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Physical Health
World Prayer Day
While people all over the world / chanted and prayed for a miracle, / we stood in the woods with binoculars / trained on a pair of bluebirds / flitting from branch to branch, / tiny chests puffed out / in the chill morning air.
January 2021Penance For Nico
I first met Nico at a gathering of country-club types. We two misfits clearly didn’t belong at such a party, where the other guests had doused themselves in so much cologne that we were forced to escape our host’s home to catch our breath on the freshly cut grass.
December 2020
Touchless
When both of us were fourteen days clear of getting over COVID, I left our New York apartment for the first time in a long while and quickly became alarmed. No one was on the street. This was in April, when tourists normally descend on Manhattan in flocks, even in our off-avenue neighborhood. But this year a tumbleweed would not have been out of place.
November 2020
How I Got To First Base
Earlier that same afternoon All-Star slugger Dave “The Cobra” Parker had revealed to me the secret of hitting: “Hit the fucker hard, and hope it goes far.” I keep this revelation enshrined in the same chamber of my heart where my rabbinical ancestors kept their favorite Scriptures.
November 2020
Love Poem
Brooklyn April 2020 | even now the old men sit / at their corner on the stoop / the three of them on the stairs / one on top of the other / recycled masks hanging / from their faces to appease / whoever loved them / and begged them not to go out / into the street
October 2020The Race
I used my legs and heart as if I would
gladly use them up for this,
to touch him again in this life
Musings
A stink bug perches on the bristles of my toothbrush. I know more about ventilators than I should. This morning’s coffee tastes luxuriously of earth. As I run through the forest, pileated woodpeckers hammer and cackle from above. I’ve got an ache in the ball of my foot. Some things never give up.
September 2020Mothers Of All Pandemics
we call our moms they’re in their / nineties now some don’t remember / many do we are worried sons of mothers / mugged by some motherfucker of a germ / going back to the days when our mothers’ mothers / were alive during the pandemic of 1918
August 2020
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