When I was in the process of finalizing and editing the poems in COLLAPSOLOGIES, I kept stumbling across details from the early days of the pandemic that I forgot. Somehow misplaced in the intervening years since I wrote them and made the "bloom" zine in late 2020. In the entirety of the collection, this section is probably the most directly autobiographical, and in being so, feels almost like an artifact of a very strange era in history--both the world's and my own--that passed. I often write poems, and once they've solidified, I don't really look at them again until they meet some kind of publication. Or sometimes, I'll put them in a zine and then not really revisit them until I am compiling things for a full-length manuscript.
Even though other poems touch on the pandemic like "the plague letters," or "unreal city" (which is actually not in this manuscript but another) those pieces seem later, written at a great distance in late 2020 and 2021. "bloom" was written in the mid to late summer of 2020, when the experience of lockdowns and quarantines and curfews for the city were still much fresher. When we were making our way with trepidation back into a wholly uncertain world with no vaccines. It's far more personal to my own experience of those strange months, the leading up and the immediate aftermath--how the tree near the bus stop was full of wasps no one seemed to be dealing with for weeks. How the library felt like a tomb re-opened (though this was probably wrong, people had been in and out all spring installing plexiglass and directional stickers that would already be curling and peeling from the walls and carpet.) The cleaning staff, who had worked on campus to get it ready to reopen told horror stories about bathroom and stairwell floors full of dead cockroaches after the college used the time for more hearty extermination efforts in the absence of the public. Their stories all told through masks from a careful distance of 6 feet away. We did things in those months that actually were probably over cautious like setting up self-checkouts and closing the stacks in lieu of a pickup shelf\. But really, hardly anyone was around to use it, not through that summer or into the fall. In a staff of around 15, there were three of us in-house regularly, and it remained that way for a long while. Every day, we presented the app screen that claimed we had no symptoms to the security guard and placed our faces up to a tablet to discern possible fever.
But the best details come from the early and middle days of lockdowns. The details of the world as people stayed inside, including one very luxurious group of black cows who laid about French beaches absent of sunbathers. They were my favorite detail that I sometimes forget, but there they are in a poem. Or the coyote photographed in the middle of the Mag Mile, not a completely unrealistic sight in the wee hours, but unreal midday when normal the streets would be teeming with people. These were the surreal good memories, but there were also less so---fires, violence, riots downtown (not pandemic related, but justice related) Curfews that required J, who was suffering serious financial constraints due to not working, come over evenings before the city battened down for the night at 9pm. And I was lucky, death and sickness only skirted the fringes of my existence, but it cast a pretty big shadow over my mental health nevertheless. The day my copies of SEX & VIOLENCE arrived was also the day that things were burning downtown. I told my boss, I was taking a sick day and going back to bed instead of working. I wasn't sick, but perhaps the world was and I was feeling the effects acutely that Monday. I also began to question what the point of poetry was at all
Some of these memories exist in Instagram shots and the blog posts I was writing here, but the poems in "bloom" flesh them and the surrounding months out a little in more detail. Commit them to the page. While the other parts of the book circle around the pandemic from various angles, this one attacks it head-on. But then again, the fact that it feels so personal is also the reason it is actually my least favorite of all the sequences in the book, outshone by The Shining poems, also written that summer, and the tabloid pieces, written a bit later, which feel like they have more to say on the books overarching themes. Also, the world is swimming in pandemic books. I've published a few. But I decided to open this book with "bloom," largely because it provides a context and a grounding. Almost a prologue as to why the rest of the book exists, even when only two sections address the pandemic directly, the others glossing more on economic and political subject matter. Even while, in the present, the experiences that I was writing about feel like a strange fever dream I am not even sure I had. But the poems prove it. Set it in ink.
