by John Dos Passos Coggin
Loneliness is a basement apartment
in the ice core of a winter quarantine.
Anxieties for a disease of mysterious contagion
queue at the door, unbidden and unwelcome.
Loose carpet fibers float up to the ceiling, mixing
with dead skin to form indoor smog. Snow drifts in, drifts out
of the driveway without a song. No friend to share, to confirm
the true measure of the season’s snowmen and snow angels.
Loneliness is a rationing of company at Christmas.
Children enforce social distance from the virus,
telling mom and pop to stay one alligator apart,
making gator chomp motions for everyone’s delight.
Then back to cold silence. Until I lit a hearth with art.
With a pencil and markers, I drew freehand the Irish coast,
studying each cove, crook, and crag like a Dublin schoolboy,
hoping to discover a sort of lifeline somewhere in my ancestry.
I stopped along the Cliffs of Moher to sketch a woundwort,
strong to windstorm and salt blast, once the prize of herbalists,
the bane of witches. Then, having finished the long Irish frame,
I emptied my emerald marker, an elixir, and filled its heartland.
John Dos Passos Coggin is a writer from the Chesapeake Bay region. His poetry has appeared in Pangyrus, Cathexis Northwest Press, and The Blue Mountain Review. He also co-manages the John Dos Passos literary estate.