Letter to Bowers from the Pandemic’s Underbelly Dear Audrey: Four days ago, when I first attempted to write to you, I got as far as penciling the date at the top of a blank page before returning to the fevered oblivion of uncertain breath. I’ve since been fortunate enough to have avoided the chaos of a hospital emergency room—having providentially back-doored my way into an out-of-network respiratory clinic, where chest x-rays yielded a pneumonia diagnosis & an ensuing test for the dreaded novel coronavirus came back positive—but not the nightly bane of alternating chills & sweats & not knowing what further cause for alarm the next hour would bring, including but not limited to the question of whether my son, standing outside at ten o’clock at night in a severe thunderstorm with wind gusts of fifty-miles-per-hour, would have enough sense to come indoors before the quarter-sized hail began pelting him… I’ve managed to stay vertical for a full fifteen minutes while eking out these lines, & now, as I begin to fade, I’m feeling a strange combination of triumph & lament: while I’m optimistic about my recovery finally heading in the desired direction & more than relieved not to be adding at least one particular undesirable statistic to my repertoire, I also never imagined I’d live to see the day I’d discover that my beloved Poetry is not so much an actual element of my own blood, as it is an exotic other, a separate life form, however precious, I’ve only known the luxury of cultivating like a juniper bonsai in a relatively oxygen-rich environment. Poetry, it turns out, is not some elixir for a richer life to be procured & casually sipped; rather like a sapling, in all its tender precariousness, it requires our fortitude & right orientation toward the entire living, breathing world (breathing, to my mind, being the operative word) in order to survive—an inclination which, for my foreseeable future, will be predominantly horizontal in nature… In the meantime, I shall count on the selfsame atmosphere that feeds the breath of Poetry to keep you healthy & safe, as I remain your reclined & convalescent friend, Stephanie.
Stephanie L. Harper
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