Marjorie Moorhead
Coronavirus Diary (3/14/2020)
I dreamt I woke up, and Covid-19 was a dream
not a disaster.
It had never happened, and things were the same.
Covid-19 and I’m grinding my teeth again.
Broken bloody teeth enter my dreams.
As well as a niece who’s sick and knows it,
yet comes too near.
Weaponized coughing. Sneezes of death.
I’ve come to resent the closeness
of my husband’s breath, misting our pillow.
Shelves now stocked with extra
peanut butter, soap, and sprays. In case
there’s a shortage, or the demand to stay in.
Through the late 80s and early 90s, I survived
a virus for which there is no cure.
Left a swath of death in its wake.
Changed the course of many lives, forever.
I lived, have two kids, and grow old;
am good at “being in the moment”.
I appreciate small and beautiful things.
But these days of darkening news, anxiety builds
like a Hitchcockian thriller, highlighting
all we have to lose.
Editor’s Note: What Rough Beast welcomes poems in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The usual editorial guidelines apply—we don’t generally like poems that dwell overmuch on the shortcomings of the Trump administration—It simply does not usually make for good poetry. Poems may allude to the administration’s catastrophic negligence in responding to this pandemic, but we’d rather read about your personal experience of the pandemic than a critique of the administration’s response.
Marjorie Moorhead is the author of Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Amethyst Review, HIV Here & Now, Rising Phoenix Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Porter House Review, Tiny Lit Seed, Verse-Virtual, and other journals, as well as in anthologies including Planet in Peril (Fly on the Wall, 2019), edited by Isabelle Kenyon; From The Ashes (Animal Heart, 2019), Amanda McLeod & Mela Blust; Birchsong: Poetry Centered in VT. Vol. II (The Blueline, 2018), edited by Northshire Poets Alice Wolf Gilborn, Carol Cone, David Mook, Marcia Angermann, Peter Bradley and Monica Stillman; and others. She received an Indolent Books scholarship to attend a summer 2019 workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Moorhead writes from the NH/VT border.
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