Anthony Chesterfield
Three Poems
Clean Air Under a Corona
I am taking cleaner breaths at work. My lungs expand—happy to let oxygen—
Enable them to sag like hammocks—Occupied by some lazy man
On a beach without a care in the world.
Down the hall, a resident’s chest collapses.
This morning, he ate the Product 19, along with an omelet
This morning I ate the Product 19, along with a hard—boiled egg
The shipment of cereal came in last night from upstate.
The ears of wheat were harder to husk—they were more hardy
Less riddled with carbon from automobiles.
When the farmer harvested them, they were not drooping,
They were not hunched, not curved over
Like some druids singing incantations to a wrathful god.
This healing of the earth is to my benefit, not to his.
Didn’t we both just breathe the same air?
Shouldn’t we both reap what we sow?
Too Many Rules
Ever since COVID—19 hit, I’ve been in the company of misery.
The phone rings. It rings with the same urgency as
the nurses hands that are trying to pump life into a man who has been dead for an hour.
He won’t be brought back—But—because of a paper he signed three years ago, our hands are tied. I’ve been expecting this call. I’ve been warned of the sibling dynamics.
The hatred, the anger, the subterfuge—I’d hoped that the virus—
which has just struck their father down—
Would have them grow up. Put their differences aside.
And by doing so saved me from having to utter this trope—which in its own right is the hangman to my psyche. I measure the words in my mind. Twenty—four, two dozen, two score, doesn’t matter how I quantify them, they will be my noose.
I can’t tell you what you want to know.
You are on the list of people I can talk to—
But not about that.
I pick up the receiver:
“Hello, my name is X I am Y’s son can you tell me about his medical state.
“I am sorry, I can’t tell you about your loved one’s medical condition.”
“Why?”
“You are not the health—care proxy, and are not on the contact list”
“But you actually pick up the phone—unlike the doctor”
“I’m not a doctor.”
“Just read the chart.”
“I can’t.”
“You’re heartless. He could be dead for all I know”—Click.
He is—He is.
As I hang up, the nurse Purells her hands. She wanted to wash them earlier—there was no hope.
I’m shaking. Aren’t rules made to be broken? Had they been, my deceased patient’s ribcage wouldn’t be shattered—and my heart would not be leaping out of my chest.
Nursing Home Under Siege
You are thirty percent empty on both fronts—Staff and patients
Admissions have ceased—and—the morgue—is overflowing.
Every day, a third of workers are out sick.
Good intended leaders, pontificating—
With the same degree of elegance
As today’s shit in yesterday’s bedpan.
When normality returns will I genuflect to a culpable conscience?
I’m only one person. I can’t be all things to all men.
I can only clock in early, clock out late
I can only check out if my chest is achy
If I run a temperature, have cough
Our census is down two hundred.
Every day we see the morning star
We wait for that influx from the hospitals
Whose harbinger graces the papers daily.
The DOH, unreliable as a squeaky hinge,
Changes protocol with such abruptness
Causing our PT therapists to feel like lapdogs
To a circumspect Dr. Jekyll whose alter—ego Hyde
Paints a retrospective of second guessers.
For the past two weeks, it’s been Death’s birthday every day.
He has become so complacent—
He has forgotten how to hand out party favors
He risks the same anonymity I experience at work
Where social workers become chaplains—
Chaplains become nurses’ aides and doctors—
Doctors become shadows of their former selves as they are rotated out weekly.
The anxiety ridden home
Whose mission to bring comfort
Has been suspended
For him to gloat over
Have his cake—and eat it too.
—Submitted on 04/26/2020
Anthony Chesterfield is the author of Death’s Strife (XlibrisUS, 2018). A social worker pursuing an MFA at Manhattanville College, he lives in Bedford Hills, NY, with his wife, three daughters, and three cats.
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