"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..."
"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..."
"...Dress yourself. Or not. / Read a book. Or not. / Study the pantry shelves / like a poem filled / with mysteries / until you have arrived."
"Dig a hole—human-size—in your front bushes. Leave the shovel and a clump of your own hair next to it..."
"If there ever was a time to take a risk, the end of the world as we thought it, should be it..."
"Decide what is right for yourself. No one else can know the right answer except for you...."
"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..."
"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..."
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.
"I have never been a germaphobe until this month, but now I can’t shake the image of the crowned virus which could fill my throat and lungs, and turn me into a hacking, wretched vector of death..."
"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."
"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..."
