Natasha Deonarain
Quarantine
I stifle a cough—
hand flies to my mouth like a hasty surgical mask but
it’s too late;
your accusing eyes turn on me and widen, sink to the depths
of your cloth-bound frown. Heat
rushes to my cheeks mistaken for three degrees above normal
and it’s time to quarantine—
they say.
Too bad my allergies are terrible this year;
eyes wet, inflamed, nose dew in a slow drip
to the top of my lip like tankers in the street but I’ll not
wipe it away. I’ll suck it all
up and gulp down
my mucusy pride. I’ll stare off into the distance
toward some invisible enemy casually adrift, lounging
on a droplet in air—
I’ll finger
my cuts and scrapes from last night’s toilet roll rumble
that made this pain
worthwhile.
But from behind a frenzied laptop my friend,
I long for your touch, the
feel of your smile,
the nestling heat of your body and sound of your undigitized voice—
a tap of a stainless steel knife against a crystal glass
calling us to attention, a remembered
past when we were way too drowsy to see
what might have been.
Natasha Deonarain is the author of the chapbook 50 etudes for piano (Assure Press, forthcoming). Her work has appeared in The Inflectionist Review, Rogue Agent Journal, The RavensPerch, Door Is Ajar, and other journals, as well as in the Little Red Tree International Poetry Prize: 2012 Anthology, and was selected by NELLE magazine for this year’s Three Sisters Award for poetry. Deonarain divides her time between Colorado and Arizona.
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