Going Viral
Daniel Stewart
I broke the yolks in my eggs this morning but I guess I’ll press on. I’m trying not to think about money. I made the coffee too weak. I’m trying not to think about how all the recent rain’s making things grow, and growing things need tending. Even now, in these empty streets and silent yards things green, creep out of cracks looking for light to feed on. The shelves at the grocery store empty further by the hour; I think of something to buy each day just to watch it all disappear. It’s a new way of keeping time, which can never be kept. And we’re limiting contact with each other, though we can wave to each person walking a dog as we rake and mulch, feed and seed. Even in a time of crisis, the world keeps growing.
Reading recommendation? The Trailhead by Kerri Webster
“I keep returning to The Trailhead, by Kerri Webster. Her poems contain lists that read as reliquaries. The poems ache and haunt; the language is beautiful, angry, elegant. Her poems feel necessary, especially now.”
Daniel Stewart is a teaching-writer for The Cabin’s Writers in the Schools program, serving as Writer in Residence at Ada County Juvenile Detention, and Frank Church High, an alternative school, in Boise, ID.
The author of the collection The Imaginary World, his poems have appeared in BOAAT, Parentheses, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Scab, Thrush, Yes Poetry, NightBlock, and Graviton Lit, among others.