AIRBORNE............................................................................................................................................................CAITLIN KOSSMANN

WINNER

Airborne

Poem by Caitlin Kossmann

While they are sitting with the empty seats between them I am cleaning the flies stuck, dead, to the toilet seat in the apartment no one has touched for four months.

Waiting for me was the musty damp of unwashed clothes in the laundry and two rolls of disinfectant wipes on the made bed. Today, this is care:

methods to kill what can’t be seen, maybe isn’t even there, packaged neatly for my arrival in their absence, and the exaggerated repulsion of strangers long in advance

avoiding meeting. They breathe through cloth and plastic even sealed among the clouds, as I waste sodden paper towels, lift a window for a gust of sound to feed the candle flame. When they land their message is the same as if they’d just pulled up downstairs or at the grocery store on Harrison. I can’t tell if they made it there alone.

I am trying to read out of the air what I can’t hear: the ticking of the next second, the shape of air currents around missing bodies, the things those molecules run into,

the pressure drop of a kiss. The sigh before the mold blooms already like an aftertaste as I fold the sheets.

MONSIEUR LE BEAU by BARBARA DIRNBACH