Patricia Nellene Deal
Mid-March 2020 Revision
Last week we called it the coronacation.
Memory’s distancing in magnitude
of need not known before the breadth
of a collective sigh could exhale. Disbelief
mute in living rooms watching new cases
climb charts daily like ladder rungs leading
to anxiety. Death falls from the ladders
held standing by hospital workers forced
to make protective gear with two sided tape
In hospital conference rooms across America.
Patricia Nellene Deal is a writer in McLean, Va. Her current writing focuses on the exploration and challenges to the ideas of a single story, memory, and the resilience of the female spirit. Here poems appeared in the Clerestory Press Quarterly, a journal formerly published by the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta.
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