What Rough Beast | Covid-19 Edition | 05 28 20 | Guillermo Filice Castro

Guillermo Filice Castro
Ode to Discarded Gloves

Praise you, teal ones, 
		clear ones, 
			pink ones.

	Thin mediators between 
			us & the myriad of things 
		trying to kill us.

It’s always just one of you I spot, 
		
		unpaired 
		& impaired. 
	
	A mother’s abandoned
		slap. Hand without jazz.
	Condom 
without jizz
		deflated in
	the grass like a jettisoned
teenage memory,
	
	mourned by sneezeweed.

More endearing than face masks, your domed
	cousins 

from the country of Mouth & Nose.
	
	Ubiquitous jelly fish, 
		mangled 
			on 
		supermarket parking 
				lots, half

			of your tentacles 
		still stuck inside you. 

Haven’t 
we all felt this way—translucent, 
				cast aside?

Dressed in the latest latex or 
			vinyl (praise you!)
		
		for one final 
			
			wave.

—Submitted on 05/28/2020

Guillermo Filice Castro is the author of Mixtape for a War (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018) and Agua, Fuego (Finishing Line Press, 2015). His work appears in HIV Here and Now, The Normal School, Fugue, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, and other journals. He’s the recipient of an Emerge–Surface–Be Fellowship from the Poetry Project in New York. An immigrant from Argentina, Castro resides in New Jersey with his partner and two cats.

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