False Positive, Spring 2020
By Lindsay Wilson
This poem moves between personal worry and national worry and how those can change our perception of the world and my own need for hope. That hope would come in the form of two robins.
During the spring of 2020 those robins built a nest under our eaves, and given my wife and I were stuck working from home, we enjoyed watching the nest for signs of life, which finally produced three young robins. Through our glass front door, we had a slim view of hope, and we felt quite lucky to have that view.
During that same time, my asthmatic wife began to show many of the symptoms of COVID-19. She lost her sense of smell, had a slight fever lasting several days, trouble breathing, body aches, chills, and she was quite lethargic. The poem details the weekend we spent at home waiting for the test results we assumed would be positive.
In February of that spring two white men in a pickup truck chased a black man, Ahmaud Marquez Arbery, while Arbery jogged in a neighborhood. One of the men shot an unarmed Arbery killing him. Even though a video existed of the incident, and the identities of the shooter was known, it took over two months for the police department to make an arrest, which prompted national outrage.
Unfortunately, that same weekend we waited for my wife’s test results, most of us watched a number of protests against the lockdown instead of the arrest of the two men involved in Arbery’s death. In a number of states mostly angry armed white men—like the ones in the Arbery video—stormed capitals demanding an end to the lockdown. I remember seeing several of these men holding signs that said things like, “I want to get a haircut.” Many of the people interviewed made analogies to being prisoners in their own home, and called it government tyranny. My own perception of these comments was simple: they were confusing an inconvenience for oppression. We weren’t prisoners. A great many of us could get food delivered, or pick it up curbside. We could binge watch media with our families, and we could leave our homes for walks or to jog. Most of us, of course, except for Ahmaud Arbery.
The poem wrestles with my worry for my wife, and my worry for our country, and those two worries fed a deep sadness within me—even as I watched the robins come back to their nest several times a day to feed their newborns. Ultimately my wife and I were lucky regarding the results, but I do not know if I can say I feel that way about our country, then or now.
Lindsay Wilson
False Positive, Spring 2020
By Lindsay Wilson
Above a mottled eggshell sky, we do not
deserve, and though the thyme died
this winter, I water the garden,
then carry oregano inside to make a marinade
for a cheap cut of beef along with rosemary,
bay leaf. Soon, when we eat the richly rubbed
meat, Anna feverish on the couch will say,
I can’t smell anything, and yet after tomorrow’s
test results, we will put the leftovers
on old takeout rice and know what luck
tastes like, but that’s the future tense.
Now a white boy jogs through the cul-de-sac
and no one sees criminal, and now through
the blinds the light seems to fall down like bars,
but by now we know all metaphors fail.
Prisoners don’t own the keys to their cells,
so I walk right out to my lawn where
the wind drags it feet over this suddenly
green grass. The mind throws itself out
into fields like that to find its footing, but come
on now: You can’t taste luck. Under
the dark eaves the new robins sing hunger
to their mother, so my wife turns off
the patio light, and we stand there, her framed
by doorway, me on the new grass, as luck,
with its stubby tail feathers, rustles and stirs
from its dry nest. Moments cleave to zero
like this. I call luck what others call sadness.
I take the temperature of the roast
then turn up the flames for the final sear.
I stare, mouth ajar, at this high desert sky
considering our odds, a little rain spitting down
onto the edges of me, and I swear I feed
this sadness—that it plucks what it needs
right from my open mouth.
Photo courtesy of Lindsay Wilson.
Lindsay Wilson is an English professor at Truckee Meadows Community College where he also edits The Meadow. His poetry and essays have appeared in The Colorado Review, Fourth Genre, and The Carolina Quarterly, among others. His sixth chapbook, Because the Dirt Here is Poor, is available from Main Street Rag.
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