Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic

by Alice Quinn

And there were days when I remembered the teacher who made us memorize a poem each week, and when we asked why, she said we might one day find ourselves in a wreck at the side of the road and we would recite these poems to stay alive.

what love persists in a time without touch

But sometimes standing still is also life. —John Ashbery

I had enough scraps, of poems that went nowhere—I had enough memories…

the long-lost letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and the ego and the obliteration of ego,

we can kill who we touch, we can be killed by who touches us, but wasn’t that always true,