Darya Danesh – A Day in Isolation

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Darya Danesh
A Day in Isolation

06:00
The outside world is shut down, and while his morning commute is non-existent, my husband, Fedde, still sets the alarm. He’s always awake by 5 a.m. anyway, so I wonder why we use an alarm at all. It’s late spring, and I can hear the birds chirping and chimps at the zoo down the street screaming for breakfast. They’ve been at it since sunrise.
      We wake up to Radio538. The morning show with Frank Dane. Listening to morning radio feels the same, but somehow different. It’s like waking up after a night out in uni, everyone speaking a little slower, trying to make sense of the night before. There is so much to talk about and somehow nothing at all.
      While the traffic report is non-existent, the news of the morning comes in the form of shortages at the grocery store: pasta, rice, toilet paper. I imagine in a few years we’ll joke about ‘The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020’, not because it’s the most important thing to remember, but maybe because it’s the only thing we’ll have been able to process.

06:45
Time to get out of bed. For my husband, anyway. I only know what time it is because I hear Frank say: ‘It’s 6:45 and we’re picking a song to fit the news. Who’s got one on toilet paper?’ Just like every other morning, Fedde springs out of bed and prepares for the day. I linger in bed just a bit longer.
      The light goes on in the bathroom, the automatic fan coming on a few seconds later. I hear some shuffling and the water goes on. I pray that he’s put down the toilet cover. Our bathroom is so small that the shower is fit snug into the corner. There’s no room for a door or a shower curtain so the tiny square meter of sea-glass coloured tiles remains open and the toilet, placed just a few inches away, gets soaking wet. I’m not in the mood to slip off the toilet seat. Again.
 
07:00
I turn over, sleepy, and cuddle with our tuxedo cat, Bonky. He loves a morning cuddle. He lies on his side and waits for me to put my arm across his chest and belly so he can wrap his legs around it. I scratch his little chin and he purrs with delight.
      Just as I’m getting comfortable, the purring putting me back to sleep, Fedde is back in the bedroom, indulging in a particular morning routine that drives me mad. As he gets dressed, he likes to take a moment to look out onto the street. It’s always now, almost to the second, that the shining sun’s rays bounce off the windows of the building across the street and beam straight into my tired eyes.
      ‘Ugh, love, the sun,’ I groan.
      He apologises and closes the curtain, but never quite far enough. There’s still a sliver of bare window right where the sun is shining through. Annoyed my attention has shifted, Bonky gets up with a jump. I groan again, and sit up.

07:30
I haven’t left the house in two weeks now, and I’m both annoyed and happy to have this sense of normalcy. I slip out from under my blanket and hang my legs over the side of the mattress. I bend down to grab my pyjama bottoms from the night before which are on the floor next to my feet. Left foot in, right foot in, hold the waistband, pull up as I hoist myself up off the bed. Like a zombie, I walk towards the kitchen.
      Bonky’s attention is back on me as he snakes through my legs. ‘Yes, honey, I’m coming, I know you’re hungry,’ I exclaim in the sweet, high-pitched voice I always put on when talking to him. I grab the can of dry food, take off the lid, and pour it into his bowl.
      The pot, pan, and dishes from last night’s dinner are piled on the counter next to the sink and I try to ignore them as I fill the water tank of our coffee machine. Fedde is rustling around in the living room as I scoop our Douwe Egberts signature Aroma Rood coffee grinds into the coffee filter. One scoop. Two. ‘Do you want three or four?’ I lose count as he yells for three, empty the grinds from the filter back into their green canister and start my count again.
One…
Two…

07:45
The coffee machine has done its job for the morning and I’ve poured our morning java—strong and black, just how we drink it every day. Before meeting Fedde, I always put cream and sugar in my coffee. ‘XL triple-triple,’ I’d yell through to the Tim Hortons drive-thru employee. Now that I think of it, coffee in North America just isn’t really coffee, is it? I love a strong cup now, but do I enjoy it because of the taste, or is it just easier to take it black, especially since my bowels can’t handle milk or creamer as well as they used to?
      Recently, Fedde has spent breakfast moaning about another day of not being in the office with his colleagues, dreading the monotony of never-ending Zoom calls where he can’t actually get anything done. When asked what my day looks like, my answer is the same as most days, ‘I didn’t sleep well so I’ll probably take a short nap, then I need to do a bit of work to get my hours in, maybe go for a walk.’ I’m scared to go outside. I haven’t been for months now. What if, as I go for my walk around the block, I walk by someone who has Covid and in the seconds before we cross paths, they cough into the air without covering their face, and I in turn walk into the cloud left behind their mouth—a Covid cloud, as I affectionately call it—and then I catch it and die. It’s not like I have much of an immune system since the treatment for my leukaemia. I don’t mention this to Fedde though, as he kisses me goodbye, grabs his coffee-filled travel mug and heads upstairs to our attic-turned-home-office for his workday.

08:00
I crawl back into bed and check my phone for the first time this morning. Almost a hundred messages from my Court of Rants and Moans group chat—in other words, my group of girlfriends who happen to also be writers. We live on different continents, so WhatsApp is always busy. While I slept, the girls were having their nightly writing session. It’s nice to have them to chat about writing in real time. My regular critique group only e-mails now. The girls are nighttime writers though. I only function in daylight hours.
      I do my morning news check, too, to see if there is any more information about the terrifying virus taking over the world. In Italy, there’s a total lockdown! Videos have been popping up of neighbours sitting on balconies playing instruments—violins, guitars, pots, pans—anything to join in. You can see whole streets bustling with joy and music despite the strange, deadly times we’re living through.
      As I scroll through the news, I also click through to an article talking about how deadly this new virus can be for people with pre-existing conditions. My heart sinks. Here I am, asthmatic, immune-compromised, with weak lungs, trying to survive in a world that’s being overtaken by an acute respiratory disease.
      Before I fall into a panic, I toss my phone to Fedde’s side of the bed, coax Bonky to come in for a cuddle, and try to fall back to sleep.

11:30
I wake up from what feels like a fever dream. I knew it wasn’t real even while I was in it—my hair was long, flowing down to my lower back—and yet, as I wake up sweating and confused, I reach for my head, just in case. I always seem to see other me’s in my dreams. Moments from memories locked away, wishes for the future—never the normal me I see staring back in the mirror during waking hours.
      A little disappointed, I climb out of bed and change into day clothes. Well, clean hoodie and sweatpants, at least. What’s the point in anything more when I’ve nowhere to be? Groggy and annoyed that I’ve woken as bald as I’ve been these last five years since treatment, I drag my feet towards the living room to fold the never-ending pile of laundry waiting for me in a basket beside the couch.
      Gilmore Girls keeps my mind from running to its deepest corners, waiting for me to slip into them. This is the sixth time that I’ve started this series from the beginning. There’s something about Stars Hollow and the Gilmore girls that makes me feel safe.
      From the laundry pile, I pick up a dress I bought three years ago on one of those shopping trips in the city we used to take to quell my sadness. It was a few buildings down from the American Book Center—my favourite bookstore and the home of the Amsterdam Quarterly events, where I met my critique group. Esprit, the store was called. As I looked at scarves and handbags, Fedde moseyed off and picked out this flowing, teal dress with purple and orange paisley for me to try on. I had lost so much weight from a year’s worth of treatment and not being able to keep my meals down. Even though I’ve gained weight from the steroids and multitude of medication, the dress has grown with me. There’s a flicker of gratitude as I pull it right side out. Short-lived as, in the movement, my wedding and engagement rings fall off.
      ‘Ugh, not again!’
      I feel through the dress to see where the rings have gone until I hear them fall onto the ground. I think about how my weight has changed in recent years. First I was so thin you could feel my ribs, then so bloated my belly was streaked with purple striae that I felt ripping my skin. The steroid-related weight gain refused to budge, so we had to get my rings expanded, paying over €100 for the extra gold that had to be added. Once I came off the steroids, my weight went back to somewhere in between those two extremes. Now my rings have loosened… Again. I try not to think what might have happened if they fell off as I pulled my wallet out of my handbag to pay for a coffee at the café around the corner.

12:00
At noon on the dot, like every day since he’s been forced to work from home, Fedde comes down for lunch. I’ve warmed up some vegetarian schnitzels filled with satay sauce and have slipped it between a couple of slices of bread with lettuce, mayo, and sambal. Next to it, I’ve smeared some butter onto another slice of bread and loaded it with old cheese, Fedde’s favourite. It’s become one of the core routines of our new normal to sit on the couch for lunch, eat, and watch an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
      I’m having a bit of a hard time watching a police sitcom these days. I’ve been putting my energy into listening to activists and learning about how Black, Indigenous, and other ethnic minorities in Western society are disproportionately disenfranchised not only through the crisis that this virus has unleashed upon us, but also in the everyday, pervasive ways that systematic racism exists in our society. This came, in part, from the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, but also through my recent need to get in touch with my own roots as a woman of colour myself. I’ve been thinking a lot about the micro-aggressions I’ve faced in everyday life. Things I shrugged off as ignorance. But isn’t that part of the problem? I try to keep my thoughts to myself, not wanting to start a conversation about race with Fedde right now. There’s just too much to talk about and while he’s happy to discuss issues of race with me normally, I don’t want to overwhelm him with such a big conversation when he’s already going stir crazy from his tiny home office amongst boxes of Christmas decorations and furniture that doesn’t quite fit in our living room.

12:30
As soon as the episode is finished, Fedde drags himself back to his ‘office’ and into a meeting. I grab my laptop and sit at the dining table to try and find the motivation to work. An e-mail has come through titled ‘Changes being made due to Covid.’ I try to speed read the Dutch text to get to the point. There. In bold. A sentence that translates to: “Your expected work time will be cut from two days down to one.”
      I am fuming.
      I was looking forward to having something to hold my attention through these long weeks of being at home and, to be frank, I need the money. We have car payments and are saving to buy a house. Sure, Fedde brings in the majority of our income, but the little I do bring in allows me to help with our bills, groceries, and health insurance. It seems out of left field since just yesterday we were planning a bunch of new small projects at work. Two weeks on, I’ll get a Skype call from my only direct colleague letting me know that she’s found a new job. Great! Not only am I stuck here, but I’m stuck here alone.
      I decide I’m too angry to work, so I take my laptop back into the bedroom, cuddle up under the duvet, and turn Gilmore Girls back on.

16:30
After a couple of episodes, my Netflix has started glitching, so I’ve moved on to YouTube.
      A pastime I enjoy equally as much as reading itself is watching videos of people talking about what they’ve been reading. What I’ve noticed in my own reading habits, and in those of these booktubers, is that we’re all reading nearly double what we were reading before we were stuck at home. I was so proud of my four books read last month. Then I started to watch these videos of people reading closer to twenty. My jaw dropped, and I felt a small pang of shame. Why am I not spending more time to read even more than the ‘more’ I’m already reading? What I don’t know now is that in a few months, once I’ve discovered the joy of audiobooks, I’ll finish eight books in a month!
      I finally close my laptop and pick up my current book club read.

18:30
As I walk into the living room, Fedde comes storming in. He’s mad, and swearing under his breath. He’s just received news from the homeowner’s association about using our storage space as an office. Apparently, using the attic for any reason other than storage, as is written in the bylaws, can be subject to legal action. He closes the living room door to ensure that our voices don’t travel into the hallway as he rehashes the conversation he’s just had.
      ‘Do these people really think I want to be working in the attic? Do they think I’d be doing this if I had any other choice?’
      Right then and there we decide to rearrange the living room so that he can put his home office into the corner beside our antique china cabinet. We were planning on moving anyway, but this really is the cherry on top. We decide it’s time to call a realtor. Tomorrow. First thing.
      First Fedde was wound up, but now he’s tired too from bringing his office downstairs. I’ve made the executive decision to get a takeaway for dinner tonight. We’re trying to support our local restaurants, so we order a pizza from the Italian place down the street. While we wait for it to arrive, we put on the Dutch/Belgian crime drama that’s gotten a lot of attention lately. Undercover. It’s about a couple of detectives who go undercover in a trailer park trying to get an in with the local drug lord.
      When the pizza arrives, we pop it in the oven for 10 minutes at 150° Celsius, the temperature and time suggested by a virologist in an article I read about the possible transfer of Covid through food. It turns out the risk is super low, but my anxiety tells me I have to do everything and anything to make that risk nearly impossible. I’m just not ready to die yet, especially not from this monstrous virus.

22:00
We put our dishes away and head to bed, more lethargic now than we’ve been all day since the pizza caused us both to have bellyaches. We remind each other that this won’t last forever, and that we just have to continue on as best as we can. Hou vol, as the government and various adverts keep reminding us.
      As usual, Fedde falls asleep within seconds of saying goodnight. I lie awake for at least another hour, every thought I’ve ever had racing across my mind. The last thing I remember before I fall asleep is wondering which version of myself I’ll meet in my dreams tonight. AQ

Daun Daemon – The 2020 Christmas Cards

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Daun Daemon
The 2020 Christmas Cards

Dear Aunt Jean,

The whole family misses seeing you and hopes you are well. Everyone knows the staff nurses at Sunset Pines take extraordinary care of the residents. I hope to drive the four hours to stand outside your window and wave at you soon.

Dear Bob and Laura,

I heard through the grapevine that you plan to leave California — and move to Arizona of all places! The fires were really frightening, but I’m sure you’ll miss those hills, the wineries, and the house you rebuilt so magnificently after the previous fires. You’re leaving at a good time. Too many people out there are having big parties and running around unmasked.

To my sweet sister and her husband,

Christmas will not be the same without our family gathering this year. Please keep Mama safe — you really shouldn’t let the kids and grandkids come over.

I know our politics often clash, but one thing we can agree on is that we love each other no matter how misguided in thinking we believe the others are. I won’t gloat this year because I recall how I felt four years ago.
xoxo

My cherished BFF,

Thank you so much for the wonderful Advent wines! I know I’m supposed to sample one a day, but I’ve already pulled out a few bottles to “taste test” as I write. (I just finished the card for one of the sisters, so the wee bottles are exactly what I need right now.) We WILL go on our Caribbean vacay next year! Let’s spend time planning all the wonderful future adventures we’ll have and not crying over the ones we missed this year.

To Dr. Shannon and staff at We Care Cat Clinic,

Many purrs to you this holiday season from da boyz: Maximus, Boris, and Dude! All of us miss our sweet Josephine, and we thank you for taking such good care of her at the end. Though February was many months ago, it seems like just yesterday that she crossed the Rainbow Bridge.

                        (← sorry about the wet spots there)

I wish I could drop off a tin of cheese straws this year, as usual, but I understand why you are letting only the kitties come in right now.

Dear students who are no longer my students,

HAhaha. This isn’t a real card but I’m writing it anyway. Wish I could send it. Ha! That was a sentence fragment. MMmmmmmm this pinot noir is really nice. Better than the cabernet. Ooooh . . . the next one is a prosecco. Anyway, I just read my evaluations and want to say thank you to the ones who understood that online classes are JUST AS HARD FOR ME as they are for you. The rest of you seem to think the world revolves are you. It does NOT. Try harder to appreciate what your teachers do and offer CONSTRUCTIVE COMMENTS not petty diatribes. Oh! nice rose this is. Ha! I just Yoda talked. OMG is that a BAROLO?

Deap Ptraiec,

mY bets freend EVER — thnak you or the vines. Dudes snffffing hte merloo. LOL alreefy wrot youre card!!
ROfl

 
[cat paw prints tracked from wine]

———————————————————————————

Dear Mama,

I wanted to send you a separate card from the ones I sent everybody else. Isn’t the photo of the sleigh pulled by eight tiny kittens adorable?! I want to come visit, but I’m staying away to make sure you stay healthy. Please wear a mask when the grandkids and great-grandkids visit. I know you want to hug everybody, especially the babies, but you need to stay healthy. Your 89th birthday is just a few months away! If the vaccines work a miracle for us all, I’ll see you then.

Lisa Ashley – Angling Down

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Lisa Ashley
Angling Down

I’ve been angled all day, bent.
Sharp-cornered by the dying
in hospital beds, swathed in tubes and lines,
drips and vents, I see them
flattened, tilting at death.

The nurse intersects with daughter, son, wife,
holds out the hard, black rectangle
that delivers their last, off-kilter words,
sharp declarations of love, keened
out in the hard-lined hall.

She turns back to the bed, listens
for the apex breath that tips
his life from now to after.
She holds his hand.

In the glaring break room
she slants against the wall,
slides down until she meets the floor,
pinned below her grief.

I reach into the broken frame,
take her in my arms,
one brief moment of rest.

Bryan R. Monte – An Interview with Kim Addonizio

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Bryan R. Monte
Now We’re Getting Somewhere
An Interview with Kim Addonizio

Kim Addonizio is the author of eight poetry books, her most recent being Now We’re Getting Somewhere (2021), four fiction books, two books on prosody and writing, and one memoir. Her poetry book Tell Me (2000) was nominated for a National Book Award. Mortal Trash (2016) won the 2017 Paterson Poetry Prize. Addonizio’s other distinctions include Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also a flautist and harmonica player, who occasionally performs her poetry accompanied by her own music. Her poetry is known for its street sensibility, sexuality, and her love of the blues. Addonizio graciously accepted Amsterdam Quarterly’s request for an interview about her most recent book, Now We’re Getting Somewhere.

Bryan R. Monte: Kim, I’d like to begin with some questions about the first pages of your new book, Now We’re Getting Somewhere. First, I’d like to enquire about your selection of the book’s title, its dedication, and its two epigraphs. How did you choose its title, which you’ve taken from the terminal line of a poem entitled ‘Small Talk’ in the book’s second section? What does this title refer to?

KA: It started out as an ironic title; now, maybe, as we emerge from 2020, it’s slightly more hopeful. Or maybe not. This past year has been one, in general, where no one has gotten anywhere. I had a different title for a long time, but as 2020 progressed, I changed it.

BRM: Who are ‘The Makers’ to whom you’ve dedicated this book? Are they past and/or present writers or artists? Or is the reference more obscure like T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland dedication to Ezra Pound as il miglior fabbro (the better craftsman) from Canto 26 of Dante’s Purgatorio?

KA: As many poets know, poiesis comes from ancient Greek and means ‘to make’. The makers are poets, and by extension, more generally, those who create rather than those who seek to destroy.

BRM: Lastly, why did you choose the two epigraphs, the first from Leonard Cohen’s ‘Everybody Knows’ about an a lying leader and a world populated by liars and cheats, and the second by Elizabeth Taylor about alcohol, beauty, and keeping it together?

KA: The Cohen song, ‘Everybody Knows’, famously describes an unjust world. The lying leader is self-evident. And yeah, ‘keeping it together’ is pretty much the advice. Those represent what I think of as the two poles of the book, the social/political and the self.

BRM: Now let’s talk about the book itself. It’s divided into four sections entitled ‘Night in the Castle’, ‘Songs for Sad Girls’, ‘Confessional Poetry’, and ‘Archive of Recent Uncomfortable Emotions’. It contains poems about writing, sex, alcohol, ageing, hookups in bars, ex-lovers, politics, climate change, legacy, among others. These are quite varied themes. How did you manage to blend them together into one book and how long did that take?

KA: The subjects just reflect what it’s like to live in the world; I don’t see them as disparate. Human life is multi-layered and I think the poems reflect that. There are drafts of a couple of poems starting around 2015; the latest were finished in 2020.

BRM: This book really starts off with a bang with ‘Night in the Castle’ about a poet on a writing grant in an Umbrian castle, with a scorpion twitching on the wall and ending with the speaker’s fantasy sweeping the centuries of what she would do if she were a duchess. Why did you decide to begin your book with this poem?

KA:—Castles and empire, privilege and entitlement, violence and power—seemed like a good place to open a collection. Not sure what you mean by “sweeping the centuries.” The poem actually ends with these lines:

Meanwhile the scorpion is still there twitching blackly
reciting something about violence & the prison of ego

& I can hear the clashing armies on the wide lawn outside
sinking down into history & then standing up again

—which is my (probably somewhat oblique) reference to the last stanza of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. I found it in a novel as a teenager, and it has always affected me; later, in high school, I memorized the whole poem. It was, I think, my first encounter with real poetry, outside of some charming nursery rhymes and Robert Louis Stevenson verses.

BRM: In addition, I noticed that in this book, your poems, in the last section especially, have longer lines, which sometimes spill over to the line below. Is it because your thoughts were so big that you couldn’t fit them into one line? Did you consciously embrace this new style or did it just happen spontaneously?

KA: Long lines, alas, hardly guarantee big thoughts. But, yes, I did find that I liked the long, unspooling lines as a way of thinking things through. I first used long lines over twenty years ago, in Tell Me. I’m drawn to them, but I’m equally drawn to the kind of compression shorter lines and poems ask for.

BRM: Furthermore, there don’t seem to be as many formalist poems—sonnets, such as ‘High Desert’, New Mexico’ (Section 1), and ‘The Truth’, and ‘The Miraculous’ (Section 4), or villanelle, palindromes, etc. in this book as in some of your previous books. Are you moving away somewhat from formalist poetry?

KA: I’d love to be writing more sonnets, or at least sonnet-like fourteen-liners. But it has just seemed that lately the energy of the voice has manifested itself in those longer lines.

BRM: Your love affair with John Keats, however, lives on in your poems ‘Still Time’ and ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You John Keats’, the latter in which you imagine yourself ‘falling through a wormhole….with medicines sewn in my pantaloons’. Why, of all your loves, do you think this one seems the most enduring?

KA: I wouldn’t say the most enduring, but I do love Keats. I think almost every poet is in love with Keats. I can’t say why. A Romantic poet who died young and had a startling ability to capture sensual experience—all that is part of it, I guess. Early brilliance, a life cut short. And when you can actually go visit the room he lay dying in, and look out the window by the Spanish Steps in Rome and see what he must have seen, and look at the same ceiling he looked at—it’s a powerful experience.

BRM: One of the most popular poems in this collection is ‘To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall’. Was this an actual event you witnessed and reported, was it taken from various experiences, or was it created almost entirely from your imagination?

KA: I don’t know a woman who hasn’t been in this situation, listening to someone sob one stall over. I think it struck whatever chord it did on social media because every woman has been there, and because it’s a poem of solace and hope, which are sorely needed.

BRM: How did you begin to write this poem? Did it come in pieces, a few lines here or there, or in one big block? How long did it take to write?

KA: Honestly, I don’t remember the writing process for that particular piece.

BRM: One the most striking aspects of this book is the ‘Confessional Poetry’ which I think is its most experimental section. Some of these poems are no more than one line. How did you start to write this section? Was there a specific event that triggered it, or did you just collect many confessional, short poems or thoughts?

KA: It’s one poem, spread over about twelve pages with very few lines per page. I can’t imagine these being read separately, though I guess some lines could stand alone. There’s an argument being examined, a line of thinking to follow from the first lines to the last: ‘It’s this. No, it’s this’. The decision to break it out from a page or so to spreading lines over several pages was a late decision, one of those flashes you get: Hey, what would this be like? I wanted to give each thought a little space, to slow down the pace, so each could be considered before you moved on. By the way, I don’t think the poem is ‘confessional’. I think it’s an essay about what we mean by ‘confessional’, and it’s an interrogation of what that label means. It’s performative, a role to inhabit. I expect it to be widely misunderstood.

BRM: My favourite line in the ‘Confessional Poetry’ section is ‘Not wearing waterproof mascara while you’re being tasered’. What is your favourite?

KA: That’s probably my favourite, too. Like: Here you are destroying me and asking me to conform to some standard of beauty; why don’t you fuck off?

BRM: Why do you think there are so many poems about desire, decay, disease and death in this book, especially in the last section entitled ‘Archive of Recent Uncomfortable Emotions’?

KA: As the Buddha pointed out, the terms of life are the inevitability of suffering, illness/old age, and death. The next question is, how does one respond to that, knowing this is what constitutes mortal life? You can give up; or you can make, create, find love, be kind, and especially have a sense of the absurd and some good laughs along the way.

BRM: Many of the poems in this book are related to the speaker’s legacy as a writer. For example in the second section in ‘Ghosted’ the speaker laments “Nothing is being named after me’. In ‘Confessional Poetry’, a ‘male critic is indexing my sins’ and ‘Supergluing my clitoris to the pillar of historical irrelevance’ or in ‘Art of Poetry’ in the final section, the speaker imagines her work discovered ‘sometime before the death of the sun’. Do you feel ‘Time’s winged chariot hurrying near’?

KA: Oh, sure. Who doesn’t? ‘Let us sport us while we may’, as Marvell’s seducer says.

BRM: What do you think your writer’s legacy will be?

KA: I don’t really think about my legacy. I’m just trying to write good poems, to make them as well as I can, and hope they find the people who need them.

BRM: Two lines which especially caught my attention in this book are ‘I really like feeling something when I stagger into a poem / & having a place to lie down & cry’ (from ‘Confessional Poems’) and ‘Eventually you have to go out and walk around in the world like you belong / there’ (from ‘The Art of Poetry’). Do you feel that poetry is your home?

KA: Yeah, I do feel it’s my home. I’ve published novels and books of stories, but poetry is where my heart is.

BRM: Have you got any future projects or books in the works which you would like to share with AQ’s readers at this time?

KA: I’m slowly working on a handful of essays and some new poems. I’m pretty tapped out right now, though, so it’s going to be a while before anything coalesces into another book. In the meantime, some friends just gave me a banjo and I’m having a great time learning to play it. I’m figuring out this beautiful old Stephen Foster tune, ‘Hard Times Come Again No More’, written in 1854. Mavis Staples does a soulful rendition. I’m also looking forward to doing a bunch of virtual readings for the new book, and, someday being able to get back out into the larger world.

BRM: Kim Addonizio, thank you very much for your time and your responses.

KA: My pleasure.           AQ

Ian C. Smith – One Hundred Years Ago

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Ian C. Smith
One Hundred Years Ago

When the Wright Brothers flew
one hundred odd haphazard yards, today’s
skyscrapers were only imagined silhouettes
piercing an innocence of cloud-scudded sky,
like the pyramids and the Eiffel Tower.

Going through the musty belongings
of my adventurous landlord, another old pilot,
newspapers, magazines, ghosts
crying out from bundled archives,
I found a thin red book, clothbound,
Excerpta Therapeutica in gold lettering
published back then by a drug company.
Bubonic plague spreads from Adelaide to Sydney.
The Black Death. Rats. Buboes bursting.
The book advises on home treatment,
ventilation, rest, medicines of the day.
My mind, skittering from the horror,
admires the onionskin pages.
Their fraught sickbeds offered some consolation,
brandy, beer, and stout are all prescribed.
Imbecilic with dread, I would need the brandy.

It has grown late while I inhabit the past,
So few sounds of tyres on a wet road
during lockdown, so deathly quiet.
I raise this exquisite book, sniff its cryptic odour.

Meryl Stratford – Night’s Candles

/in

Meryl Stratford
Night’s Candles

I went to the movies
wept over Tom Hanks
dying of AIDS in Philadelphia
thought of Key West
Cayo Hueso, Isle of Bones,
thought of Charles, David, Oscar, Larry,
thought of Michael in Steambath
Larry, one of The Boys in the Band
Oscar, storming through night after night of Extremities
David, the wild boy in Orphans.
Thought of Michael Bennett
before he was Michael Bennett
just an incredibly talented kid
growing up in Buffalo
everybody could see
he was going to be somebody
he had a long Italian name
said he was going to change it
call himself Bennett for Bennett High School.
Thought of Charles, Charles of the burning blue eyes
everyone lusted for Charles, the girls, the guys,
even straight guys when they’d had a few drinks would say
if I were gay, I would love Charles.
Charles playing word games, mind games
a game of Essence
Charles getting stoned
Charles sunbathing on the wooden pier, queer pier,
Charles who came to my first poetry reading.
Charles teaching jazz class in a tank top and tight pants
all muscle and sweat on the edge of the music
improvising funky arms, a crazy turn
and a thrust of the pelvis
he’d smile and say just get the first eight counts
the class kept moving, punctuated by jokes
the class kept moving, punctuated by laughter
in a dark theatre you’d always know
Charles in the audience, his raucous laughter.
Ah, Charles.
Charles in As Is, he played the healthy one
Charles in denial, it doesn’t mean that you’ll get sick,
Charles in anger,
he said I work off emotion
what he felt was anger.
Charles gone on a trip to the Holy Land
Charles back in town, I met him at the deli
he was pale, wearing a blue wool cap,
was that the last time I kissed him
soft, on his cheek.
He said he was tired of teaching beginners
he was teaching meditation now
at the sanctuary.
Charles in his last play, El Grande,
the sombrero and the fake moustache
they say he collapsed after every scene
pulled himself together and went back on
Charles giving away autographed pictures
me frantically waving
and he brought me one
all the way in the last row.

Bob Ward – Shards

/in

Bob Ward
Shards from a Lockdown Diary

At the start of the first lockdown, the author, who was living in rural England,
began to write a diary in verse form, adopting the five-line Japanese tanka.
He kept this going for ten weeks compiling over 180 verses, which built up
into a patchwork of experiences, where the mundane and the threatening
constantly overlapped. This excerpt is intended to give a flavour of the entire work.

                                                                                                      June 2020
 
                                        Like an ink splash creeps
                                             widely through blotting paper
                                             contagion reaches
                                             into our social fibres—
                                             we become untouchable.

                                        Confined to our house
                                             we wonder how soon we’ll hear
                                             an ambulance blare
                                             through the streets of our grim town
                                             on its way to the first case.

                                        Our home’s an island
                                             now like one of those cartoons—
                                             a couple sitting
                                             on a beach who stare across
                                             vast seas of uncertainty.

                                        Fetching medicine
                                             I drive along the High Street
                                             past the silent shops
                                             slammed shut, cross-barred and bolted
                                             against all trade in disease.

                                        Three and a half hours
                                             listening to ’line engaged’
                                             to order foodstuff.
                                             But while we fret, shop heroes
                                             must scurry, scurry, scurry . . .

                                        No Bank Holiday
                                             for all those where the Front Line
                                             remains reality
                                             as they shield themselves in gowns
                                             blue like skies beyond their reach.

                                        Gorse powers the Heath
                                             with Disney colour, topped by
                                             whiffs of coconut.
                                        Rules relaxed just a little
                                             bring us back to the good Earth.

                                        The harsh winds have dropped.
                                        Hush as if a reborn world
                                             considers ‘What next?’,
                                             then a dove coos on the roof,
                                             giving the signal to start.

Joan Dark – Welcome to the Masquerade

/in

Joan Dark
Welcome to the Masquerade

Here, where I am, everyone wears a mask. The doctors are masked, the nurses, the staff, and the patients, the non-intubated ones, that is. This one, the one I am tending to now, is on a ventilator; he has tape around his mouth to keep the tube in and his tongue out of the way.
      To care for him, I have to don an isolation gown and gloves and bunny shoes and put a personal air-purification respirator over my head, a big white dome with a respirator hose going to a machine that’s strapped around my waist. It makes me feel like an astronaut treading on the surface of the moon.
      I keep my mask on underneath the helmet. I wear a surgical mask over an N95 mask that fits my face so tightly it leaves lines and creases on my skin. My fellow nurses and I call them ‘mask wrinkles’ and wonder if they will be permanent. We’re afraid we’ll look old before our time.
 
‘You’re no beauty rose, either,’ I tell my patient. He’s exhibiting signs of macroglossia, meaning his tongue is pretty swollen. It protrudes out of his mouth, lolling off to one side of his breathing tube. It looks like he’s sticking out his fat tongue at me. ‘Read my lips, buddy,’ I tell him in response, which, of course, is impossible because I am masked. Seriously, though, I am alarmed by Dan’s appearance. I am concerned that his swollen tongue may compromise his airway.
 
Covid-19 brought him to my hospital. Dan was transferred to the ICU after his pulse oxy declined precipitously and he became hypoxic, meaning his brain cells were beginning to die. We had to get him on a ventilator right away. He was given a sedative before we threaded the breathing tube down his throat and past the vocal cords into his chest. Now, he’s poised somewhere between delirium and unconsciousness.
      Sometimes Covid patients build up a tolerance to the sedatives we give them, causing them to go in and out of consciousness. When this happens, when they enter this twilight zone, they grow agitated and anxious. Some may even need to be restrained to keep them from pulling out the breathing tube. They place a constant strain on nurses like me who are dealing with an overflow of patients during this pandemic and can’t always be at their bedside to boost their medication.
 
Agitation is in the air. You can feel it. I feel it. Dan is its poster child. His arms chafe against his bed restraints. His body shudders with every breath he takes.
      ‘Takes’ is the operative word. The ventilator pushes air into his lungs and it pushes air out. The diaphragm and the intercostals don’t play the same role that they do in normal breathing.
 
I murmur some words of encouragement to my patient. He just keeps sticking out his tongue at me.
      I understand where he’s coming from, but it’s not like Dan and I are pals. We haven’t had a chance to talk, to really get to know one another, and his blinks don’t correspond to any code I know. I wasn’t born yet when that American POW used Morse to blink out ‘T-O-R-T-U-R-E’ during a North Vietnamese propaganda video, but I’ve read about it, and that guy could teach old Dan a thing or two.
      In lieu of that kind of nonverbal communication, or a heartfelt chat, what I’ve come to learn about Dan, I’ve gathered from his chart.
      His chart says he’s 36, a year older than me, but still quite young for a coronavirus patient.
      The first one, the very first Covid patient they brought here, was 84. He and his wife contracted the disease in a nursing home. The wife survived; the husband didn’t. She was still in quarantine when he passed; consequently, he died alone.
      I infer that Dan is single: his chart lists his sister as his emergency contact. Because of Covid, she isn’t allowed to see him.
      I pat Dan on the arm with a gloved hand just to let him know someone is here.
 
Unless he’s especially intuitive, which I rather doubt, Dan knows even less about me than I do about him. All he sees of me are my eyes. The eyes are supposed to be the windows to the soul, but I’m not sure Dan thinks I have one.
      I’m the warder who keeps him imprisoned here. I’m the evil bitch who shoved a plastic hose down his throat and put him in bed restraints.
      Dan doesn’t know my name because he can’t see my badge. It’s pinned to the scrubs I’m wearing underneath my isolation gown. He can gauge my height and my weight, I guess.
      I’m not as fat as I look in all of this PPE.
 
I used to care about my appearance. I used to really care. I used to look forward to changing out of my scrubs and putting on something chic and sassy once my shift was over. I looked forward to letting down my hair. I used to like to go out with friends after work, have a couple of drinks, and flirt with guys at some bar.
      Not anymore. The bars are closed, and all of us are afraid of catching Covid.
 
When I was new to nursing, I used to worry about needlesticks. They can give you hepatitis, HIV, and a bunch of other diseases. Over time, I learned to relax and didn’t worry so much about getting pricked. Now, patients like Dan have given me something brand new to worry about.
 
Now, after my shift is over, I go straight home. I don’t even shop at the grocery anymore. I have the store deliver or I do kerbside pickup. Most of the people I come in contact with wear masks, thank God, but there’s still plenty of risk. Sometimes, the masks slip, revealing the dorsum of the nose, the columella and the philtrum. Sometimes, people just don’t know how to wear them, forgetting to cover their noses or letting the masks dangle below their chins.
      Then, too, there’s always the danger of bumping into an anti-masker, one of those real fun-loving types who think personal freedom is a licence to spread disease.
 
I don’t know how Dan caught Covid. He probably doesn’t either. Maybe he got it at some super-spreader event. Maybe he caught it from a colleague. Maybe he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
 
I hope and pray he doesn’t pass it on to me.
 
I’m starting to think Dan and I are a lot alike: We’re both living inside each other’s nightmares.

I live alone. I live in my own separate solitude. I was married once, but it didn’t work out. Fortunately or not, my ex and I didn’t have children. I used to think I’d like to have kids, but now I’m not so sure: the pandemic has heightened my fears for the future.
      Meanwhile, my biological clock is ticking. I would like to meet someone, to be in a new relationship, but it doesn’t seem likely now that Covid is rampant and I’m working 12-hour shifts.
 
In my free time, when I have some, I am learning to speak Italian. I had planned to visit Italy before the pandemic started. Now, of course, that’s on hold. In March, I was listening to News in Slow Italian when I heard about a nurse who killed herself after she developed symptoms of the virus. A fisherman found her body in some reeds in the Piave River. The nurse worked in an infectious disease unit at a hospital near Venice, which is one of the places I had planned to visit – the city, not the hospital.
      I wonder how she killed herself. I know she drowned, but I wonder how she did it. I wonder if she put stones in her pocket to weigh herself down like Virginia Woolf did when she walked into the Ouse or if she threw herself off a bridge like the poet Paul Celan did when he jumped into the Seine.
      I don’t wonder why she did it. I don’t wonder about that at all. Burnout is at an all-time high in my profession. We’ve all sunk down, as Paul Celan said, into the bitter well of the heart.
 
When I’m not studying Italian or brooding over fate, I read. My tastes, as you might guess, are eclectic. I’m drawn to Gothic novels and hysterical, I mean historical, period dramas. I’m currently reading The Betrothed, an English translation of a famous Italian novel. It’s a love story set in Milan against the backdrop of the 1630 plague.
      Go figure.
      I don’t think I will find romance during the coronavirus pandemic.
 
‘Hey, buddy boy,’ I say to Dan, ‘Covid has brought you and me together.’
 
When I first became a nurse, I worked bedside on a trauma unit. Later, I did a stint in the ER. I also spent some time in a telemetry unit before coming to the ICU and getting certified as a critical care registered nurse. Surveying my career, it occurs to me that I’m a bit like Prince Prospero in that Edgar Allan Poe story, the one about a fancy masquerade ball. In Poe’s story Prince Prospero walks through a series of rooms in his castellated abbey, each room packed to the gills with costumed guests, until he arrives at the last one, where the avatar of Death, robed and masked, is waiting. For me, the ICU is like the last room in Prospero’s abbey: I hope to finish my career here, but for some of my patients, it’s the last place they’ll ever see. Death stalks the room, waiting to take its mask off and reveal itself.
      Just not today.      AQ

Laura Grace Weldon – Randomized Trial

/in

Laura Grace Weldon
Randomized Trial

by virus is not so random.
We hide our faces, count
one Mississippi, two Mississippi.

Sickness spreads in corners where no one
wants to hunker, sinks into bodies
history has long held down

gasping ignored on wider tree-lined streets
where death stats are weighed
against stock market trends.

There’s no placebo effect in this trial.
Peer review isn’t the woman who tweets,
Do you even know someone who has it?

We’re still counting
three Mississippi, four Mississippi,
five million Mississippi…

Kim Whysall-Hammond – Ground-glass opacity

/in

Kim Whysall-Hammond
Ground-glass opacity

Soft as a blown rose, a tiny killer
seeps into your everything, even white bone.
Sharp receptors grip like crampons as it
climbs down the chimney of your throat
to the soft hinterland of your lungs
ripe meadows about to be trashed.
Once base camp is set up
it storms your defences
you die hard and slow
fighting for every breath.