Brid
I watch nature’s slow pace against the quickening tempo of Instagram and Twitter, twin doors I open in the expanse. People throw flashlights and photographs like shouts in the forest. This is the spot where we can hear an echo, says my son, pausing on our walk, and we talk out loud to ourselves for a while.
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For spa day we scrub our feet with pebbly salves, play the sounds of the rainforest on low. Blue toenails this time, says my son. I plug in the hair straightener and get the towels. We perform in front of the picture windows in the living room, acting out our adventure. In each house its own intimacy, like stones on a beach, waiting for the tide.
My daughter won’t let me throw anything away. She makes a monster from empty tape dispensers and googly eyes, a trophy from a happy meal container. She cuts up everything and tapes it back together. My friend says they can’t find any toilet paper. We are always running out of tape.
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A Black Lives Matter sign is vandalized. Video shows cops firing rubber bullets into a crowd, knocking a senior to the ground. News like a puncture to a cocoon. The puncture was there all along, just not in my cocoon. Not in my line of sight.
I put my hair into a ponytail and take it down, again and again, a nervous tic. I am lucky and can teach into the abyss of my screen. Students poke heads in like minnows. We’re always going rock jumping at the creek. Look at me! Shout the kids and I look and look.
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We get bunnies off craigslist. Two sisters the kids name Snuggle Bunny and Riley. We build elaborate cardboard structures but they just chew the rug. Prey animals, they are programed to run. Boredom isn’t the worst thing. Keep petting the soft fur. Keep looking out the window.
Looking away, a privilege. Looking inward, a privilege. Lack of action, the pause before joining the march. The excuse of the kids. Wading into a bog, being part of it, the sticky depths.
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Such first world problems. The incarceration is chemical, wrote Paul Celan, from his bed in the mental hospital. What rigor these pills. How to bend open time’s little box of guilt. Bodies like matchsticks, in a line. Death, distant, a black halo. Uncomprehending is one way to put it. Willful is another.
Donations are a drop in a bucket. Face pressed to the window, I can see the neighbor’s castle house. Haunted, say the children. In its grandiosity, a kind of terror. We keep the Egyptian statues lined up on the piano, a fake inherited treasure. Pomp is a word like rotund, an obvious excess.
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Images of the dead read as black and white photos in a yearbook. I picture their lives as webs extending through the world, a net cut from its tethers. Do you know anyone who has it? Someone asks me over text. I mean, do you know anyone who died?
We buy bird feeders that attract goldfinches and orioles, hummingbirds and woodpeckers. Our 13-year-old dog gets sick. The vet shakes her head over the phone. Memories like filters bring clean images, the dog park in winter, a puppy lying on the heat vent. Grief like a bucket of hot water we have to carry around with us.
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The neighbors embrace the holidays, put up elaborate decorations and lights. We carve jack o’lanterns and make a haunted house out of dollar store black tablecloths. When it passes, we invent our own holidays—a stuffy’s birthday, leaf day. We celebrate the leaves in our lives. Something we should have been doing all along.
The vet sends a foot imprint, a card with wildflower seeds to spread in memory. Personal grief like a cold secret. We move the rocks in the backyard to find millipedes and tiny salamanders. Slick dark life hidden deep down there.
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We play Slamwich and Labyrinth. We play Doodle Dice and Old Maid. Someone is left out at the end. There’s a tired ladle in the winter sandbox. My daughter and I have a conversation entirely in nonsense language, using exaggerated inflections and facial gestures. Repetition a kind of low hum. A humor in opacity.
The first time I meet my students outside, masked, we are shocked by the noise—leaf blowers, an airplane, the birds. It feels like waking up for a moment before reentering the dream. The whole family gets ear infections for no particular reason. Each headache a lozenge of fear laying its root. There are still normal illnesses. Everything vying for space in this new world.
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Darkness clicks one click closer. I throw the bird seed on the ground so they won’t fight at the feeder. We buy an ant farm but accidentally kill them with too much sugar. We release the lone survivor into the cold yard. My youngest says she doesn’t remember before this new life. She doesn’t remember the touches of friends.
My daughter jumps out of a doorway, yelling Boo! I freeze. You’re supposed to say Agh, she chastises. The expectation of surprise, a guttural sound tied to motion, fear. When my students write onomatopoeia into their poems, it falls flat. A sound without a body.
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What is real as what can be seen. So much visible through screens, but still, an uncertainty. Are wolves real? My daughter asks, lying in bed. Yes. Are bats real? Yes. She closes her eyes, puts her hands over them. Ok, please tell me the truth. Are werewolves real?
My son’s birthday comes and goes. He is angry that I didn’t schedule a zoom party. I design an elaborate escape room. We hold movie night. I open the packages that arrive, hand soap, shampoo, books. It’s an embarrassment, but I miss wandering the aisles of Target.
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A book I worked on for eight years is published. I do Zoom readings into the abyss. Share screen. Black and white photographs like grief, a kind of solitary burning. Unknown faces appear, a yearbook, bring back high school like a painful rush.
I watch the free episodes of Bahamas Life on demand. The couples say how much their lives have changed. Walk right out your door and put your toes in the sand! From upstairs, I hear my son stomping around during a school zoom call. My daughter can’t figure out how to unmute so she just listens.
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The winter brings nosebleeds. Snow renews the bleak trees like a perfect craft project. Crystal glitter and little tracks of glue line my daughter’s paper sculpture. She wants Jolly Old St. Nicholas played on repeat. The finished projects make a strange mountain on the table. We can’t keep everything, my husband says.
The red curve of daily county cases rises, 186, then 647. When it reaches 800 I stop checking. My son starts piano lessons. He can play Ode to Joy and The Muffin Man. It’s been so long I can’t remember how to read music. When I open a book of poetry I somehow don’t have the patience.
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Several students cry on zoom meetings. Tears like a movie’s reboot gone wrong. If I touch the screen who feels it. People write hopeful messages in chalk on the sidewalk. We Can Do This. Thank You First Responders. We are lucky. We still have a full paycheck and two iPads.
We read the Ramona Series because I remember a great fondness. But-- kindergarteners walk to school alone, father smokes in the house. Is it having fewer things or a new way of viewing the world, through screens. What would the pandemic mean back then. A marble dropped into a wishing well.
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My ability to meditate is a kind of privilege. There are many others. I hold them like a bouquet I don’t need. Beauty as a kind of wealth, unearned. But what deep work should mean. When I worked at Friendly’s, wiping down the sticky booths, shaping the ice cream into faces. Only a summer fling.
How to see something that doesn’t come into the online algorithm. A worldview shaped by experience. Push through the digital pages. Cards lined up like dominoes, a child’s block building, broken. Use the search screen for a new outlet. Something not written for you.
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Large chunks of snow drop from trees. A bird dives. The word bird a mistaken spelling of the original brid. Mistakes channel a world, a worldview. A tear in a web that becomes an ocular hole. A tunnel into new brightness.
The map of Pennsylvania counties is marked in shaded oranges and reds by case count. In high school I painted a portrait of my father in that palette without realizing its anger. Suggestion like a flip book missing pages. Once a person could feel fear by feeling eerie. Now it just describes a thing, an uncertainty.
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A week of anxiety over the election. I stress eat and then joy eat and then stress eat. Tied to my phone for news, a brid fluttering around the feeder. Rats come out at night, leave a stink. I feel eerie.
Leaving, a privilege. One weekend we rent an Airbnb nearby with an indoor pool. My daughter makes a wallet out of paper full of paper credit cards, IDs, and money. How much does that cost, she asks, pulling it out happily.
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The New York Times prints a full page spread of headshots of the deceased, but it backfires. They printed all the old people, says my husband. It looks like only the old are dying. This isn’t a marketing scheme, I think. But somehow it is.
We run out of tape again. My son learns a new song on the piano. A simple melody, repetition like childhood, safety. Keep sledding in the same spot for speed. Let the sled find the grooves. An LP pulled from the basement, its pause.
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More paper, milk, tape. I make the same list again. My daughter confuses lasagna with vagina. What are we eating again? she asks, uncertain. Her lack of knowledge of time. What day is it? How many more days are there? Until what, I ask.
I own what I own. A pure pandemic tapestry. Virtual lessons, karate belts, a piano. Unread books line the tables like coins. After the snowstorm, I rush order a new sled from Amazon. I buy the poinsettia from Giant Eagle. Each purchase a bleak stone in the garden.
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In what limits our view. A world as delineated by expectations. No, expectations as delineated by a world. Born into. A kind of eclipse, first covering, then opening the moon like an eye test. Unwrapping the many Christmas presents. Expectation as a brief kiss upon waking.
Everyone is always running out of charge on their devices. Fruit becomes too ripe on the counter, attracts flies. I’m annoyed by those being performative on social media. I think that’s what it’s for, says my husband. The snow was beautiful at first. Only days later, I’ve grown used to it.
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The childrens’ blocks have magnets these days. My daughter asks for sand hanitizer. The words stick, a family joke. We agree it sounds better that way. It’s not letting me in, says my daughter. What isn’t? The screen.
We lose the scissors under the mound of art projects. The world muffled like distant tapping in a cave. My daughter brings her giant stuffed animals into every room, sets them in a row. Let’s talk about winter break, I say. Maybe we can start a fun project, like a comic book. I want to see my friends, says my son.
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We make things for my daughter’s stuffy: a throne, a Christmas stocking, a stuffed carrot. Sewing like chopping or reading, a distraction. Focus like a warm blanket over a hole, an old scab peeling to fresh skin. Rainbow Bunny wants a yo-yo, she says. Rainbow Bunny wants a coloring book. We run out of tape.
I miss our dog especially at meal time, when I throw away the scraps. Excess like wine spilling the brim of a glass. A friend’s close friend dies. He was old but got it early in the pandemic. Now doctors understand the virus better. But there are still refrigerated trucks outside the hospital.
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If I get it, I get it, someone says. Willful obtuseness, a fake Doric column in the living room. No one can get it alone is the thing. There’s always someone you expose.
In reading about privilege, a privilege. Interrogation, from inter- (between), rogare (to ask), a question between the questions. What’s hidden behind, a grave. A stone as a monument to a grief unexperienced. Looking at the stone, the grief a whisper in the ear.
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Hush. The algorithm of social media advertisements, an indictment. That I would look at such dresses online. Time a wasted space of another dimension. The clutter building in the house like sediment. Push open language’s door, an unexpected draft.
How a word changes, opens up. Cut the tethers and watch meaning escape, the letters forcing a mouth to shape itself newly. Children are malleable, haven’t set themselves on a singular path. My daughter makes sculpture after sculpture out of clay, an army of gothic flowers.
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My son shows me his newest Minecraft build. Trap doors that lead to lava, an opening that drops intruders into the void. Booby-trap, a silly word, like nincompoop. A portmanteau, its serious French sound, from the word for a simple piece of luggage. Drag all those sounds around with you.
Can I use that? My daughter asks, gesturing to an empty toothpaste box, to a plastic wrapper. My son makes a comic called Pip and Slink, about a raccoon who is always fed up with his penguin friend. Not you again, he says. Argh, the American sound for exasperation.
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I know Santa has the elves, but do you think the Easter Bunny steals gifts? my daughter asks. No, she magicks them, I answer. Then why does Santa need elves? Logic drilling holes into imagination, a sieve held beneath the finished pasta, draining. I don’t know. An expanse waiting for puncture.
I start buying scratch-offs when I go to the grocery store. A little ring of excitement, a pulse like good news about to be told. I buy Winner Winner Chicken Dinner and Mega Crosssword. I win $25, $100. Then I lose and lose.
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People send the normal holiday cards, posed photos of children hugging. I start a painting of Monica Puig for my husband’s birthday and immediately know my limitations. When I was younger I didn’t think of such things. A bloom like a new red tree. Each brush stroke an opening.
When this is over, I’m going to kiss everyone, someone writes on Twitter. Nostalgia like returning to a favorite childhood aquarium, only they’ve changed all the exhibits. The specialty store sells obscure candy, you can tell by the font on the packaging. How many days are there again? asks my daughter. Until what? I ask. Until the next Leaf Day.
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Keeping time before calendars, scratches on a wall. Writing was a necessary first step. My daughter confuses C and S. She counts time as it relates to the next holiday, a puncture in the expanse. Which makes sense, when you think about it.
When my son was little, he thought the end of the calendar meant the end of the world. No, no, I reassure him, we just get a new calendar. And what about the next year? He asks. We get another one, I say, happily. And then we die? he says.
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After thinking I miss going out for drinks, I realize I prefer children and animals. Freed of conventions, we live our imaginary lives. I'm Elitra, Queen of the Fairies of Sculta, says my daughter under the pine tree, and this is our crystal palace. Spreading our arms, jumping through pretend mazes. Queen Elitra, can we defeat the shape-changing snake with this magic powder? I ask, offering a pinecone.
Quarantine stretches its languid body. Why did someone have to go and eat a bat? my son asks. That’s not quite right, I say. It’s more an outcome of our actions than a single mistake. Then why are we destroying the earth? he wants to know. I don’t know. Because it lets us lead these lives we’re used to? Because we won’t look far enough ahead? No, he says. I mean why are WE, this family, destroying the earth?
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Lack of action as a deep mistake. How to start a new way of living, completely. When this is all over, a kind of ignorance. Take the opportunity. How many more days are there? says my daughter. Meaning made through circumstance. The real answer is I don’t know.
Language rips a hole in worldview. The video is undeniable, requires an action outside of Twitter. A humming in the ear. What’s right in front of our eyes. A brightness, this new call.
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What should I dream about? asks my son at bedtime. He means what should he think about as he falls asleep. What about a waterpark? No, he says, it has to be something that’s really going to happen soon. He wants a match, a bright light like luck in the expanse. I don’t know, I say. It might be time to use your imagination.
Later I think, maybe it’s time to use less imagination, more concrete action. Punctures in the expanse. A brid flying through time, a hatch mark on the wall of a cave. I was here. I did something meaningful. Language as an expression beyond self, a rip in the continuum.
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Wishing something away. A magical evasion. How to face the real and change it. A responsibility, tethered to something outside a worldview. Push through the screen, pull it out, a muddy mass. Believing isn’t just seeing. It takes imagination to understand the real.
Lauren Shapiro is the author of Arena (CSU Poetry Center, 2020), listed as a top poetry book of 2020 in The New York Times, and Easy Math (Sarabande, 2013), which was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Debut-litzer Prize for Poetry. With Kevin González, she co-edited The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Rescue Press, 2013). She is an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.