Nichole Acosta
Daily Video Calls With My Grandmother
1.
She speaks in broken English.
To me
These are full poems.
Today she warns,
“Don’t stay outside
too long
Last night I see the fire
on T.V.
You know?”
I reassure her I will be safe
I try to reassure myself.
2.
I make the mistake
of telling her I have a headache
one that is so painful
I have to call her in the dark.
The flood of text messages
from other relatives
fill my inbox.
She doesn’t sleep all night.
I call her in the morning.
She is relieved the virus didn’t take me
Like it took 5 of her best friends.
She doesn’t know I know.
I call her twice that day.
3.
She says my grandpa sleeps
most of the day,
imitates his loud snoring
We laugh the purest laugh
we’ve heard in months.
4.
At dinner time we do show and tell
of what we are cooking
evidence we love the one we are with
and they love us back
5.
On Mother’s Day
I tell her happy mother’s day
She’s shocked that no one has called her but me
I don’t spoil the surprise
that her daughters will drive-by visit.
6.
The day when things shut down officially
my grandfather asks why no one comes over
for family dinner anymore.
I write in big letters because he cannot hear very well,
“There is a virus outside,
making people sick
so they have to stay home.
Turn on the news.”
He journals every day.
7.
The nation is erupting.
The white protestors
are voluntarily becoming human shields
for black protestors.
The police are herding the masses
with force.
I saw one protestor nearly be pulled apart
Police at the foot of him
Protestors at the arms
Tug of war with a human body
The stretched man got away
ran off screen with his fellow protestors.
This happened in Chicago
on CNN
My wife just got home from a protest in Brooklyn
says, “cops are crazy,”
too much to explain now
She needs to go out again.
I call my grandma
She says,
“Too many people outside
I don’t know what happen”
I want to say,
“There are two viruses
making people sick,
hate and COVID”
Instead I say,
“It’s crazy. It’s all crazy.”
—Submitted on 06/20/2020
Nichole Acosta is a Brooklyn-based poet, performer, and carb counter. She enjoys bridging the gaps, between page and stage, identity and perception. She is the author of Throat on Fire (The Soap Box Press, 2020). Her work appears in The Americas Poetry Festival of New York 2018 anthology, the Diabetics Doing Things podcast series, the This Is Not What I Ordered podcast series, the Connect. Politic. Ditto youth poetry anthology from Urban Word, among others.
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