2 Horatio

Michael Broder
First Thing in the Morning of April 13, 2020
You sip your coffee. You take your meds. You
feed your kitties. You check your email, your social media.
You used to get straight to coffee and your poem.
Now you are far more distracted. Now before you
write your poem, you check the headlines. Cannot
start your day without knowing yesterday’s death
toll, if a new clinical trial started treating patients with an
experimental drug. You anticipate the governor’s
daily press briefing, live streamed on Facebook
or watched later if you miss it. It’s your Mr. Rogers.
It’s your fireside chat. One of your backyard feral
cats looked sickly, and then stood off and looked
at dinner but did not eat, and then just did not come
back—you assume he’s dead; that’s how they do it;
you’ve seen it before. And it has nothing to do
with the pandemic, and yet it seems to—
everything that happens during this time—
a new TV show you start watching, a book you read
for a few minutes at bedtime before your Ambien
kicks in—everything seems to be Covid-19 edition,
everything seems connected to the—you like the
term “health crisis,” which nobody seems to use.
That’s what they called AIDS—the health crisis.
Then you were marginalized and the federal government
dismissed your plight. Now you have marriage rights
and characters in TV shows, movies, and stage plays—
and the federal government fucks everyone else
right along with you. Plus ça change.
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