Suzanne Edison
Coronavirus—Seattle 2020
Today I revisit Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson
of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp: the cadaver’s arm splayed open
for us, and seven ruffle-cuffed and curious male faces, who peer
inside the strata of muscle and tendon or towards the bulging
anatomy book open at the deceased’s foot. The doctor is lecturing
on the visible, the common to all. In the 17th century, witnessing
anatomy lessons was a social activity; once a year dissections
welcome to the public. Our current lessons involve pandemic:
invisible viral menace whose droplets, passed in coughs or sneezes,
lodge inside our cells, igniting a cascade of cytokines, an inflammatory rush
of the body’s attempts to flood and flush foreign invaders.
Our lungs, hearts, possibly perforated or constricted.
To slow infection we have restricted congregation.
We are not standing shoulder to shoulder examining
a widespread, natural normal; we are empty
streets, shuttered restaurants, our kids banned from schools
and playdates, our elderly and homeless neighbors like tissues
crammed in boxes or left in crumpled isolation. All of us forced
to see faces on screens. Will surfing and clicking in virtual space quell
racing nerves, keep us knitted together? Even so, some of us
are singing from apartment balconies to friends and family,
some of us are calling loved ones on the phone. We need
the violinist on the corner serenading the quarantined.
As we stare into, and stave off, the grip of abyss, the unknown settles
on us, present as the shadow Rembrandt painted on his cadaver’s face.
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.
Suzanne Edison is the author of the chapbook The Body Lives Its Undoing: Exploring Autoimmune Disease Through Poetry and Visual Art (Benaroya Research Institute, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Naugatuck River Review, Scoundrel Time, Mom Egg Review, Persimmon Tree, JAMA, SWWIM, Intima, The Ekphrastic Review, and other journals. She lives in Seattle, and in fall 2019 was a writer in residence at Hedgebrook, a retreat for women writers on Whidbey Island, about thirty-five miles northwest of Seattle.
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