LatinosUSA

1

Looking at the grocery’s empty shelves, he says,

If you want to measure I.Q.

Start with the baseline 140 then subtract

The number of rolls of toilet paper

That are in your house. We stand aside

To watch grocery carts push past

Overflowing with nothing but the softest

coin of the realm.

2

Two young woman dressed in formal

Concert attire: black trousers, white blouses,

Heels, then covered with screaming orange

Life jackets as they place their open violin cases

On the shelves empty from one end

Of the aisle to the other

As if all other options are out of reach.

They begin to play the theme

To the movie Titanic as they rock

On waves of scuffs lapping

the tile floor around their shoes.

3

I can’t say that the shelves have been cleared

For landing freight planes, that this a South Pacific

Island, that this is a WWII cargo cult still waiting long

After the war was over, waiting for the gifts of civilization

To magically reappear as quickly as they disappeared

And now from the shelves we have come to believe in,

Hold dear, worship, though our grocery bags

Are strangely light and we might easily blow away.

4

Almost before another breath of fear,

As fear itself walks in, when the earth begins to

Violently shutter and shake: curtains waving

In a windless room, cabinet doors

Opening as dishes fall onto the counters,

Cat and dog cowering together for the first time

Under the couch. The airport damaged and closed

To clean up the debris, the angel Gabriel that tops

The domed Capitol building has dropped his horn,

A long descending note, twenty stories to the ground.

Nothing left to play, the conclusion to a 5.7

earthquake near Salt Lake City.

Twenty minutes later after the 4.7 aftershock,

The retired school teacher finds herself

Hiding under the kitchen table near her pets.

Days of duck & cover in the fifties,

When the earth shook with mushroom clouds

Sprouting across high southwest desert

And Pacific atolls. Her older sister sends a text

From a thousand miles away asking:

Is this the end of the world as we know it?

Don’t forget the pandemic and all the unused

Rolls of bathroom tissue in the closet,

That wait to wipe us clean away.