What Rough Beast | Covid-19 Edition | 05 27 20 | Trish Hopkinson

Trish Hopkinson
I want to order room service

I want to go jogging down the bicycle lane on the street near my house / gently glide down its slope away from Mount Timpanogos avoid the large fallen pods from locust trees & the sadness of a clump of decomposed bird’s feathers pressed flat by a pickup truck tire / the sadness of statistics of pandemics of children caged of women missing of men lying where they ought not to lie & then turn one-hundred-eighty degrees at the stop sign by the church back toward the mountain filling the sky blocking the horizon / where other sadness must exist between me & earth’s edge where it too turns / curves into ocean & dissolves into space / the sun wrapping it in a fiery blanket of soon-to-be ash & think if only the climb toward home was less steep until I reach my cul-de-sac, slow / to a walk to reach my doorstep & stretch off the intensity / taste the salt of my upper lip / feel the trickle from beneath my breast / step inside into the shower stall / rinse perspiration & pollen & pollution from my hair / finish just in time for that loud knock at the door

—Submitted on 04/05/2020

Trish Hopkinson is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Footnote (Lithic Press, 2017) and Almost Famous (Yavanika Press, 2019). Her poetry has appeared in Tinderbox, Glass Poetry Press, and The Penn Review, among other journals. Hopkinson lives in Provo, Utah. Online at SelfishPoet.com.

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