Balm for anxiety, we’re shopping online
buying essentials like coffee and chocolate,
wine and brandy for those who still drink.
Booze sales boom during the threat of Covid19
as it presses against a shortage of masks.
 
I won’t be buying troll dolls with succulents
growing out of their heads, or vintage Barbies
in their original box and clothes for seven
thousand dollars. No tall platform sandals for me,
no exfoliating scrub, or off-the-shoulder blouses—
 
already passé. I don’t need home hair dye kits
or articles on how to pass the time during 
the quarantine. I’m grateful not to be married
to Pence or Falwell or Bundy, or the gun and ammo
collectors I once knew. My days are full, hours
 
too few. Like other quilters with a ginormous stash,
I find large scraps for sewing masks and make
them reversible. I’d add some silly beads or buttons,
beards of ribbons. But no bling. Extra texture
might offer Coronavirus another way to cling.
 
No embroidered leaves and daisies like those
on jeans in the sixties, no childish charms will dangle.
I could make bread and rolls shaped like genitalia,
cookies iced with bawdy words to bake my rage
at feeling helpless. But I’m still on a healthy track,
 
won’t gain back pounds I shed. When I come out
of the world of dread, you won’t recognize this thin
and sober, pale and mindful me in my snazzy veil.

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
           —Edith Wharton
 
In sobriety, I’m fasting, having long given up
White Russians and Long Island Iced Tea, able
to say, No, thank you to a spiked Bloody Mary
on a Sunday morning, no to Chianti with ravioli.
I confess the cravings carry on, especially alone
 
when thunder tumbles over my house and rain
pours down. Thirty years without a jug of Gallo,
without the easing, warm sensation when ethanol
releases my rigid shoulders. Now I start my days
with black coffee, no sweeteners, no cream
 
or milk, then switch to green or black tea after noon.
No additives. All the water I care to drink, clean
and unlimited from my kitchen faucet—oh, luxury.
I’m drinking to my wide bed with clean sheets and quilts,
to central heat and air-conditioning, to secure and solid
 
shelter for two cats and me, to All-Clad cookware
and a deep freezer, to shelves of canned tuna
and artichoke hearts, to black beans and brown rice.
Alone for weeks, I’m drinking in my days, guzzling
weeks and months of quiet solitude, gulping
 
the scent of spring and earth, fertile after rain. No
one tells me how I’m wrong. I savor isolation’s
flavor, love this reclusive life with the fragrance
of cornbread and rising sourdough, sober and alert
to my mind’s channels, mining unseen gold.

My patience is at an end for listening
to your tirades about your every ache
and twinge. I can’t attend to another
litany of symptoms, the date and time
of each twitch in dreams. You wake me
more often than the cats, hold me 
tangled in the sheets and then send me
back to bed by midday with exhaustion.
 
You are a painful rash, fleas and ticks,
algae growing in the drain, fruit flies
breeding in the cat litter, the expiration
date on cans of tuna and black beans.
Just when I feel I have everything under
control, the laundry folded and put away,
you deliver a letter from the IRS and knock
on my door with a voice that says, Police.
 
I’ve had enough of you throwing puzzles
off the table, your sowing seeds of deadly
weeds. If you’re going to plant anxiety,
come up with a plan of action, a solution.
Tell me where to send a letter. I’ll step up
to make posters, sign petitions. Worry, you
achieve nothing but paralysis. Look! I’m off
my ass. Get lost before I raise my fists.