Lucie Barrios
Dystopia
Reflect upon your sins,
Said the archbishop
I thought of people dying
And mothers who can’t afford diapers but even if they could the shelves are empty
And a garage filled with 99.99% effectiveness
Stolen from the hands of people who could afford to pay
The coming of Christ is at hand
But this year there is no church service
No family gatherings
My mother cries as we pray the rosary
I am afraid my grandmother will die and we will not know
We sing and make jokes and use too much bandwidth to keep from going crazy
Imagine houses with horses and tennis courts and wine cellars
Acres of freedom away from everyone
We’ve been told to sew our own masks
Spring break is cancelled
Offices closed down for who knows how long
Everyone left unpaid
And yet the line snakes a poisonous coil round the grocery store
In the leafy green fields of California
A squirt bottle of hand sanitizer burns clear paths
Across an hombre’s hands as he pauses in his strawberry picking for lunch
There’s nothing wrong here, says the boss, business as usual
I thought today about running
My finger down the page in the book
Of Revelation
In search of answers
Hellfire and disease and earthquakes
And now too, the rockets of war?
I hold you in my heart
And remember love
Lucie Barrios is a 2019 graduate of Webster University, in St. Louis, with a degree in English. Since childhood she has felt a deep kinship to a wide variety of poets and she has been a voracious reader of fiction. She believes that letter writing should be revived and that sharing food is the sixth language of love.
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