This selection, chosen by guest editor Sierra Farrare, is from Alone in the House of My Heart by Kari Gunter-Seymour (Ohio University Press 2022).
Ohio Struggles to Contain
COVID-19 Nursing Home Deaths
It’s Tuesday and if the world
had not splintered,
I would be driving into town
as I have every other.
My mother, gone thin some
months ago, sits locked away,
trapped between memory
and the moment, her body rusting.
Other daughters hold her now,
masked, silvering threads of life
cradled in their latexed hands.
March winds blow biting
against a gray cloudless day.
I cover my mouth, hunker down.
How far across the sky will this Corona
spread its doom?
Kari Gunter-Seymour is the 2020–24 poet laureate of Ohio and the author of A Place So Deep inside America It Can’t Be Seen. A ninth-generation Appalachian, she is the editor of I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices and the founder and host of the seasonal performance series Spoken & Heard. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, New Ohio Review, One, and numerous other publications.
Sierra Farrare is a short fiction writer from Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to a limited self-published run of her collection, Friday Night Hand Grenade, you can also find her work featured in Pretty Owl Poetry and University of Baltimore’s Welter.
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