The Chinese Virus
Pandemic Poetry
Where surgical masks become scarce
and latex gloves get slippery with sweat,
the nurses are wearing plastic
trash bags in ICU wards.
I remember not too long ago the images
of Chinese crowds on sidewalks
barely visible through the yellow smog,
huddled phantoms where breath was the ghost,
the crowds have vanished along with the fog,
but it’s still more hazardous to breathe
a more microscopic pollution,
pangolin posed, like a scale rebalancing
while the wealthy presume numbers
are a vaccine in their veins,
promises empty as the streets of L.A.
or New York City now, strange ghost towns,
these sleepless cities in comas self-induced
except for grocery stores
where the lines stretch and snake
out the doors, and Asian-Americans
are avoided like the post-truth plague,
racism the new worst of cliches,
stories of being spit on, cursed at,
attacked while walking home,
an entire country believing a virus
capable of choosing its host,
but hatred itself is the most obvious
choice, like a fortune cookie
after a meal of vampire bat soup,
its message left blank
and presumably white,
a slip of paper to write your name on.
_________
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