Happy Mother’s Day to all those who celebrate. I’m in Dallas this weekend visiting my mom. Five years ago, in 2020, we were locked down and in the midst of the pandemic. We still didn’t know much about COVID and there were no vaccines. I wrote this poem1 then, when I couldn’t fly to Dallas to see my mother for Mother’s Day.
Restricted
It doesn’t matter
how I feel, if I’m
healthy, if I don’t
have a temperature,
if I’ve scrubbed
my hands until they’re raw,
if I’m six feet away
and wearing a mask
of many colors
and gloves, if I’ve
disinfected my entire
body in bleach,
if I’ve quarantined
for fourteen days
after flying from California,
because how can I know
if I’m really healthy,
if the dry cough and fever
I had in January
was just the flu,
because what if
I have it now,
if I’m asymptomatic
like Typhoid Mary
a cook who refused to
to stop cooking
and was sent away
imprisoned basically
on North Brother Island
for being an asymptomatic
carrier of Typhoid Fever,
so I can’t come see you
to buy your groceries,
to hug you and take
your loneliness like you
took mine away
when I was a child
because what if
I am the carrier of a gift
I would never want to give you?
My book Gathering the Pieces of Days has been out in the world for a month! I want to thank all of you for your support and encouragement. This community means so much to me. If you have a moment and feel so inclined, please leave a brief review on my Goodread's page. You can also leave a review on Amazon. You can get my book from Unsolicited Press, Bookshop.org, or Amazon. Thank you so much.
“Restricted” first appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Issue 4, July 2020, http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ4/Pickrell-Restricted.aspx.
I hope we never have to live through something like that again, it was heart breaking. In some strange way, I feel a slightly similar sense of isolation with regard to this animal we have as a president who would try to divide us all, isolate us, make us suspicious of each other. thanks
Whew. I really like how this poem rushed along with the speaker's thoughts. It takes me right back to the beginning of the pandemic.