ANNA LEAHY
Purgatory : Pandemic
You’ve discovered that a day can be a place
between all you’ve done and all you expected to do, to be, to occur.
Each day becomes a lengthening instant between
breathing in and breathing out. You’d like to think this is meditation.
This pause has nothing to do with holding your breath
and everything to do with what you’re doing and not doing and repeating.
A day is a day is a day is a day.
You’re hoarding eggs, then rationing them out to yourself. You hear yourself humming.
You’re looking for a little loveliness and cauliflower.
You’re listing names of friends, loved ones, in the space between memory and prayer.
You’re wiping things down because that’s what purgatory means.
You’re worried about everyone because that’s what pandemic means.
You trust that neatness will count for something and bleach for everything.
You recognize a face from six feet away and don’t know what to say.
And they told two people and they told two people and they told two people and now everyone
knows. That’s not exactly what exponential means
but it’s the way it begins. Everyone’s anxious for half lives of inevitable exhaustion
and whatever’s around the next corner we’d like to reach.
The berries are unreasonable. Slippers and weeds are as necessary as anything
else. As necessary as keeping something from each other,
as necessary as keeping something from oneself.
You back away because that’s the opposite of what necessary means.
You long for after-this-life. You think, If I can trust distance, I must trust time.
When you hear that someone can’t breathe,
your heart aches with hope-fors and might-have-beens.
You’re sobbing over peaches and apples. You’re not alone.
—Spring 2020
—“That is the way we are one and indivisible.” after Gertrude Stein’s “Sacred Emily”
Previously published in Atlanta Review
Anna Leahy is the author of the poetry collections What Happened Was:, Aperture, and Constituents of Matter and the nonfiction book Tumor. Her work has appeared at Aeon, Atlanta Review, The Atlantic, Bennington Review, BuzzFeed, Poetry, Scientific American, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and her essays have won top awards from Mississippi Review, Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, and Dogwood. She edits the international Tab Journal and directs the MFA in Creative Writing program at Chapman University. More at https://amleahy.com.