Is the pandemic 
in history’s archives?

Who can tell where one
infestation ends, another begins? 

“Speak louder,” Whisper’s feature  
preaches.

News is never
new — eye-wall of
rampant inventions.

It’s a blur— 
fictions and real bleed into me, so my blues
blue out of headlines, can’t handle truth of this world spilling out.
Settings unset in vestibular 
landmarks, landmines.

“I didn’t catch that,” the bot 
chimes.

I’m terminal, long-term quarantine
tucks me in its seams—
stray cat in cursed alley of 
shrill spasms, nerves preoccupied with Pollack’s
blood splatter.
 
Dilute, flatten illicit turns in 
the backseat of mathematic’s 
manic missteps—
sabotage spewing simulations out of control, preposterous 
brain floating, stem blown 
off, aimless downpour of 
neurotransmitters not
transmitting.

I touch the red rose my mom left with my left
thumb, because “try to speak,” 
in the algorithm’s blinking max
deadens more of me—
my tissues. I’m scarcely 
there.

Doctors gawp at my pulse, this breath—
departure from statistics in the physical fact 
of me.

I pretend the petal is my mom, so my organic origin doesn’t 
vaporize, so I remember my left hand that 
didn’t forget me in the ICU.

It’s a free-for-all in stretches of subconscious, suburbs of 
botched forgeries in the seventh  
person—
rare flagrant failure.
  
“I don’t know that word,” AI enters my 
endangered elegy.

What to do with dictators in my air, sick with
tuberculosis from 1910—-

interrupted, frustrated words, pedigree to past,
Mendelian punnet squares 
squared away into fibers expelled 
in an arm, leg halted by their own unfelt
futility, unassailable trembling muscles I can’t place in 
their place, endless riddles of oxygen’s counterfeit 
accent no longer cures this breathless 
body barking at its pale sadness, its twin shame shoals in its black 
stain it tills until it spills over, waterboarding me
vacuous.

“come closer. I can’t hear you,” the generated
sound invades.

I tap the volume, 
then my mom’s rose.

I am only these four walls— 
surface tension mulling, confessions I give over 
to a bleeping screen.

I am a target of some ridiculous scheme,
and it might be poetic, ironic, humorous even,
from another angle, an angle that isn’t this
austere angle, so I take my IQ to the page, 
page the dust of what was 
once agency— 
lovely noun hides and ducks 
from disability, so I’m on the lookout for Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own I once called life, but now I call to 
nobody 

nowhere but this transcription’s skin I live 
spoken spoonfuls of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
if I don’t slip in aphasia’s spit 

splitting infinitives, shortchanging sound under 
ground as I look and look. 

Why is nobody here to report
this to anybody?

Why must I reach into  
this hive to grip time?

“Say that again,” Whisper demands, but I’m unsure where 
its stenographer lost me,
so I take a shallow breath in my 
dissolving body

beneath its stretcher for an atom of 
my lost soul’s contagion.

I write inside suffering’s spleen 
to translate out of its language, to pay the price, whatever it is,
of being heard—

to evolve beyond this technology-drunk, emaciated world, to accomplish the 
impossible: penetrate this eroding planet
with paper, a pen, 

but I can’t, can't even shout as my lungs don’t 
know how to shout. So, for now, I catch filaments of memory,
light straining through the window into what 
might suffice, what 
might bypass Western medicine’s lapses
to put me back into
my senses, my body.

I edit myself into what might 
be conviction, however shaky and
disjointed, to notice all before it disappears—
my quivering left thigh, my
meek voice-box.

Is the terrible 
lockdown extinct yet?

“I can’t answer that,” the bot responds,
but I ask only to 
set the question loose.

Are we mortal creatures any longer? 
I index into the blue tablet, my mom’s rose
wilting into the past.