Like Picasso's Weeping Woman
       

my face is both straight-on and sideways.
Like the walls of the house next door,
the days accrue, accrue, accrue,

until it's time for the terror lilies to bloom,
until every speck of interstellar dust
has fallen between the breasts

of Sister Domenica, Patron Saint
of Plagues. Like the tiniest
asteroid moon, one mile across,

we're pulled by gravity
whether we like it or not.
You ask me what I pray for;

I tell you I don't. That it's more
like wishing on a fisherman's brow,
nodding to the cheery-fucking-upping

robins. Straight-on and sideways:
is that a band? The ache is nameless,
its color stomach-in-knots pink,

blue like the diagram explaining
how the virus hatchets our happy
like a solar system of woe.

Each day brings a new carcass
for a turkey vulture to munch,
a red line resembling the one

that ran up my father's arm
when he got that infected bite.
Like a dentist office receptionist's

dreams, like an old-man's tooth,
there's a fissure in the fuselage,
a viral Hiroshima in every blessed

bowl. In gym class, Miss Joyce
called out the steps: Apart, together
together. Together, together, apart.

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Copyright © 2021 Martha Silano All rights reserved
from Copper Nickel
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission