Pandemic Mercy
by Carmen Calatayud

We seek mercy and not
grace
~Gris Muñoz

We lived to ride the sun
like a carousel, never knowing
when we would fall off.

Tonight we seek solace in stars,
trust we’ll see them despite the fog of illness
after the hospital turned you away.

I claw your chest open
to let moonlight into your lungs,
watch alveoli crawl across the stage
beneath your ribs.
It’s still a beautiful show.

Hum to myself as I wait for you
to breathe a recognizable rhythm.

***

Melancholy the heat of fever
Melancholy the bark of the towering palm
Melancholy the souls who asked us to turn around hundreds of years ago.

This nation loves money,
ignores body counts.
We have slept with damage since our beginning.

The dead spin in the sky
fly above suffering, whisper don’t refuse me now
after sun busts the horizon.

You create a gurgling sigh
and I know that even with hope in this kind of country,
we are on our own.

There are no working wings.
Just wandering for mercy.

---

Image by Stuart Buck is a visual artist and award-winning poet living in North Wales. His art has been featured in several journals, as well as gracing the covers of several books. His third poetry collection, Portrait of a Man on Fire, is forthcoming from Rhythm & Bones Press in November 2020. He is the art editor for kanstellation magazine and available for commissions all year round. He can be contacted via Twitter or E-Mail

Carmen Calatayud is the daughter of a Spanish immigrant father and Irish immigrant mother. Her book In the Company of Spirits (Press 53) was chosen as a runner-up for the Walt Whitman Award by the Academy of American Poets and as a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She lives in coastal Georgia, outside of Jacksonville, FL.