To Dream of Shopping in a Time of Pandemic

 

Every night you throw your bones on the mat, then
Voyage to shopping centers whose lights flicker “closing,”
To classes you’ve only visited once prior to exams,
To the job at the company that closed but still runs,
To great malls with ceilings skewed upward, crushing
their second floors; all these escaped by sliding down
piles of mattresses in the back of a department store
that folds into the makeup maze of a convenience store
and leaves you aching for pizza in a lost food court.
It isn’t cooked; there are no masks;
we’re too close together and eventually
there’s an empty parking lot. Someone sleeping.
Or a husk of a sleeper and a man saying all these
stores are closed. Can you believe it? Every one.
The parking lot, the storefronts, are all brown
and the car that dropped you off has probably gone
to the one place still open, several blocks that way.
But what’s a block in this time where days
become months in slug-contractions of space-time
Sliding over the oil-slick news of devoured days?
That place is open. There is food.

Thinking about how "normal" is slowly shifting away from where we've been. Dreams are odd for all their spatial and time displacements--but they're becoming odd through narratives of activities that aren't currently wise or possible. Maybe it's just the discomfort of squeezing through a chrysalis, but I'm not sure.

Sharing this week with Poets & Storytellers United.

Wishing you a week absent fire and flood, except in your writing. 

-- Chrissa