The plants are happy
by Kate Angus
that we stay inside
I tell myself, guilty already
for thinking of how we would flee them.
I do not want to be responsible
for their tender green. We cannot flee
anyway. Who knows if we carry
a virus inside our breath already.
Today I wait to make sure
no one has been in the hallway
and take out the trash, masked
as a mugger, gloved as an assassin.
I read books about the old plagues
in London. I watch online video of a fox
leaping in the snow. Gamboling; cavorting.
When will we again? Last night I imagined
I was dead already or you were and we were in hell
with the other one’s body pretending
that we still lived. It’s still lonely now when everyone
is lonely. I eat blueberries, each one gnashed
in my teeth like a perfect world.
-
Kate Angus’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Indiana Review, Court Green, Gulf Coast, The Atlantic´s online Object Lessons series, The Washington Post, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day feature. She is the recipient of an A Room of Her Own Foundation Orlando award and an Elizabeth Kostova Foundation Sozopol Seminar fellowship, as well as residencies from the BAU Institute, the Betsy Hotel’s Writer’s Room and Interlochen Arts Academy (writer in residence). Angus is the author of So Late to the Party (Negative Capability Books) and the founding editor of Augury Books. Born and raised in Michigan, she currently lives in New York.
- Email: katea215@gmail.com
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