Parker Jamieson
A Panic-Attacked World After COVID-19 Encases Buffalo, New York
The metro is a cesspool
For bacteria. It always was
A host of particulate phantoms
That rarely show their faces
Unless you tinker through telescopes—
Now there is more rise over run,
And the parabola regains its slope.
I can’t make it anywhere these days,
And I have no money to refill
My prescription for buspirone.
I think about how this all started
For me: Rob Halpern reading
Poems in the WNYBAC. Outside, the
City a corpse corrugated like candlelight.
Candles that I had the night before
In a dream of servitude and
My lungs calling, without sound, to the
Woman that I carry on my finger.
The morning before that dream
I had taken my Zoloft. My pilled mind
A landscape of tumult eased
from the broken sticks of youth,
Not the fear of contagion, and
Not the contagion of fear.
The landscape fails to move me
Back to my youth completely
And I can’t take the bus away
From my mother’s house.
Maybe I can go pick up bottles.
Maybe I can build a hut of sticks,
I’ll patch a roof from littered plastic.
—Submitted on 03/24/2020
Parker Jamieson‘s poems have appeared in Poets Reading The News, The Wild Word, Outlaw Poetry, Passaic / Völuspá, and Anti-Heroin Chic, at a minimum. They hail from Woodlawn, NY, and work at Marilla Cemetery.
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