Stuff a rag in your ragged mouth. Now, scream. Cough.  Taste the blood  in the back of your throat. That is the flavor of panic.

Does the whiskey help me sleep or will I always see the crack in the coffin shining its light  into my one open eye?

Covid-1

It seems unlikely that I’ll die strapped to a chair,  a woman with slicked back hair demanding the codes  to the safe or the encryption…

In Italy the death toll doubles, hospital beds choke the halls —  coughs trapped in weakened lungs.

They’re digging mass graves in the deserts of Iran, with too many bodies to bury and more on the way.

This poem will not go viral but the world outside is going to shit, and who has enough coffee to survive this apocalypse of bullshit?

It hurts to breathe  as if I inhaled a cloud a cloud of fiberglass dust, it hurts to bear witness to this constant stream this constant…

Saint Corona, Patron Saint of pandemics, please hear my prayer: do not allow me to make myself prisoner of my own paranoia,

No days off for nurses, for doctors, for epidemiologists caught in a losing race against time, lives held  like water  in a bucket with…

I want to buy a gun. Maybe it’s something I’ll never need, but there’s a cold comfort in steel and the physics of force.

I’ve contracted the virus, yet I remain asymptomatic. I’ve become a weapon made of breath and blood, I creep close  and share my love,

The beaches of Florida are packed, a prism of sun glare waves and oiled bodies where the kids welcome death like a lover mixing drinks…

In Oregon the strippers were put out of work so they started delivering food bare breasted, a service guaranteed to rush blood to the head…

If every three days, the numbers double

Where surgical masks become scarce and latex gloves get slippery with sweat, the nurses are wearing plastic trash bags in ICU wards.

~after Maggie Smith

Covid-19 was created in a lab, invented by the Chinese, coordinated by the Russians as a bio-weapon to weaken the world for the communist…

I remember my normal life, the ease and malaise of it, the somber saunter of routine.

You’re fine until your wife starts coughing and death takes on the size and shape of a garbage bag filled with worn out shoes, every shoe…

It’s so easy to focus on the negative, when you know every breath contains the possibility of your death:

The good news is you probably won’t die today, you probably won’t die tomorrow, the minuscule odds fluctuate like chaos that lives…

~for John Prine

That was the year they stopped shaking hands, the year the porch lights turned green across the neighborhoods and backstreets of Kentucky…

Plastic pastel clamshell eggs tucked into bunches  of bright green grass, when I was a child  some held dollar bills,

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times, grief became the burden of attempting to wear two hundred thousand veils, and the…

I hope to escape this digital cocoon,  that we all emerge from our homes like cicadas breaking free of their husks, glistening green and…