MAYDAY

During These Unprecedented Times
by Nicole Steinberg

Contributed By:

Person Alone on Boat
Image by Vuong Viet from Pixabay

 

amidst my deadlines death circles closer / shifting 

from internet strangers to friends of friends / everyone 

 

is angry this week / the novelty of it all gone completely

a thin impenetrable film of tension left behind / little things 

 

piss me off like why can’t I open a goddamn piece of mail 

without worrying it’ll be the thing that kills me / the line 

 

between the quotidian and the absurd buried and blurred

a glimpse of the world my grandmother inherited in 1918

 

all the devastation and mass expiration minus the virtual 

happy hours / is there a worse feeling known to humankind than 

 

it didn’t have to be like this? outside the bathroom on a sunday 

night L and I count our toilet paper rolls / hold each other 

 

by the shirt hems / bracing for the bleak hell of tomorrow 

and the next TV ad that reminds us we’re in this together

NICOLE STEINBERG is the author of Glass Actress (Furniture Press Books, 2017), Getting Lucky (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2013), and several chapbooks, including Fat Dreams (Barrelhouse, 2018). Her work has been featured or reviewed in the New York Times, Newsweek, Flavorwire, Bitch, and Hyperallergic, and her poetry was selected by Penn State’s Pennsylvania Center for the Book for the 2016 Public Poetry Project poster series. She’s the founder of New York’s EARSHOT reading series and she lives in Philadelphia. She can be found at nicolesteinberg.net.

Filed Under: Poetry

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Every mound—cultivated, black— every furrow combed with air— ground crumbled, figured as a chorus, the damp ground is my soil and freedom . . . Spring mornings, tilled—black to blue—unarmed, peaceful labor— a thousand ploughed-up rumors— in its radius unbounded. And, nevertheless, the ground—mistaken thunder—unmoved if you plead, even pounding the ground metrics—a decaying flute […]

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