It doesn’t matter
how I feel, if I’m
healthy, if I don’t
have a temperature,
if I’ve scrubbed
my hands until they’re raw,
if I’m six feet away
and wearing a mask
of many colors
and gloves, if I’ve
disinfected my entire
body in bleach,
if I’ve quarantined
for fourteen days
after flying from California,
because how can I know
if I’m really healthy,
if the dry cough and fever
I had in January
was just the flu,
because what if
I have it now,
if I’m asymptomatic
like Typhoid Mary,
a cook who was sent away,
imprisoned basically
for being an asymptomatic
carrier of typhoid fever,
so I can’t come see you
to buy your groceries,
to hug you and take
your loneliness like you
took mine away
when I was a child,
because what if
I am the carrier of a gift
I would never want to give you?
is a poet living in Richmond, California. Her work previously appeared in KYSO Flash and most recently in Eclectica and Coffee Poems, and is forthcoming in West Marin Review. She is a freelance editor, and managing editor of Jung Journal: Cultural and Psyche.
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Two poems by LeeAnn Pickrell in KYSO Flash (Issue 8, August 2017):
Hand and Wheel, after Georgia O’Keeffe—Hand and
Wheel (1933) by Alfred Stieglitz; and
The Ostrich