in the end, I simply want my family and friends
to be safe. I want the clock at midnight to reset
and all the pain, annoyances, and deaths to stop.
An old woman wakes to New Year’s fireworks
someone has set off in the adjacent cul-de-sac.

She reaches for her husband
but he is not there, not since he died in July
from Covid. There were fireworks then as well.
She remembers seeing the sky
after the nurse called to say
he had passed: pink and blue pulses
of light amidst crackles and pops.

She remembers feeling nothing,
a suck of air in and out.
Her eyes puddle and she thinks of her two sons,
how they stood in her living room and each made calls,
planned a small ceremony for four days out,
to which almost no one came.

She closes her eyes and makes a wish
she knows cannot possibly come true.
Her mind rearranges memories and she struggles
to remember the name of the store
where her husband bought his suits,
wondering if it will ever open again.