American asphyxia

“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 knowsHow 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 breatheBut youAnother cipher of the matrices of mass hysteria swaddled tightly in their propaganda rags

And again, ding-ding:I can’t breatheBut youAnother 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 differentBehind the masksSo black and whiteEach one of you is madSave her. So still she triesTo 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 facewhile you were fidgetingfumbling with her chintzy pots and panssome old-timey chevronand a paisley patternsown with the pink threadonce, then twice “because you couldn’t stop moving your head”while she measured youand 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.