Lines Written During My Second Pandemic
after Franca Mancinelli
All water flows toward loneliness.
Loneliness is a black eye, a gleaming pit.
We have yet to split loneliness like an atom.
Loneliness arrives on a leash of scorpions.
In my skull, loneliness opens like a parachute.
It’s illegal to chain loneliness to a fence.
Flickers tunnel through loneliness to build nests.
I sprinkle a spoon of sugar over loneliness.
In some languages, loneliness is imperfect.
Antlers crown the bald head of loneliness.
Like rough trade, loneliness won’t kiss you.
Loneliness is crouched in a tree, afraid of dirt.
In the dark, loneliness ripens too quickly.
Beneath the roof of loneliness, my blood drifts.
Copyright © 2022 by Eduardo C. Corral. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 31, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The first line of this poem arrived during the first few months of the Covid pandemic. I was sheltering-in-place: minimizing time spent in shops, finishing the semester on Zoom, and venturing outside now and then. I was, basically, marooned on my couch. After I wrote the first line, I combed my notebooks for language that orbits loneliness. I found a lot. But I only kept fourteen lines because the sonnet is a constriction, and life during those months was constrictive. This poem ripples with the loneliness that sheltered inside my body—another fixed form—in the spring of 2020.”
—Eduardo C. Corral
Eduardo C. Corral
Eduardo C. Corral is the author of Slow Lightning (Yale University Press, 2012), which was chosen by Carl Phillips as the 2011 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets.