ALL WE HAVE TO FEAR

This is a quickie to say if you haven’t gotten the stomach virus that’s going around yet,

—Put on your scuba gear and stay in it until May

—Use your fins to nudge strangers away in the produce section

—Yell ONE TURKEY VULTURE WINGSPAN through your mask to anyone who passes you (as I do to explain social distancing to my children, since they don’t know what six feet is but they can dimly recall the spatial concept when they imagine Ichabod the Turkey Vulture, who used to live at the Cayuga Nature Center)

I have spent seventeen of the last twenty-four hours sleeping, after a night that would have humbled a plesiosaur. Everyone in my family had this thing once, dropping like flies day by day, and because I was an apparently an ax murderer in a past life, after recovering and getting the other three through it, I then got it again. I’m currently doing the sixty-fifth load of laundry and setting all the toothbrushes on fire.

This is all to say: there will be a LitCafe transmission this week (it’s more than half way done, but those seventeen hours of sleep kind of got in the way), one that will arrive as perhaps a Friday or weekend edition.

In it I gnash my way through the poetry of genius-sorceress Rachel Abramowitz’s book The Birthday of the Dead, thinking about what endings mean, why poets are drawn to them, and what makes Rachel a goddess of endings (death).

Hm. Makes you think I’ve had to reckon with my mortality lately or something, possibly while feeling unutterably grateful for the chill of porcelain on my forehead.

Yes, so, back to the scuba gear. See if you can rustle it up. If not, living in the woods until school is out should do the trick. I’ll send a lantern and some furs.

See you here soon,

xCaro