March 12, 2020A Dispatch from Seattle
or, Nervous in the Hot Zone
Yes, we’re scared but we also make
zombie apocalypse jokes
By texts. I don’t know when I’ll see
my friends in person again.
We don’t want to panic and overreact
but we don’t want
To underreact. Some of my friends
are still hosting parties.
Some of them are still planning
to take their previously
Scheduled trips overseas. Some are
the polite looters
Who are buying all the toilet paper
in Seattle.
“Good for you,” I text to one of them.
“You’ll be
The most hygienic and well-stocked
shitter in the city.”
Some of my fellow Native Americans
are performing
The highly sacred Indigenous shrug,
as in, “Dude,
They’re not giving us smallpox
blankets.”
But, hey, it’s the Trumps. Their
wicked incompetence
And delusional arrogance is
striking us
With smallpox of the soul.
I try to listen
Only to the health experts,
but the dipshits,
Conspiracy theorists, partisan
hacks, trolls,
And the mentally ill dominate
the discourse,
As they always do. How did
we get to a place
Where the borderline personalities
get quoted
As if they were experts by borderline
journalists
Who also act as if they’re experts,
as well?
Maybe the true pandemic is
immodesty.
Maybe the true pandemic is
the loss
Of a shared and common
decency.
But, hell, that’s big talk
for someone
Like me, who just angrily,
impulsively,
And paranoidly bought
$500 worth
Of canned food. And yet,
I also know
That people are good. I know
that most of us
Will reflexively switch
into kindness
Mode. That’s what humans,
at their best,
Have almost always done.
In the meantime,
Here I am, re-binging on Parks
and Recreation
As I serve myself another bowl
of lactose-free
Ice cream and rhyme my way
through self-quarantine.
from Poets Respond