Blowholes and Camouflage, Adaptations in a Pandemic

By Jennifer Battisti

The day before our quarantine begins, I chaperone my daughter’s second grade school field trip to the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay. We name the sharks at the aquarium: Hammerhead, Sand Tiger, the Blue shark. We talk about natural selection and adaptations in marine animals. We learn that horseshoe crabs outgrow their small shells and must molt and shed its exoskeleton to accommodate its growth. We learn that electric eels communicate through pulses and about how this trait helps them to survive.

The next day, news of a virus becomes the ocean we all swim in, frantically. Soon, the grass grows six feet, the wind chimes scream. We mask our terror and play Twister inside the grocery store. Sharks are surprisingly social, often feeding and hunting together. I discover that even with my introverted inclinations, I desperately need others. Before the pandemic I belonged to several groups of others—a 12-step recovery for 10 years, a thriving literary community, a yoga community. Suddenly, I have to say the Serenity Prayer in a Zoom AA meeting and attempt awkward online versions of every area of my life, which once supplied my sense of belonging. My daughter and I plant strawberries and leave sanitizer out for the Easter bunny. The ice cream truck still jingles ominously down the road every day, while my daughter watches and worries from the window. Everything feels predatory. Everything keeps changing. Adaptation hurts. It stings and bewilders.

Before the pandemic I was over-scheduled. I was juggling single parenting with writing my first full-length manuscript, while also working as an aesthetician in a resort spa on the Strip. From outside appearances, it looked like I was progressing—or rather propelling myself toward some future sense of accomplishment or contentment, but inside I was often distracted, anxious, and overwhelmed. During the quarantine, I had to surrender ambition to stillness, going to staying, achieving to witnessing. Suddenly, my life wasn’t progressing but orbiting around the confines of my home. There was no more productivity to hide behind. The quarantine turned out to be a tremendous bonding experience for my daughter and I. There was a sense of unity to sheltering in place with everyone in the city. There was a shedding of too-much-ness in favor of just the essentials. This felt like the kind of progress one discovers only as a consequence of something outside of their control. A forced awakening. We all had to shed our previous small shells, for larger ones, ones equipped for this “new normal.” During the protests over the murder of George Floyd, I began to feel very uncomfortable about the overdue investigation of my own privilege. I had tough, but necessary, conversations with my daughter about how we are a part of systemic racism—even the fact that we weren’t always aware of being part of it is a privilege. The virus seemed to disappear during the protests—or rather, there was something worth the risk.

In order to measure progress, we need a goal or destination in mind. At six months into the pandemic, with very little statistical progress on COVID-19 or the economy, racial injustice and civil unrest, as well as devastating wildfires in the west, it feels more like a regression is occurring. My daughter is five weeks into her distance learning. We’ve already weathered numerous meltdowns and lost the “T” to her Chromebook keyboard. She cannot focus at school. I feel like I am failing her. Everyone I know is struggling in some form in response to the pandemic. There is plenty of evidence to justify all of the anxiety we are all steeped in. But ask me about resiliency and adaptation and I’ll tell you about how the equestrian center where my daughter attended summer camp turned their horse ranch into an outdoor distance learning center, so that working parents like me could have a safe place to leave their kids while they go to work. Or, I’ll point toward the ongoing commitment in the literary community to keeping folks connected through virtual open mics and poetry readings.

While there are very few clues of where we will end up, all around us are examples of how we are growing in spite of and because of the pandemic. Despair and inspiration can coexist. Joy and delight can surprise us even in the darkest of times. For me, art is essential for healing and can mend much of our isolation and fear without actually fixing anything about the world. Art forms have the ability to transcend a dualistic view of the world—it mends humanity as a byproduct of witnessing. Deep and meaningful witness comes from paying attention. Bringing a mindfulness into our daily lives, we are forced to find meaning in the here and now through our senses. I think this is a gift and an adaptation. It’s blowholes and camouflage—a way to find what we need in our new environment. If we are deliberate with our attention; if we bend it towards beauty and truth each day, if we stay curious about the shape growth takes, I think we’ll learn about what it means to belong to others, to ourselves, and to this one earth.

Progress isn’t always a forward motion trajectory. It’s fits and starts, and sometimes circular. It’s less about gaining anything and more about letting go—of ideas that don’t serve me, control, and ultimately, letting go of my expectations of the future in exchange for the rich, uncomfortable, yet often surprising, gift of this one moment. Throughout the pandemic, creativity wasn’t always an easy energy to summon, but when I was able to use poetry, and sometimes photography and collage, as a way to work through the complexity of the ever-shifting reality, I found that art is roomy. It can hold the sadness, hope, absurdity, injustice, fear, and beauty of this surreal, historical moment.

What follows are my original poems, photographs, and collages documenting my experience of the pandemic.

Week One (a reprint from Desert Companion)

On the first day, I massaged someone from Munich, then London, then a guy who’d spent two weeks off the grid in Montana—he said he felt like he woke up inside a video game— a woman with open wounds and conspiracy theories from Philly and my regular, a high roller from Miami. I put oregano oil under my tongue, sage in my bra. On the second day, I got laid off from work and dreamt of pounding my fist on the pump of a Purell bottle. Each squirt produced a new news update that I feverishly rubbed between my palms. On the third day I was in denial. I drank four frosty bottles of top-shelf cream soda. When Amazon ran out of delivery windows, I shrugged, then chugged vanilla bubbles. On the fourth day I waved at my mother from inside my car. She waved back from inside her garage. We smiled awkwardly, two nervous gloves with latex grins. On the fifth day I became my child’s school teacher—she told me tricks are no longer allowed in math. We went outside. I sat my daughter in a field of clovers and said this is a silver lining. She asked me if worms could get the virus and confessed she was thinking now would be a good time to try out her middle finger. We were so far away from anyone I told her to go ahead, shoot the bird, go nuts. On the sixth day we went to Trader Joe’s. The shelves were nearly barren—one crumbly avocado, ritzy olives for entertaining, daffodils, $1.49/bunch. The planter guide read: suitable for planting between shrubs, on a border, or for forcing blooms indoors. I bought the daffodils.

Jazz Hands

We expanded our broadband, gave the children legumes to count, the red-stripped Tweets kept coming. A sonata flash mob flushed from the balconies into the desolate streets. This was not a drill they said. We squeezed and hoarded, raised money for the one-ply people. They unrolled mid-air, just like a high-school sleepover. We covered the homes, cars, Pilates classes, still-smoldering Australia, the darkening Las Vegas Strip, the Statue of Liberty, the corner pastry shop, Disneyland, Rome. It was an intention, a Costco snowfall. We distance flung. We isolated our grandmothers and wrapped them into Charmin mummies. We buried our salutations, answered every question with jazz hands. Some people called it a prank—was shaving cream in the sleeping palm next? We ignored the heckling sphincters and propelled the rolls into canons, covering all the tender spots—a waggling sanitation meteorite surging under the smogless sky. Airborne TP reached across borders, continents, oceans, quilting our fears and insufficiency. The wealthy scoffed at us. They used lace, wool, hemp, bidets. They drove to the Hamptons, leaving the poor to use rivers, leaves, plant husks. We forgot who we were before. Our previous selves foamed up and rinsed away to the tune of “Happy Birthday.” Our quarantined hearts shook like tambourines while we waited for the next update. Shopping carts kept us warm. Our spirit fingers wiggled from the porch steps, exuberant; sparkling and stockpiling our neighbors to the brim with our clueless Bob Fosse hope.

How to Split the Wind

The cities poured out, emptied
of noise, commerce, exhaust.
At sundown spaghetti pots banged,
make-shift tambourines shook,
jumping jacks bloomed the fire escapes.
The known world was folded
into a wet wipe, the weeping
wept from a distance.
A sewing machine chattered
into a hollow night.

There was not enough for everyone.

The streets cleaned,
clean enough to hear the birds,
birds on the Boulevard,
birds in the subway, a blue
bird in the nursing home,
a pale bird in critical care,
a team of scrubbed birds
who triaged dozens of stolen,
private goodbyes inside their shoes,
inside their sleep.
The air turned quiet, so quiet, we heard
the many gulping beaks begging that same jugular
song, that gasping need—against the gale force
wind—another black bird flying in place,
see how he is held back,
struggling into that fisted wind,
that bloodied wind,
that blunt baton wind,
that lynching wind.
The streets filled, counterfeit
hearts strong-armed a hurricane
barricade, raised a shield of lies— there’s no wind,
not even a breeze, the wind stop blowing long ago!
The white birds flew, glutton wind at their backs, slick with inherited, mirrored ease.
and history keep blowing and blowing—
Hurry up black bird, work harder black bird,
keep small black bird, fly nowhere, black bird.
Twin lungs beat and fought, a mama flooded
the pulmonary womb.
The slack beak orphaned, then stilled.
Fearful badge-blue birds coasted
the intentional, protected breeze, spit and grinned,
pissed their pants with flash grenades, and soon
Assembly became an anemometer, an instrument
to measure the tenor, the habit, the genome.
The cities burst, a confederate broke
in spite of the rubber-bullet wind.
All the birds in the streets roared
and each day, grew and grew
and knelt and risked and bled, their tears
were gassed then mended.
The few white birds flew between
the many Black birds
and the wind— oppressive.
Thousands of ventilators pumped,
protesting death.
They marched and hushed

And there was not enough for many,
but the inexhaustible friction
began to split the wind—
This was how the lungs lived
outside the body.

If Masks Were Prayers

We could unfold them in our laps inside our cars,
transform our mouths into a blue sky.

Prayers would hang from our gear shifts
stuff our cupholders.

My mother’s prayer is an embroidered rose,
when she laughs, it slips and blooms across her chin.

Yours is a heavy metal band, a baseball team, cartoon lips.

A child’s prayer is a Llama in pajamas, Spiderman,
a bandaid for their smile.
If you leave your prayer at home

your mouth becomes a gun, a common bat, a canyon
for your loved ones to leap into.

One day, the strap to my prayer snapped.
It bungee-jumped like a risky liberation.

Nowadays prayers are handed out everywhere
with a pump of holy sanitizer, and it turns out

they were right all along—
they work even if you don’t believe in them.

They are adjustable, non denominational,
intentional.

Prayers with flare! If you pray long enough, it will leave a mark.

Some people clench their prayer like an angry fistful.
They spit and shame and burn their prayers,

They say that prayers make them choke
and maybe faith is a kind of gasping.

If you want to kiss your lover, you must first tug the seams
of each others’ prayers to reach the wet edge of desire.

It’s a sensitive endeavor, to launder a prayer—
the instinct is to bleach in heat and shrink.

But prayers are delicate invitations,
better hand-wrung and line dried,

a sun-warmed wish
beside your unmentionables.

Soon, prayers begin to clog our oceans, they curl up
on our city streets like a naked sob in the road.

The desert grows rows and rows of disposable prayers,
stomped into the earth, to be dug up later,

in the form of a fossil from that time we challenged grief
with invocation.

Jennifer Battisti is a lifelong Nevadan. Her work has been anthologized in Legs of Tumbleweed, Wings of Lace, Where We Live, an anthology of writing and art in response to the October 1st tragedy, and Sandstone and Silver. Her worked has also appeared in The Desert Companion, Minerva Rising, The Citron Review, FLARE, Helen: A Literary magazine,Slant, Thin Air, Briar Cliff Review, 300 Days of Sun and elsewhere. She is a contributing writer for Las Vegas Woman magazine. In 2016 Nevada Public Radio interviewed her about her poetry. She is the coordinator and a participating Teaching Artist for the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project in Clark County. In 2018, she was the recipient of the Helen Stewart Poetry Prize and was voted best local poet or writer by the readers of the Desert Companion. In 2020, she was runner up for the Western Humanities Review contest for nonfiction. Her first chapbook, Echo Bay, was released in 2018 and her full- length manuscript, Off Boulder Highway is forthcoming in 2021 (Tolsun Books).

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Kathleen KuoOctober 19, 2020CComment