Mount Isolation (Northbound, 2020)

I’m standing in the shower,
a towel around my shoulders,
the top edge taut against the nape of my neck.
I inhale, and feel held—the first hug in months.
But it’s October, it’s cold, and I haven’t dried off.
What is urgent is all I can afford.

My sense of self depends upon you, your dog,
and twenty-four hundred other scoundrels from the city.
Your skyscrapers are the fancy kind, metal boxes with men and money
and fax machines. Around here they’re built of granite, ancient
towering records of rivers and rodents. Next time

I’ll ask Who are you?, and you’ll say good
or getting by, or fortunate, given the circumstances,
answering the question I ought to have asked.
A better one: regrets. I expect you’d pick the silences,
the solo moments, all our accidental trendsetting,
performing distance before the world exploded.

In the rubble, there was sanitizer everywhere. Enough to clean up
and heal each others’ cuts. Everyone limped home. For now
the chill feels fine, but I’m familiar with bankrupt knuckles
and winter’s sinister sting. This year is a desiccating ointment,
and I’m the fly stuck inside.

Nothing upcoming is certain. But the foreseeable future
has always been an oxymoron. Even afternoon rain might call in sick.
I want to walk to Low & Burbank’s,
trade today to escape from my life again.
You won’t be there, I’m sure, to correct me
when I say the past is all we have.

Bryce Morales, is a sophomore at Yale University from Portsmouth, NH.