Kerry Trautman
Referring to a Pie-Chart of Quarantined Time
Here is a 10% slice for
the baking then eating of bread,
a 1% slice for watching
our governor on TV,
a 30% for jigsaw puzzles,
a 30% for TV movies,
a 4% for watching online concerts
and poetry readings where
the dime-sized faces have no idea
I’m listening,
a 1% for clicking online models of
animated dots spreading, spreading,
a 1% for worry everyone’s
had enough of me,
a 10% for worry the earth
has had enough of skins,
a 1% for worry I’ve
chosen all wrong,
a 3% for assessing slant of sunlight
for a reasonable hour for wine.
Where might time have been salvaged?
Here: cleaning-out a junk drawer
could have been, say,
editing a chapter of my novel.
These Netflix hours—
letters to my mother and
phone calls to my sister.
Here is where avoidance occurred,
here: denial of ticking clocks,
here: pokeweed took quiet root
in backyard mud, and I did
nothing to stop it,
here: distraction to slow the pulse,
here: busying of the mind
like skipping stones in a lake
beside a capsized boat.
—Submitted on 04/28/2020
Kerry Trautman is the author of To be Nonchalantly Alive (forthcoming from Kelsay Books), Things That Come in Boxes (King Craft Press, 2012), To Have Hoped (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and Artifacts (NightBallet Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Slippery Elm, Free State Review, Midwestern Gothic, Paper & Ink, Alimentum, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies. Trautman is a poetry editor of Red Fez.
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