Quarantine on the Sun

by Elias Lowe

I have struggled to write a poem
because I am running from place
to place in my mind and my
neighborhood. You told me to
write about quarantine on the sun
as if I could conceptualize something
so hot and big. I’ve been thinking
about sex, clearly, and the word cock
and I’m working on loving my desires
the same way I love the sound of
the repetitive hand-drum the man
played on the shady corner and the way
that I love the tender, controllable things.
Palatable, transparent like homemade
coffee and pie. Still-life moments,
not the emergencies, hours
of birds, desperate decisions.

While I write to make the big fit on the paper,
you write to make the small things seem big.
Neither of us are saying very much,
we are both lying.
One thousand tiny failures,
a ripped shopping list
a sink overflowing with dishes.
My own desires spelled out,
suddenly diminished.

Elias Lowe is a transgender non-fiction writer and poet based in Pittsburgh, PA. They are recently unemployed and trying to make meaning out of daily joys and tiny rebellions. Elias’ work has been featured in Litro Magazine, Cosmonauts Avenue and After the Pause. Elias spends their time exploring what it means to be surviving through intentional community building and creative writing. Bill Mazza is a visual artist using chance, duration, and accumulation to reinterpret landscape as a relationship of people to their mediated environments, through painting, performance, and community-building collaborations.