Welfare Check East of Downtown
By Christie Valentin-Bati
“It is 2020. Everything is canceled except for police terror.”
–Nick Estes
They said close down everything
non-essential: The coffee shop,
blue trimmed with a green porch,
white-potted flowers that hung down
from the awning,
closed – so I roasted my own coffee.
The outlet mall
with high-waisted jeans,
gold-plated, pearl earrings
I’d been saving up to buy
closed too. So I wore nothing
in my ears, dug deep into my closet
and cut my own shorts instead.
They told me to stay home. I stayed home.
I used Instacart. I worked remotely.
I bought surcharged surgical masks off Amazon
though I knew, it wouldn’t help much
to block the droplets should they come.
Still, I was young, white.
I washed my hands regularly,
soaping around the thumb,
between the fingers,
even around my wrists,
I scrubbed clean.
I sexted, watered the plants,
and when I tired, I turned on the TV,
watched the news do its count
of another thousand people dead,
which meant only 100,000
were left to die.
Every now and again
I would peak over the fence,
happy to see my neighborhood
silent and unmoving,
the cars parked, quiet, in the driveways.
If any noise ever did pass through,
a construction truck, police sirens,
I’d pull down my windows
to mute out the sound,
certain that the noise was headed
to another place. I never worried
about any strangers in uniforms
coming to knock on my door,
carrying with them
something more deadly than a virus.
Christie Valentin-Bati is a poet and photographer based in small-life suburbia Hollywood, Florida, and soon big city Chicago. She is a co-author of Existential Quandary, a book of haikus from the perspective of a chicken, and her poetry has been featured in Columbia Journal. More of her work can be found on Instagram @_christieos_, Twitter @christiee0_0 or her website christievalentinbati.com.
Photo credit: Alachua County via a Creative Commons license.