The KN95 Blue(s)

The cabin fever quarantine rippled outward. There is something in the air.
Everywhere, the startled cautious constituents only consciously aware
of about 2% of what's going on around them, some suppressed aspect

of the fear that pervades, the missed connections of facets of our identities
usually reflected in the eyes of others. Replaced the malevolent intangibles
of climate change & the war on terrorism. Which monster devoured

which monster. In the spring of 2020, Coyote opened a bag of darkness &
a deadly virus swept across the world. All the night creatures of the world
gorged upon the fettered Old Normal, the greed & hate, the corruption of

the State. The plague began with a fever, the human body raising its core
temperature to kill the virus. Planet Earth works the same way. Global
warming is the fever & humankind the virus.

Our lives were put on pause—stay at home, stay alive—every breath
a pestilence to mankind. The season of rebirth became a time of asphyxiation
& impending death. The indiscriminating disasters of a siren-

laden spring. The background fossil fuel noise-less teeming the byways
of Amerikkka, everyone at a social distance from a world less cluttered by
the dangers & detritus of human indifference,

but loading up on guns & ammo like an era of masked highwaymen,
an instinctive fight or flight, breathless behind polyester-cotton blend
N95 masks, or eyes mewled wide above each bandanna, a barrier between

the pandemic that kills & the platitudes of thoughts & prayers.
We only began to take the pandemic seriously, when we could no longer
stomach the unpolluted air & the unrestricted proliferation of fowl & fauna,

the Mother Hubbard store shelves, when we couldn’t have right now
what we had always been told we needed. Our constellation of conscious, &
unconscious anxieties, shuttered behind the social distance of the New Normal.

That one bare, sparkling wire of happiness, now a pseudo-
security where happiness was judged solely by an inflated cost-effective-ness
& profit-margin ability. Where flint became the heart of the world. Every loss,

a graveyard waiting to be filled, threatened to swallow the singularity of
every death. The pandemic flood of statistics, like
a vacant lot, an eyesore, was not interesting until we put dead bodies in it.

Death hovered about every masked human interaction, a stray dog
foraging for scraps. The unvaccinated enemies of the state, & school-
children, replaced crash-test dummies in the New Normal. The wolves

showed no mercy as they donned the human skins of economic recovery.
Our wide cow eyes, an instinctive fusion of fear, caution & self-
preservation. Our every breath continually fogs our glasses, captive to

the multiplicity of a false geometry, to be treated as the world sees fit,
like car tires hydro-planning rain-washed asphalt, how one recognizes
impermanence, not as a multitude, but each one by degree of circumstance—

at the entrance to Home Depot, the consumer habit of forgotten our mask,
a smattering of brightness in proximity to the light, as we enter week infinity
of sheltering-in-place.

henry 7. reneau, jr. writes words of conflagration to awaken the world ablaze, an inferno of free verse illuminated by his affinity for disobedience—is the spontaneous combustion that blazes from his heart, phoenix-fluxed red & gold, like a discharged bullet that commits a felony every day, exploding through change is gonna come to implement the fire next time. His work is published in Superstition Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Poets Reading the News and Rigorous. His work has also been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.