Quarantine
I’m washing the pee rags when
I hear my husband playing blocks with our son,
Saying: This is a square. It goes in the square hole.
This is a triangle. It goes in the triangle hole.
This is a circle. It goes in the circle hole.
The blocks are plastic
Red, orange, yellow, green, purple
Knocking loud into a blue bucket.
The cat sits by the sink on the sill,
Watching a bunny in the yard.
The bunny is calm; it’s stopped,
Turned its head, gazing through the grass.
It’s a slow humid morning
I feel guilty about the plastic blocks.
Sleepiness sits in my forehead like a stone.
Some day the blocks will rest in the bottom of a landfill,
Perfectly intact pieces of a scattered rainbow,
And we will all be dead.
But today smells of tomato vines,
Rain, sweat, farts from the night before.
Today, my belly stays dry at the sink;
Water runs clear through the rags.
Today, we clutch the blocks in our hands.
We count shapes; we hear rainbows.
Today, the bunny is still and stopped.
Its soft watery eyes search the grass,
Taking the time to take time.
The cat jumps down.
The baby crawls on in.
And they all sit at my feet while I pee
And my husband teaches our son
The chant that he and his friends made up
When he played trumpet in the high school band:
We’re all here together.
We’re all here together.
We’re all here together.
Anney E. J. Ryan is a writer and teacher who lives on a garlic farm with her family in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Her work has been featured in The Kenyon Review and The Philadelphia Inquirer. When not writing, teaching, or planting things, she tries to sleep.
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