What Rough Beast | Covid-19 Edition | 05 19 20 | Alexandra Méndez

Alexandra Méndez
A Song of Solace

Just remember:
We will congregate again.
There will be plays again.
There will be class again.
We will hold hands again.
We will brush coats again.

When all this passes, we will not be the same.
The ghost-imprint of masks we wore,
the mental gauge of six feet
sounding alarm bells when it shortens—
they will linger, but they will fade.

We will learn to touch again,
share the space of the world again.
And a gleeful little girl
born in quarantine
will laugh like spring and run into our arms.

—Submitted on 

Alexandra Méndez‘s poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in Tuesday Magazine, Dudley Review, Public Books, Harvard Review Online, Language Magazine, Harvard Political Review, and Harvard Crimson. Raised in Decatur, Ga., she holds a BA from Harvard University, where she received a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship. Méndez is a doctoral candidate in Latin American and Iberian cultures at Columbia University.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.