Fat Chance in the Land of COVID-19, and On Death in the Land of COVID 19
By Melanie Perish
To write is to engender writing. To power my life is to empower others. Current goals include: to be authentic and to be an effective ally.
I’ve worked since I was 12. I’ve cleaned houses, waited tables, taught English, done Human Resources, edited medical articles, placed temporary workers, and raised funds for a university. I’ve also written and published poetry since the 1970s. When I retired in 2014, friends, colleagues, strangers would ask me, “Do you travel now? Volunteer? Consult?” It took me 18 months to say: “I read and write poetry every day. That’s what I do.”
There is more: I think life is about love and service; so I try to do those things every day, too. I’ve been with my fellow for 18 years, currently long distance since he found the job of his dreams several years ago and 1,400 air miles away. I became aware of the seriousness of COVID-19 in February through my sister-in-law, a family practice physician. In March, my guy was banished from his university office and came to Reno.
All this is to say that I’ve not felt the keen isolation that some others have. But at 72 (me) and 78 (him) illness and injury take on different meanings. I believe the personal is the political. From the start, COVID-19 became a political universe of discourse. For most of my life, being working class, female, non-binary, and now old have been the prism through which I view the world. I believe these poems provide a quiet examination of power, identity, and mortality in America in these difficult times.
For me, poetry is conscious choice: saying much in smaller spaces. For me, the language of poetry is accessible language. One of the things I hope is that readers will see what I’ve done and know that they can do this, too. We need many voices. There are so many silences to break.
Fat Chance in the Land of COVID-19
Where are those moments of sateen calm?
This land is a world on tilt. A world on tilt rings,
lights up, keeps score, and wants calm.
My calm is a privileged calm. It’s a calm set
in a small city, is aided by a body temperature read
less than 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit coupled
with a three-day break from shriveled blossoms
and hard freezes. Calm is coaxed into sight
with ruby sunsets, Nevada blue days, and finches
at the feeder – or the last Zoom meeting
with co-workers/classmates/friends/family
where you see a screen of faces smile
from postage-stamp pictures
talk to that little mic in the left-hand corner
sometimes with the red backslash through its spleen.
In the fourth week of COVID-19
my old white woman, middle-class calm
is conditional. It depends on whether I’ve watched
local news, national news, news that’s 24/7.
It depends on how much fear
anyone should allot a small elevator that houses
two movers not wearing masks and their proximity
to your closest friend and her grandmother’s tri-corner table.
The move to assisted living complete, you both
will count the days she remains symptom-free.
Calm depends on reports from friends of friends
who are self-quarantined, run low-grade fevers,
have a lover who is an EMT and not getting enough sleep,
or a father that waits for a ventilator in New York.
This land is a world on tilt. A world on tilt rings,
lights up, keeps score, depends on the strength and force
that shakes the pin-ball machine. It depends
on the players: federal and state, economic and medical.
A world on tilt wants calm.
Fat chance.
On Death in the Land of COVID 19
After Cesar Vallejo
I will die in the mountains on a hot day,
on a day in May, July, or October, but one
like today with no vaccine, still air, trees
as busy with photosynthesis as I am with death.
This day will include words in lines less jagged
than a granite ridge, less smooth
than beach glass, but varied as shadow-lines
on the bright ground hard with rocks and choice.
They will say, The poet chose not to start the clockworks
of her heart at Three Horse Flat near Five Lakes.
Everyone knew she’d forget to keep the mistress-key
in her back pocket. Hearts attack. Ventricular contractions
don’t always respond to voice commands. The witnesses
are Black women, pilots, miners. Witnesses include
brook trout, cairns – a mouse caught in hawk’s talons –
or the magpies that eat death and fly.
Photo/Melanie Perish.
Melanie Perish’s poems have appeared in Sinister Wisdom, West Trestle Review, Calyx, Willawaw Journal, Persimmon Tree, rkvry. Her poems have been anthologized in Desertwood (University of Nevada Pres, 1991), Emerging Poets (Z-Publishing, 2018, 2019), and di-vêrsé-city (Austin International Poetry Festival, 2017-2019). Her books Passions & Gratitudes (Black Rock Press, 2011) and The Fishing Poems (Chapbook, Meridian Press, 2017) are her most recent collections. She is a member of Poets & Writers, Inc. and has done Poets-in-the-Schools in addition to a number of poetry readings in California, Nevada, New York, Utah, and New Mexico. Her poems owe a major debt to other poets with whom she exchanges work and critiques. Their careful readings and generosity are examples of Audre Lorde’s thought: “Writing is solitary, but thinking is collective.” Melanie is working on a collection of new poems tentatively titled Delicious Amendments.
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