Member-only story
Deliveries
Bringing meals to the homebound in the early days of COVID
Doris snaps
You’re late
when I arrive
laden in plastic:
gloves, mask, bag
microwave-warm lunch,
suffocated bread roll.
I had been in the car
rubbing pungent germicide
on my gloved hands
because I do
not want to kill her.
This is early Covid,
and I feel the virus crawling
on me, a thousand silent ticks
about to champ,
making me a secretly febrile
time bomb,
ready to erupt
in racking coughs.
Four hundred miles away,
my brother, a pulmonologist,
ensconced in plastic,
slathered in Purell,
intubates
the first wave
of coronavirus-sick
in Washington, DC.
He is sleeping in his basement,
floors below
his three children and wife,
eating peanut butter
sandwiches in plastic bags
between patients.
I pray that the PPE
will not run out,
that the N95s
will keep the red spikes,
out of his lungs,
that the sick, symptomless colleague
does not approach him
with an innocent…