On Wearing A Mask In The Grocery Store

By Author Name

Whales live where they can’t breathe
& still we believe there’s a god
in the callus formation of lungs
below the gulf, without legs to carry a body
to shore, to the oxygen it can’t live without:
tell me where my body was formed
if not for the algae, single cells that swim
through my DNA, jeweled strands that connect
me to viruses dropped onto slides
I can view magnified a thousand times.
When my daughter asks why we shelter in,
I tell her it’s because dinosaurs sleep
in layers of rock, their bodies found
in predictable depths – look in the right place
& the pterodactyl opens to you, thin boned,
folded wings just like a child curled in her bed.
Thank god there’s too much earth for a single flood,
for the sky to take the reflection it lusts
to contain, every ripple it can’t touch.
Imagine we overcome our lust for touching
the shopping cart, the doorknob, the grandmother
we haven’t seen for months. If there were a god
his hands would be tied behind his back,
lips sealed to his snow-capped teeth.
Nothing more than a child,
nothing more than us

—

About Christen Noel Kauffman

Kauffman lives in Richmond, Indiana with her husband and two daughters. Her hybrid chapbook “Notes to a Mother God” (forthcoming) was a winner of the Paper Nautilus Debut Chapbook Series. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays (University of Nebraska Press), Nimrod, Tupelo Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Willow Springs, DIAGRAM, Booth, Smokelong Quarterly, Hobart, and The Normal School, among others.