Originally published in The Rye Whiskey Review – online poetry ‘zine
Appeared in the 2020 anthology Thought for Food from South Broadway Press
FOR JASON VIVONE
Let’s just say you had a meltdown in the grocery store because your hands are so dry from washing and sanitizing that you can’t open the plastic produce bags and your glasses are fogging up from your own breath escaping through the top of your quickly fashioned quarantine mask constructed from cut out swaths of an old trade-show t-shirt and elastic hair ties and there’s no toilet paper on the shelves and they’re out of the brand of toothpaste that has kept you cavity-free since college which, now, was more than thirty goddamned years ago. Let’s say you had that meltdown. Let’s say it’s late afternoon on a Thursday and even though you should be working from home this trip to the grocery store is the closest thing you’ve had to a vacation all fucking year and there’s no real work anyway and after parking the car, sanitizing the groceries, putting the groceries away, and realizing that your very public and, now, embarrassing meltdown is going to eat at you for weeks, for months (let’s be real, years), you turn on the radio and your guitar teacher who is also a part-time DJ on a local listener-supported station starts playing Miserlou and, later, Pipeline by Dick Dale and the magic of Fender spring reverb tanks and single-coil pickups cures the corona virus blues.
and then