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      May 3, 2020Christine GelineauKneading Bread While Dying

      Not a loaf from antiquity forward
      has ever been formed by hands
      that were not dying—it’s not
      that I’ve forgotten that, but here
      I refer to the special quality imbued
      to the feel of the yeast springing alive
      under your palms when the breadmaking
      is an attempt to distract yourself
      from the Covid symptoms that
      that have flared, and receded, flared
      and receded within you now for weeks.
       
      At 3 a.m., pacing, jittery, bellowing
      your lungs in deep five-second breaths,
      you find yourself pondering what
      a life means, living, what is
      the import of new mornings
      when the darkness surrounds you
      elementally as oxygen?
       
      Remember that time on the plane,
      the pilot preparing you for
      emergency landing, twenty
      minutes until we are “on the ground,”
      see you on the ground
      the pilot said and you curled into
      yourself, folded into stasis, unable
      to imagine what could one ever do
      equal to the last twenty minutes of your life,
      a question you knew even then had no answer.
       
      And now, the window of time left
      less definite, you fill the hours:
      walk out into the cold spring
      to breathe the chill air and visit
      the nodding daffodils, or you FaceTime
      the grandchildren, or you knead
      the living dough, hands pressed deep
      into the rising warmth of our daily bread.

      from Poets Respond

      Christine Gelineau

      “My symptoms have been ‘atypical,’ so for the first two telemedicine visits both doctors were sure it could not be Covid-19 and so would not authorize testing, given the shortage of tests. Now that it has became clear that there were no other diagnoses that fit, and more has been learned about what is and is not typical, it is apparently too late for the test to be accurate. So, I’m in that area so many are in where the patient and the doctor have decided that must be it but you’re on no official rolls of confirmed cases. Since they have no treatment anyway, anyone not in an immediate emergency just stays home and does their best to support their immune system. And keep their spirits up.”