Ready (Pandemic Poem)
by t.m. thomson
Time sticks in the throat,
sand & silt during a drought,
no wind to wash it down—
our legs are dream-paralyzed,
our arms heavy at our sides
tied.
And yet twilit bats zig & zag overhead—
jagged black rockets—while crickets
still sing a song using limb as violin & bow
Still that often-read mystery
novel sits on couch arm, spine bent
so that its two sections are wings
waiting for me to take off with them
into escapist realms
You still put up antennae for your ham radio,
standing on tiptoes, bending wire, saying
Oscar Charlie Tango through static
That brown cat—love of our lives—
still has his asthmatic cough
several medications later
& we still have him
despite occasional alarm
And still sun raises hibiscus blooms
& brow sweat, pulls a blue sky up around us
as far as eye can see
July turns a page, August 1—
nights swell with insect aria,
days shorten, thicken, ripen
ready to be cut with poet
tongue.
About the Author
t.m. thomson’s work has been featured in several journals, including Wild Age Press, The Ekphrastic Review, and These Fragile Lilacs, most recently appearing in The West Trade Review and Borrowed Solace. Her poetry will be featured in upcoming issues of The Voices Project, The Blue Ash Review, and The Pittsburg Poetry Review. Three of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Awards: “Seahorse and Moon” in 2005, “I Walked Out in January” in 2016, and “Strum and Lull” in 2018. She has co-authored Frame and Mount the Sky, a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry (2017) and is author of Strum and Lull (2019) and The Profusion (2019). She has a writer’s page at https://www.facebook.com/TaunjaThomsonWriter/. When she’s not writing, she can be found communing with cats, playing in mud, or spinning.