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.
