Naugatuck Valley Community College
or Batwoman. There are cut-outs for her mouth and nose, but none for her eyes, perhaps to prepare her for what cannot be seen. Unlike Cardea, Roman goddess of hinges, who had the power to open what was shut, I cannot lift the malignant mass from the socket of her brain so words might leak out, sentences crawl up her throat. Unable to pour herself into another vessel, if Mary Alice had something to ask me, some knowledge to impart, she has lost it now.
Adrift A night light for my soul, I no longer have the Bible my mother left open for me on my bedroom table to protect me like a box of latex gloves, an N95 mask. Nothing moors me. Even pushing forward, I recede. Mired in 2021, some mornings, it takes more courage to get up than I can muster. NYT’s Coronavirus death toll for the U.S. of over 600,000 leads to bathrobe afternoons. My mother would tell me to call on inner resources. I do, but they don’t answer. Poetry, the raft I climbed onto to get through another day of isolation doesn’t keep me afloat. Learning in science about hugging a porcupine from the front and not the back didn’t teach me to embrace myself. Rowing a dinghy did. The boat was a little tyrant maybe because like a chained dog, it was so often tied to bigger ships. Poems no longer come sideways, shy and circumspect to surprise me like the dinghy. Small, unpredictable, it was unstable when someone like me, overweight and unsteady, got in. Knowledge of buoyancy, of physics didn’t help and I learned the hard way to lower myself in, 7
