1

I butter my elbows before bed.
I listen to the governor speak. If we can never go outside again,
we can never go outside again. I haven’t
been counting the days.
But I miss making a cup of decaf for my mother
in her apartment twenty city blocks away.
A stone’s throw, if someone in a plane threw the stone.

I wish I were that person
or that plane,
high enough to watch over us, red dots
spreading across state lines.
But here is fine, good even—
soft sheets, my lungs performing the miracle
I’d come to take for granted.

Published April 24th, 2020

Jiordan Castle is the author of the 2020 chapbook All His Breakable Things. A Pushcart-nominated essayist and poet, her work has appeared in Cagibi, Hobart, New Ohio Review, Third Point Press, Verdad, Vinyl, and elsewhere online and in print anthologies. She is a resident poet and essayist for the LA-based quarterly food and culture magazine Compound Butter. In 2018, she won the inaugural Pigeon Pages essay contest and is now writer and curator of the journal’s series The Long Pause… Jiordan has an MFA in Poetry from Hunter College and currently lives in New York City with her fiancé and their dog.