“I Want America To Understand — This Week, It's Going To Get Bad”
by Tatiana Johnson-Boria
US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams on the spread of COVID-19, CNN, March 23, 2020
Every human yearns
for good health, a body
upright, in faith—
the elders in my life
call me with prayers,
I am at a loss for language
for the songs they’ve sung
away from themselves.
It seems all you can do
is sing or cry when left
in uncertain times—
on the train the bodies
shift away in distance
empty seats buffer
bodies, a shifting eye
watches a man
coughing as if we know
anything at all.
When the train stops
at Chinatown station
I climb the stairs
from the underground
the vacant world waits—
it feels like seeing a ghost
all at once there is
an empty when there
was once everything.
I walk past the shelter
the same one I do
most days the people
bundled amidst
brittle wind
I wonder who
among us
is afraid?
I think of my mother,
as I do most days
endless worry amplifies
in pandemic— I sit in
the discomfort it brings,
I avoid asking myself
which future loss
could scare me more.
I am going to work
I greet the chilled
air with the privilege
of being alive.
The streets are
harrowing
in absence.
Everyone is
somewhere else.
This world is swift
in how gently
it collapses
into itself
the innocent day
carries us on.
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Tatiana (she/her/hers) is a writer, artist and educator. Her writing explores identity, trauma, especially inherited trauma, and what it means to heal. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College and is a 2021 Tin House Scholar. She also serves on the board for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Find her work in or forthcoming at Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Foundry, and others.
Image from the Spanish painter Antonio Lopez Garcia.