This Shifting Landscape

Image of the Day: the green shoots of daffodils.

I hope you all are doing well in this shifting landscape. My son and I are working/schooling from home. I'm trying to get outside and run/walk my dog everyday--at least the sun has been shining and the weather fairly warm.

Three poems of mine are up at Apercus Literary Journal. It feels odd sharing poems at this time, (well, odder than usual) especially these poems that seem relatively frivolous and not, well, more timely or more serious.

My brain is full of Coronavirus news as I'm sure yours is as well. My work is frantically trying to shift to an online format, so I'm learning new stuff, like how to have a meeting in Zoom. I'm reading Station Eleven, which is very apropos for right now. It's hard to not keep thinking that the worse hasn't even started yet! So many of my favorite places are closed for business for the unknowable future. But then I think how healthy I am, at least right now, and try and breathe.

Here's a lovely poem by Kelli Russell Agodon, from Verse Daily.

Love in the Age of Broken Constellations
       

In the planetarium,
the universe is everywhere.

The man who controls the stars
has pressed the wrong button

and the milky way spins
around the ceiling, across the viewing

chairs and onto the floor.

A girl holds hands with Orion.

She is the first to unbuckle his belt.

The universe has never been

so close, never been part of her skin.

Her boyfriend reaches over her shoulder,

Vega is under his fingernails.

She leans in to kiss him

and the room lightens.

Where there were hands, now

there is emptiness, where there were stars—

white paint returns, the bare curve

of the dome missing its verses.
And what remains—

a mural of the virgin praying
for darkness, a saint whispering

for night to circle again,
to land quietly in his lap.