Ron Slate

In this world already so enshadowed and ailing, the haggard, hunted face is encountered everywhere. The problem is not the spiny microdemons murmuring we are coming for you. It is more about your insistence that you deserve to be spared. But if you survive, it will be through the usual media: shrewdness, detachment, and luck. *

Our laments resonate effectively among the neighbors. The first time. But a shout is a clamor when repeated through the days. If I scream I’ll save you, you need to hear it only once. Today someone across the street bellowed from a porch, Is this Thursday? And the day before, Is this Thursday? I wouldn’t call back. But I didn’t want to be alone. And also, for some minutes, I didn’t know the answer.

The odds are not favorable, but there is a chance, as the grave threat recedes, that you will stop condemning your lived life for its fecklessness and disparaging your dreams for their facile freedoms. Restarting the world on renovated terms, you will peel the last apple in the bin, core it, and count the seeds. *

Asymptomatic: striding while sick, sick while oppressing the healthy. They’ve been here since the first time I saw the flag in my classroom. But I did not hear their voices clearly until my own body appeared in their sights. *

News item, page 6: Eleven Die as Locusts Swarm in Sudan. In the village of Wad Medani, 110 miles southeast of Khartoum, the elders argue into the night. Some say the locusts gave off an overpowering smell, causing asthma. Some say the weak and aged ones, now the dead, simply imagined they couldn’t breathe. Some say the deafening clack of wings, the thickness of sound, choked off life.

One says, “I have a real person hiding under the personality you know. It’s my secret self and it’s the best part of me.” The other one says, “I’m the space between what I am and what I am not, the space between what I dream and what life makes of me.” The two of them, socially distanced by six feet. And then some. *

No one is available to guide you to the exit, and if you should manage to grope your way there, no one will be waiting on the other side to greet you with an antidote. *

In March, while the news arrived from across the sea, there was a silent rupture in our city. The clock in its tower skipped a beat, the tower sunk imperceptibly. You had an opportunity, but you savagely refused to renounce the unlocatable source of your values. Every street corner was begging for love, all of our uncountable differences were asking for asylum. You said We need cleansers and chocolate.

Every day at a quarter to four, the hospital orderly walks by on his way to the hospital and the all-night Covid rounds. Green scrubs, supper in a backpack. We stand at the window, waiting. Here he comes, today he’s wearing his Celtics jacket as well. The night is a long guess about the route he takes home. The next day—a vigil. *

It was only a matter of welcoming the pandemic, exploiting it as a pier to push off from to a mythical journey among whirlpools, enticing islands, and beasts. A journey, like all others, ignorant of what is at stake, abandoned to chance. We could have sailed together. We could have shared our provisions to the very last sardine and crawled up on the sand. A crew of survivors for the ages, singing a sea shanty that we made up, each of us the author of a verse.