Mary Nichols
Big Rona, in Boxes
Let us burn our skin together in the bonfires of our sinks
(They say the disease may recoil from throbbing flames of water; the lipids around the corona deliquesce into bio-obsolescence)
It lingers unseen in children, lungs and alveoli untouched by gasping
Unlike our grandmothers, who we bury to save evanescent molecules of Gross Domestic Product
Let us scrub and flay our hands, then the face
The enemy is incognito
It’s everyone you know, including you, and no one
(Paranoia seeps into consciousness like McCarthyism)
Let us scrape off our body
The opposite of newborn, soaked in industrial chemicals and bleeding from the obdurate teeth of fingernails
We can now sink into the concavity of the shower which is like a bowl, or a large, oblong contact lens
Please don’t let me pluck back the curtain to the side
Or draw the curtains on mannerisms of old routines, lovely and faded like my mother’s wedding dress
The house is a box
And its rooms are also boxes,
Ersatz boundaries of choice
They are not democratic nations; the rooms organize and structure my quarantine
I comb hair product in this quadrant and bathe my hippocampus in dreamy amnesia over here
Our restlessness is quadrilateral, folded and contained into domicile cubes
The virus’s breath tickles anxiety, and its teeth nibble on computer screens of empty funerals; only the corpses can attend
Its hands wrap bows of terror around the boxes, and I am the Lysol wipes, smothering lingering old testament pestilence
I am the cold austere metal
Cracked and bent in the check-out line,
I press my equal and opposite force into the anguished glove of
148 countries;
I am my hair, soaked from rinsing off sad eyes in grocery store aisles, dripping microscopic pools for covid-19 to bellyflop into;
I am the dead cells in my retina, blurs and inky sands mask plots of
Breathing air,
Doctors appointments recede beneath the short sightedness from governmental denial;
It could lead to my blindness.
I am Big Rona, the epithet my best friend devised
Personifying the coronavirus into a bumbling, scattered aunt
Transmogrifying the invisible into the visual
And fear into whiskey lips and tobacco-stained grins
—Submitted on 03/29/2020
Mary Nichols graduated in 2017 from the College of William and Mary with a double major in psychology and Hispanic studies, and currently works as a professional services engineer at a tech company. This is her first publication.
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