by Liz Ahl
“The U.S. national emergency to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic ended Monday as President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan congressional resolution to bring it to a close after three years — weeks before it was set to expire…” —NPR, April 11, 2023
Still, these tattered masking tape traces
on the scuffed tile floors, hieroglyphs
of our attempts to demarcate safe zones
of coming and going through
the narrow public vestibules.
The box of “take one” surgical masks
still perched on its pedestal at the entrance,
offers only its lonely cardboard; empty,
too, each strategically placed
hand sanitizer dispenser, which exhales
a sad, shallow breath when pressed.
Some smudged plexiglass remains,
having been more difficult to erect
and therefore more bother to remove.
Outside, the windswept tumbleweed
of a facemask, its torn elastic bands
flapping their tired fronds against
the asphalt with the other winter trash.
Refrigerator trucks rededicated
to the chilled storage and transport
of anything but the human deceased.
Small town campus ice arena
bearing the slightest scars of cot-legs
and privacy screens, the strange dream
of soldiers fading to fragments.
A ghost of myself, figment out of phase,
measures distances, haunts the far edges
of what bustles and churns, a clamorous
bullying desire for “normalcy”
almost passing for “normalcy.”
And of course, the counted dead,
the dead uncounted. The brutal
and insufficient arithmetic. The long
and the short, the landmine damage
lurking in bodies, biding time
until the next innocent footstep.
Liz Ahl is the author of
A Case for Solace (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022) and
Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017). Recent publications include a poem about Buzz Aldrin in the anthology
Space: 100 Poems (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and poems in recent issues of
TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, and
Revolute. She lives in Holderness, New Hampshire.
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