The Great Giving Up
I’ve repainted the room with the red stripes.
They’ve always bothered me, the stripes.
I used to paint college dorms for summer cash.
Steady cut and roll, no drips.
No drop cloth?
(I’m eyed suspiciously.)
No.
*
I have a Master’s in Chinese Medicine.
Took me 4 years.
In graduate school,
I worked part-time,
practiced qi gong,
rolled organic tobacco.
After graduation,
a friend ten years older
with a son in college
took me out to celebrate.
There are no salaried jobs,
I bitched, and so much debt!
A bank would have refused you
a 100k loan, she says,
but student loans are different.
Fuck, I say.
Yeah, she says,
consider it your mortgage, hon.
I shrug.
She buys me a beer.
In my last year of school,
I explain to her,
I learned the debt to salary ratio
of alum was wildly skewed.
When asked about it,
the President of the college
gave a rambling story
about an old man in Tibet.
Predatory Ed, my friend sniggers,
private interest poisoning public good.
She holds up a dripping shot of whiskey.
It ain’t gonna be easy, but you can do it.
She clanks the rim of my beer,
throws the shot back, whew!
Buckle up, no whining,
be relentless.
Just kill it.
*
I call around for work, voice
laced with the nerve I lack.
After 2 months, an interview.
I wear a red jacket, black heels.
$120 initial, $90 return.
My cut is $30.
Independent contractor, no benefits.
Show up early, look good.
Payment upfront. Cash is king.
I wonder about the $30 cut,
say nothing. I want the job.
Rich ladies change into gowns.
They recline on tables covered
with organic cotton sheets.
I learn about the breathability
of linen, the consistency
of their bowel movements,
exes and anxieties,
renovations, restaurants,
cancers, dogs, and dreams.
*
I move home.
Open a clinic in a poor city.
You’ll never make it, some said.
Too violent. Too sad. Too lazy.
There are so many types of pain.
Pain that floats. Pain that sinks.
Pain that evades language.
Pain that makes you mean.
What does acupuncture do? they ask.
It opens windows. Sweeps the stairs.
They nod. They nap.
The jaw unclamps when the body is loved.
Things that were stuck move downstream.
*
I closed the clinic during the pandemic.
Seemed the right thing to do.
I stayed home with my kid.
Longed for my work.
My kid missed her friends.
We got a trampoline.
I was the best teacher.
The worst teacher.
My daughter cried.
I worshiped a red oak.
Crows roosted above our heads.
A groundhog ate my garden.
I stopped mowing the lawn,
found maypop, wild sarsaparilla.
Mud froze.
Snow gathered.
I collected tinder,
burned a cord of wood.
From my phone, I watched nurses
enter hospitals without protection.
A local MD posted a video:
How to Sterilize an N95 in the Oven.
Doctors cried on television. Begged.
A hospital in Brooklyn
ran out of body bags.
In April, a New Yorker died
every 2 minutes.
Liars, some people said.
The virus is a Marxist invention.
Some said it to the people
who kept them alive.
Some said it to the people
who watched them die.
*
A yoga studio advertised NO MASKS.
A massage therapist with children died.
A chiropractor said you wouldn’t die
if your gut was good.
ENTER EMAIL FOR WEEKLY TIPS,
ALWAYS SOAK YOUR BEANS
HEALTH IS AN INVESTMENT,
NOT AN EXPENSE.
Probiotics, $78/bottle,
10% MEMBERSHIP DISCOUNT.
My wife’s coworker got the jab,
a day later, BOOM, DEAD.
My nose feels like it might bleed.
I unsubscribe.
The email software gives me a box
to explain the reason:
Frequent and unnecessary capitalization.
*
A colleague sent a group email.
The dying are diabetic, obese, or old.
We should not be forced to suffer their sins.
They want soda, fast food? Fine.
BUT I WANT TO LIVE!
On Facebook, she shares a meme
that implies she’s being treated like Anne Frank.
The unvaxx’d are being FORCED
into concentration camps!
Ignore it, I tell myself.
Ignore it, says my husband.
Ignore it, says my sister.
I comment.
Anne Frank died in 1945, Bergen-Belsen.
Epidemic typhus.
Infected body lice.
17,000 prisoners dead.
Fever, delirium, shock.
The slaughter of millions,
Jews, Roma, Poles, disabled, gays,
is not the same as a mandate.
When you make this comparison
I type, furiously, hands shaking,
your rectum is indistinguishable
from your face.
She keeps it classy. Posts a link.
Compilation of research,
published as a book.
Evidence of the harms of vaccines.
About the author?
This was his second book.
His first, a guide to communicating with extraterrestrials.
*
Ideologies of alt-right intersect
the Gospel According to Goop.
$2,000 Ouija boards, jade eggs,
LED lights in cursive font for the vanity:
You are everything.
Blood libel. 5G.
EMFs, ascension.
Sex rings, Fauci, fatness, freedoms.
Global paranoia burns.
Shrapnel of disinformation.
Grifters offer salves.
People die.
*
A friend of mine doesn’t trust vaccines
or pharmaceutical companies.
His daughter died of an overdose.
Fentanyl. She was 30.
She broke her femur skiing
when she was 15.
Family doc prescribed Oxycontin.
Thankfully, it’s not addictive.
She was an addict by age 17.
(An uncle helped with that.)
He talks about Purdue Pharma,
his ears turning red.
The fucking Sackler family
is inconceivably rich, he spits,
legal fucking firewalls,
corporate fucking immunity.
My daughter was gone a decade,
he says, fists balled,
before she was gone.
*
I’m back at work
and things are busy.
I’m stuck, people say.
I’m empty.
Many are women. Caretakers.
People who gave and gave. Moms.
Not always though.
Some bagged groceries.
Some dumped cocktails in mason jars
handed them through windows
to parents desperate to slake their thirst.
Some cleaned hospital bathrooms.
Some processed the food we ate.
YOU STAY SAFE, I’LL STAY FREE
read the shirt of the unmasked man
in his 30s, standing behind the elderly woman
who placed on the freshly disinfected countertop
a sympathy card
Tic Tacs
politely asked for 20 scratch tickets,
$5,000,000 Ca$h Riche$.
You play too? he says, incredulously.
Because of the mask covering her nose,
the mask that threatens to wrest his freedom,
she smiles with her eyes.
*
Everyone shouldered a burden.
All of us are sick.
In a fit of stress my husband
called me a tyrant.
Excuse me? I said
extra ‘scuse.
Nothing is mine, he said.
It’s all yours.
Pain can float.
Pain can sink.
It can detonate, make you mean.
I count backwards from ten,
feel a nosebleed coming on.
ALL CAPS FUCK YOU
FUCK YOU FUCK YOU
the bones
of the house vibrate,
he looks at me
and cries.
*
My rage is deep and hot
and burns like an ember,
like a thief, like a wolf,
like a snake, like a woman.
*
The red room
is now green and gold.
I bought a velvet chair
and a potted plant.
I’m taking everything back.