:::poetry
“Are you comfy in your mask?”
She asks, tank top rippling red and blue bristling her shoulders freckled
    from a sunburnt morning at the pool,
The little girl with darker skin tousling curls strawberry blonde
    in the parking lot of the grocery store.
“Mommy, can I have a chocolate.”
*If you behave,* she knows
How this all begins.

The sky watching as she tidies up above her child’s wider nose
    and underneath her dimpled chin,
Next to the freshly leased Toyota with the temporary registration card,
Summer wrinkling the air atop pavement‘s patchwork tar,
Apollo’s golden shin leaning on the nape of her neck, hard.

She sports a pitch black mask while fixing up her child’s,
Stitched from an outgrown superhero shirt from baby gap,
The rest of us insisting on persisting jogging round and round
    in our acculturated judgement lapse.

I can’t breathe
But you
Another cipher of the matrices of mass hysteria swaddled tightly
    in their propaganda rags

And again, ding-ding:
I can’t breathe
But you
Another cipher of the matrices of mass hysteria swaddled tightly
    in their propaganda rags

If everyone is suffocating, one wonders whether it is in polluted air lungs burn.
But no, let us proceed with a just determination of who is suffocating more,
American asphyxia in the simulated fog of uncivil war, just suffocating more,
Go ahead, voluntarily affix the only mask the state permits you to afford.
There is no thing just between man and fly cry though the fly might
    from fractured facets on its watery enervated eye.

So different
Behind the masks
So black and white
Each one of you is mad
Save her. So still she tries
To save her

The oil on the crease between your nose and cheek,
Plump, unnoticed pimples pinkening your chin,
Your upper lip plucked and quietly filling back in.

Can I pry behind your mask?
Smell the lukewarm menthol from the first Newport of the pack?
Soured French Vanilla creamer breath tickling unshaven whiskers on my neck?

Tell me,
did mom-mom stitch the patchwork quilt atop your face
while you were fidgeting
fumbling with her chintzy pots and pans
some old-timey chevron
and a paisley pattern
sown with the pink thread
once, then twice “because you couldn’t stop moving your head”
while she measured you
and chided you by pet name
“sweetheart, please stop moving your precious face?”

Or was it portioned by the state?

I’ve received no such mask for safety sake,
The post office may have lost it in the fray,
Or maybe it’s late—I gave up the wait.
So you’ll forgive me, sister,
For my prying sentimentality poetic, schizophrenic, course, frenetic—
look at the depressions in my face.
:::