3
At seven o’clock each evening the cheering begins.
I think I will miss it one day,
but that day has no date. And the cheering can be,
let’s just say, loud.
A neighbor from nowhere, somewhere down below
and across, rings a cowbell, it must be a cowbell,
and there are no words for it. Just a rhythm
they invented expressly for this purpose.
If there are healthcare workers, first responders,
exhausted nurses with mask lines
masking their laugh lines, listening,
somewhere here, somewhere in this city of glass,
I hope they know by noise we mean peace,
by cowbell we mean thank you.
Published May 7th, 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.