Quarantine Poems

I know all these '90s songs from the middle school dances. I wore an oversized black T-shirt to the dark cafeteria dance floor. It said "Got Milk?" in white letters I tucked into the front of my jeans. Mom braided my hair. The bright "Got Milk?" is a glow-stick in my adolescence. Try to go deeper this time. We have a song in common. Things started to turn around for me, around "Dancing in the Dark." It was around this time of year, 2005: I saw flowers for the first time in a landscape I thought I hated. Nights were warmer. The lengthening light kept me company in evenings. Come on, you're motivating me. Summer 1998 we moved houses: a bedroom for each of us. That first night alone I turned on the radio: Springsteen. I looked up at the glow-in-the-dark stars Dad helped me putty to the ceiling. I learned again, at age twelve, to self-soothe. You'll feel this in your ribs. No longer hating a landscape. (Ithaca, NY 2006)

One finds that time opens up like a flower in a kaleidoscope but you must test it, ask it. Perhaps you must spend large quantities of time alone in a quiet house. You must have a house and quiet, in other words. Please wait for the host to start this meeting. (Ten minutes.) Bernadette Mayer wrote a long poem called Midwinter Day while doing daily things like making dinner, caring for children, and dreaming. How did she do it? Practice. Immediacy and spontaneity are fictions women know. (Five minutes.)  Nana can't hear me on the phone so I let her talk. I try to ask her what it's like being confined to her room. She doesn't hear me. I try again. She hears something like: "Those women you used to eat with..." "I can't see them," she says. I don’t hear any sadness in her voice. "I like my room." (Two minutes.) She's passing time with dreams of the July baby. "I wonder what she will look like? She could look like Charlie, ...