MANAGED CARE JESUS
I call my wife Managed Care Jesus
because she has for many years
carried the corporate cross,
mended frayed provider networks,
set up a thousand conference calls but
it’s more than that in fact
mostly it’s our daughters
who urgently need lamotrigine
and a seasonal affective disorder lamp
(what in my day we called the “the sun”)
and something to say to the teddy bear boyfriend
who’s now an abuser
because he wants what Daughter One won’t give
you are only as happy as
your unhappiest child
the wise among us say, whoever they are
and this time they’re right
my wife carries all of it inside her
like a drug mule on a long-haul flight
every worry, every insult,
every slight to their teenage egos
and I worry one day
her body will turn to lead or heavier
the weight of all that worry actually
bearing her—boring her—downward
into the earth like an augur
until she stands upright
six feet under and I say
sweetheart do you want some coffee
and she says no, not just yet
I have to pay the deposit
QUARANTINE DAYS
Here a week of rain gave way
to 85 degrees and empty afternoons.
The sun sprawled in a hammock over Austin
and reminisced, uninterrupted, to girls laying out,
which is what people used to do before their social media feeds
like, completely blew up, while neighbors
sat in haphazard crescents in the shade of porches
and lobbed greetings out at the street.
There was some confusion about what to do next.
A tendril of jasmine peeked through the pavement on Redbud Trail,
looked around, and decided to stay. This was Day 6.
On the 11th afternoon NASA detected
daydreams hovering over major cities, one more sign of
threats to the nation’s brood supply, its chain of paranoia and fretting.
Pollution was down but lassitude was going nowhere, and
there was serious concern for the bathmat industry,
our packaged cheese processors, for
the manufacturers of protein powders and to-go meals.
Bicyclists appeared like mayflies, almost as numerous as the virus itself.
They clogged the arteries of our little suburb,
headed for its heart, and were puzzled to find this town has no center.
(That’s the way we made them in the Seventies.)
The skies were so clear I could see reasons for a choice I made
three months earlier, and on Day 22
construction workers pulled pickup trucks over
to the side of Highway 71 and let their dogs drive.
Everywhere there were open assignations, random meetings, afternoon strolls.
A woman talked to her down-the-street neighbor the following week
but had no ulterior motive. We forgot to note it.
On the 34th, someone emailed the mayor to complain about the quiet.
People wondered what to call that flower that looks like a wimple.
Verbena grew riotous in yards on Laurel Valley.
Mockingbirds acknowledged that people were listening again and
stopped being quite so argumentative. One was about to be famous when,
on the 59th day, the quarantine was lifted. The city put on shoes.
The syrupy songs of warblers faded into the background
as we stepped back into the world,
hustling to catch up, to make strides, and someone said
go shove that rock back up the slope.
Bruce McCandless is a writer and editor who lives in Austin, Texas. He is the author of the modern fairy tale Beatrice and the Basilisk, and he has previously published poems in Pleiades, Natural Bridge, Cold Mountain Review, and The Naugatuck River Review. When he is not writing or reading, Bruce can usually be found exploring Central Texas trails on his mountain bike.