"Dig a hole—human-size—in your front bushes. Leave the shovel and a clump of your own hair next to it..."
"...Dress yourself. Or not. / Read a book. Or not. / Study the pantry shelves / like a poem filled / with mysteries / until you have arrived."
"Step 10: Call parents on Thursday. Tell them the plan. Hear your mother say, “Oh, Jess,” pause and then start crying. Call your father later, he says he’s looking forward to watching it online..."
"Factory work isn’t my first job. I am almost fifty-years old now, and tried different things. To keep my job, I must stay in shape. The pandemic is giving me a test..."
"Assess your pantry, your secret stores. / Someone else may scoff, but your elders / whisper in your ears that a feast awaits your hands..."
"We "Retired" the Alarm Clock weeks ago / We sleep in late—Hell there is no place to go..."
The weight of her head in the crook of my arm feels holy, a miracle in the midst of the terror of the world. She grounds me, pins me into place.
"and / if i were to die today, like so many already have / i would ask before i leave to see the / dogwood shedding outside my grandmother’s third home..."
"Standing in line I’d scan the cases, looking for poppyseed kuchen, the strudel-like confection Nanny Frida, my paternal grandmother, made when I was growing up—the black paste with its raisins, nuts and sugar rolled into flaky dough, a taste of her native Hungary and lessons learned in her mother’s kitchen in the foothills of the Tatra Mountains..."
" 'Of course' I replied, happy that for the first time since this whole thing started I was serving a purpose, no matter how small..."
"He had said they were in this together, that if one of them went down the other would, too. After all, isn’t a relationship really about what you do when things get rough..."
"There's a map with shades of blue that have crept across the entire globe, China and Germany, Chile, Michigan and California. People that suddenly became little blue specks clustered together in warning to the rest of us."
