Scott Chalupa
Pandemic Vignettes
I.
Virus hives the wood grain. Along with this pier’s planks and beams, its microbial multitudes will soon shamble to the sea. Contagion is a smuggled promise that brings one closer to life. D.W.’s stencils and dada-dada-do-me graffiti proclaim the silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated. I tell you it isn’t the case and it isn’t not the case. My beloved not-yet-painter splatters the walls with acrylic and spray-can joy dubiously free of time’s constraints. Here a place to forge, not fuck. To come tell me to come tell you to come when I come too. Here a place to snap a pic of Rimbaud shooting up—B.B. in a mask, a truth behind the truth. It’s always never gonna be quite unlike this or that nothing we had to see once again and say girl, girl, OMG girl. This. This is everything. It’s a Reaganite name-drop several years too late. It’s a dirge mistaken for matins that taps the overripe valves of an angel’s trumpet. Rescue me from the hightide of a lowgrade fever dream. Ride with me an unflattened curve of our always-already unavailable ventilators, presidential promises begotten, unmade as though twin bed sleeping three beyond the post-party after-glower. Carry me to where we will not-say it all, will not-say not-no to another joint, unsure of the limits of mustn’t do. Where our beginning unspooled itself back through two summers. A superposition of star-struck duckwalks in Central Park. Your overnight Tuileries bag a clutch of travel-size toothpaste and misdirected lust. The down-drooped assent of devil’s trumpets surveilling our weeks-long cruise. Larches lurching in lamplight. Virus beetling beneath the bark.
IV.
A life after a life after a life after, a cherrywood cortege cavalcades past a parson unborn again. To step out from old boots onto bare ground opens us into afterlife. To breathe beyond any arbitrary moment in a life is an afterlife, isn’t it? We’ve been here before just then and there husking aeons by the hour to leave behind what we have yet to square what we must always carry with us. A broken toe—a threshold to afterlife. Post-orgasmic sleep is afterlife after a fashion, no? The bar against heavens once set so high that all life withered before the before, our lives wasted on thoughtless anticipation, an antedated antidote for never here and never now—the hoped-for heaven were never there in a pinch, a foxhole promise only half-delivered until erenow. But heaven could be here, now, here yes here, a clockwork door sprung ajar and tolling its come-hither cocked-brow antechamber always opening to another after-living after all our lives undreamt fashioned after an ever-unfolding field of windowpanes windblown open by ebullient gales blowing apart the promise of heaven to reveal heaven. Oh God, it was always wasn’t it always yes it was always meant to be like this.
VII.
We could leave Monday but the coastal connecters will crush us beneath the weight of all those golfcart-towing Tahoes. Some stupid meme calls it a Corona-cane but mom calls it several nights without sleep. Thousands are dying and I just wanna pack my blender and cast iron before the drowning starts. Din of Denalis drowning out the storm roiling up the seaboard. We thought we’d leave Tuesday when potential tropical cyclone nine was a mother’s worry stalling north of Venezuela. Krogering oftener than we should, eating half what we planned. Gratitude is a fridge overflowing with the shame of overpurchase. Did I tell you that B. bought a car on vay-fucking-cay? We came to the beach and B. goes home with a Lexus to replace a Lexus. Isaias is blowing their corona northward as I trek out of Babylon back to Babylon. Truth be told is usually followed with a selfish half-lie firmly fellated. Everywhere I run I take Babylon with me. Isaias is my quarantine and I wont to hunger. I hunger to return to my transplant but the babies behind golfcart wheels are tipping at tropical cyclones. Three derelict teens rolled a golfcart on Atlantic Avenue trying to catch a couple of two-ft barrels at low tide. We could leave we should leave tomorrow before Monday crushes this barrier island into more a gorgeous marsh.
IX.
After all hope was the only little one left behind in Pandora’s cursed amphora No wonder we’re sore when our stories sour our awestruck poses When our world is less is more than six millennia immature When we see Nietzsche hit the nail on the nose of God When ain’t nothin’ operant in the omniverse but Occam’s algorithm pulling upstream as we cross the tracks It will all come undone once done even the galaxy gone go dark drift to space beyond place Even the information in our mad mumble to inscribe ourselves on the ceiling of spacetime’s untender belly will unravel Beginning and end arbitrary points of convenience same as me and you same moraine same mountain Show me some body without a story aphasia without a named self without Narcissus’ referential tic There were no creator here beyond an ego and we be all Echoes in a polymorphic triangle twain by twofold twins in love with another at the fork of a lazy slipstream
—Submitted on 12/06/2020
Scott Chalupa is the author of Quarantine (PANK Books 2019). His work has appeared in PANK, pacificREVIEW, Nimrod, Beloit Poetry Journal, The South Atlantic Review, and other journals. His work appears in an anthology of poems related to Eve (of Biblical fame) forthcoming from Orison Books in 2021. Chalupa lives in South Carolina, and teaches at Central Carolina Technical College.
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