Fast forward March
Wet, cold, mostly gray
Except for these few days
Alone in the Lone Star State
I roll the dice
I take the trip
This is the first-ever corona season
No one knows what it means yet
I sing Guided By Voices while washing my hands
“…I see terror in your eyes
As we go up, we go down
I can’t socialize, I’ll be institutionalized
As we go up, we go down…”
I listen to poets talk
About Star Wars, The X-Files, Saved By
The Bell, witchcraft, and line breaks—
Otherwise, I’m here
To meander along an unassuming river
To meditate on the well-worn and the wonder
Of the passing past
Here in this place and time we’ve never seen
To meditate on the burning
Of every memory
Is a blessing
One day
Without
Anything in the rearview mirror
Someone coughs
Now I’m sitting inside a room
Inside of a bigger room
People shift, uncomfortable
In their open-mindedness
Nowhere to hide
In their skin
Fear spreads
Through the virus
This way walking
Leaves respond to an ambivalent breeze
And now I’m thinking about kangaroos
They cough
To signal surrender
That’s what we do, too
The sound punctures our sense
Hearing as well
As wellbeing
Easy to rupture as if ripe
Papaya skin and flesh
Quickly, unceremoniously, as if
What is vital?
Lingers in the unsafe air
We grasp the day before–
It’s gasped away
Be flippant
This is your corona memoir
This is Day 1
Call it the age of our collective negative capability
Two-thousand thirty-seven
Miles away, songbirds
Perch on telephone wires
Above the also rising
Sea—see
Their backs blacked out
To the sun their songs
Oblivion-oblivious
Looking back from a stranger’s house
In Wellesley, MA, how
Will we see this moment?
Like falling
Out of love dulls
Pours itself into a single droplet
Spit hanging heavy on this
Budding branch, a boulder
Evaporating is what we call this color
Between now and
Predictive model #42
Spring is on the march to gone
Fading into focus
A film of feeling, still
Life, dead things, dreaming
What happens next
Michael McNally-Costello is a poet. In 2017, Michael was an artist-in-residence at Mass MoCA. His poems have appeared in Del Sol Review, La Petite Zine, Crowd, swank writing, MiPOesias, Unpleasant Event Schedule, Tarpaulin Sky, GSU Review, Essays & Fictions, Columbia Poetry Review, and White Stag. He has also been included in Best American Poetry and The Incredible Sestina Anthology. Michael works and writes from his home in Newton, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife, Marissa, and their son, Liam. He is at work on his first full-length collection and is looking to publish the chapbook mss in which “Spring Catalogue” appears.
Image: “Tell Me Again” by Andy Fogle
Pine Hills Review 