Trash
On my last day of teaching in Queens in March, when the university shuts down, I walk
Kissena Boulevard as fast as I can, nowhere to go, as if in motion I can find a plan for the rest of the ruined semester. Past the bodega and Dunkin Donuts on the side of the highway past the liquor store past the dumpling shop.
That afternoon, I wrote on the board: Lucille Clifton said she wanted to write a poetry that would comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
My class sat in chairs built by the incarcerated in upstate New York. The prisoners who make our hand sanitizer now.
I wrote on the board: the tenor and the vehicle comprise a metaphor. The more distance between them the better.
*
Bodies at Elmhurst hospital are shoveled into a refrigerated truck, trundled into a mass grave on an island.
My student emails, At the funeral mourners were told to bring their own shovels to the grave to dig,
My student emails, The sirens outside my apartment never stop.
*
At home, my daughter covers a wall with blackboard paint I ordered from curbside pickup and the owner of the paint store in a mask waves, then heads inside. Blackboard paint: its smoky grey is solace, I give my daughters all the chalk I once used in teaching.
*
Meanwhile the death toll in Queens rises.
The tenor and the vehicle. The epicenter of the virus is _____.
I email my students: We will still gather in community. Poetry is still important.
*
In the middle of the night, on my phone I read, the virus opens a seam in the world.
Lovely metaphor, but I don’t believe it.
* * * * *
Trash
Circling the parking lot at the closed down high school
where parents pick up emergency food for their children,
I study the cyclone fence, its rusted borders.
Loving its simple geometry
while my high school Latin, charted on a blackboard, soundtracks
through my head — qui quae quod. quarum quorum quarum.
Or the lines of Catullus we memorized senior year,
his only poem mourning his brother:
Though I am worn out with constant grief —
Grammar comforts. Ablative. Dative. My boots strike asphalt.
I picture a trench in the city, tumbled with bodies. My own sadness
I keep like a window slammed shut.
At the edge of the parking lot:
a blue latex glove. Tricycle missing a wheel.
* * * * *
Trash
Cold winter walk as the sky pinks open —
An empty beer bottle furred with ice.
Tinfoil cross strung with lights.
The squirrels are brash and ravenous.
I pass a masked couple holding hands.
I’ve walked three seasons,
in my mother’s black coat,
uselessly furious. I would like
to unspool, lie down on the sidewalk
and close my eyes.
Vodka bottle size of
a finger. Flattened box of pocky sticks.
I list what I miss:
Cool expanse of a library table.
The E-train shoulder to shoulder with bodies.
My father.
In the beginning,
spring was furiously green. Riots
of hydrangeas. Glittering maples.
A bright blue 9/11 sky.
Where is god, I don’t ask my father.
I walk. I index. I taxonomy.
Empty bottle of bleach.
Stone painted VOTE.
I walk to sever myself from myself.
What’s left is scraps
and fragments.