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Originally published as written text only in "North of Oxford", the pandemic issue

Blue Mask Seas (For my Friend, Tom Stephany, taken by Covid on World AIDS Day 2020)

They are so easy to picture:
that ridge for the nose a wave's curve
& the surrounding white outline being froth's tips
creased pleat upon pleat...
Even the hue is a Madonna's robe gentleness sky-expansive
though these horizons are grayer, often opaque,
a chloroform of loss stopping things up.
Face without a body, not modeled in the round
is how one dictionary describes that eye-less paper relief
there on the parking lot paving, blowing now across the sidewalk
& into the weeds lining the pharmacy's brick exterior,
its chained-up trash can overflowing with refuse,
all the six-pack plastic for a tortoise's intestines.
This stray one didn't make it to that heap anyhow, whether a careless
sort of pocket-escapee or dropped on purpose as a take that
Mother Nature. Caring is sharing. May others be touched
as you have touched me.
Come, don't be cynical about how so many are angry
& searching for a companionable mob to show that their great misery
is oh so inconveniently displeased about shops & salons, (the nerve of them)
wanting their employees protected when Privilege
is now a Liberty Fight to carry Uzis through marches for Peace
to keep mutating and spreading genome A to genome Z.
No one is tear-gassing that, pleading "can't breathe"
like in the sterilized wards the size of stadiums if put together
globally - see - waving white flags to reflective face shields,
goggles & layers of gowns stretched into latex, the gloved touch
an antiseptic cry of good-bye mirrored in beeping equipment,
the hissing, decompressing & pumping ocean of lives
named or unnamed in today's pandemic headlines
tomorrow's may forget once vaccines return normalcy,
that other great body, blood-red, industrious, tidal & churning
or is that just the fear, blue mask asks blue mask,
that the human species has learned nothing

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