quarantine is a dissociation
and so what maddens is reality
bursting through itself, rising
from the sea, axiomatic inertias
of what promised to always be
revealed liquid, sloughing through new
ruins, through our cold bones.
importance alit anew in grocers and
teamsters, showed all the nobility of nurses
and the wretchedness of authority.
it became clear that it had always been
just people,
that food and toilet paper could not be taken
for granted
that neither evictions nor emissions
were inevitable.
in a land wealthy with scarcity, nothing was assured
as of its shipwreck we built fear, and hope
in the bitter salt air before a storm.