by John Dos Passos Coggin<\/p>\n
Loneliness is a basement apartment
\nin the ice core of a winter quarantine.
\nAnxieties for a disease of mysterious contagion
\nqueue at the door, unbidden and unwelcome.
\nLoose carpet fibers float up to the ceiling, mixing
\nwith dead skin to form indoor smog. Snow drifts in, drifts out
\nof the driveway without a song. No friend to share, to confirm
\nthe true measure of the season\u2019s snowmen and snow angels.
\nLoneliness is a rationing of company at Christmas.
\nChildren enforce social distance from the virus,
\ntelling mom and pop to stay one alligator apart,
\nmaking gator chomp motions for everyone\u2019s delight.
\nThen back to cold silence. Until I lit a hearth with art.<\/p>\n
With a pencil and markers, I drew freehand the Irish coast,
\nstudying each cove, crook, and crag like a Dublin schoolboy,
\nhoping to discover a sort of lifeline somewhere in my ancestry.
\nI stopped along the Cliffs of Moher to sketch a woundwort,
\nstrong to windstorm and salt blast, once the prize of herbalists,
\nthe bane of witches. Then, having finished the long Irish frame,
\nI emptied my emerald marker, an elixir, and filled its heartland.
\n <\/p>\n
John Dos Passos Coggin is a writer from the Chesapeake Bay region. His poetry has appeared in Pangyrus, Cathexis Northwest Press, <\/em>and The Blue Mountain Review.<\/em> He also co-manages the John Dos Passos literary estate.<\/p>\n
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