What Rough Beast | Covid-19 Edition | 04 07 20 | Tom McCauley

Tom McCauley
Two Poems

It’s Coronavirus, Not Coronavirme

Today I hear it
killed a lady the same age
as me. How quickly

the unafflicted spirit her
to a ventilator.
We’re sorry,

the shipwrecked doctors
serenade her
father, there’s been a change of luck.

Everyone she knows is required
to quarantine. It’s 1918, what then?
Stare out the door a spell. Listen:

the heart breathes, the lungs bloom
quite blue
with ceiling music. Now there’s almost

no food in the house. Tomorrow,
let us live by a river
and notice every jewel of the visible

shine off the broken junk
somebody left here.
Like that piano rising

out of the water. No, not that one. That one.
Yes. Give me a moment.
Let me play you something.

Will We Die If We Eat This

Little black stars
hatch
out of sacks of flour

like automatic moss
and you

same as me

bored of intercourse

go undaunted to the sink
wash your hands
roll the dough

pick away the little galaxies
spun
last night from water

I bag them upthrow them out

leave everything
on the porch
we used

to talk about the future

Tom McCauley‘s work has appeared in Superstition Review, Leveler, and the Oyez Review. His poem “People Are Not Lights” won the 2018 Joseph Langland Prize from the Academy of American Poets. McCauley holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He teaches poetry and contemporary literature at the University of Nebraska Omaha.

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