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Quarantine in Spring / Breaking Up

August 16, 2021/ Julz Savard

[poetry]

Quarantine in Spring

The earth has washed its lovely hands of us. Enough!

so sayeth the world. Knock it off. Sit still and think

hard about all that you have done. Then the planet

pours itself a long cool drink. Except it doesn’t.

I’m just anthropomorphizing. In truth, the air 

lightens, tremors tremble less, spring flowers blossom,

and, as always, the small rain down can rain without

needing to be transformed into more poetry. 

Rain will do what it does: it doesn’t have to be

seen by us or dotted with some pink umbrellas

or soaking a young, love-struck couple in a clutch.

We need these things to be: the rain and the touching.

We even need poetry, but first we must stay

inside alone, face facts, and finally come clean.

***

Breaking Up

Her mother was gone. Alas and alack. Siblings dissolved into sarcasm and dinners in family restaurants. This was an ending. This was the beginning of her end. She could barely speak. She wrote death poems instead. Friends said, ”I hope you feel better soon.” But she didn’t feel better soon. Friends said, “I don’t know how to respond to this level of grief.” Their babies hid their phones and keys. Their jobs put them to sleep. Mouse crap littered her cupboards. She tried live-catch traps, then poison. The house quaked and creaked. The house told her she owned nothing. The dogs said, “Don’t look to me, my queen. I too am dying.” Her husband coughed up, “I love you, hon, but I’m on deadline.” Death tapped at her window like a dapper Dracula. He said, “Illicit sex is all that’s left of romance.” He bought her soft-serve and rowed them out to sea, where porpoises laughed and promised a kind of immortality or at least the suburban version of Lethe: cheese, wine, and movies. Death kissed her fingers into ice, ran his cold tongue down her chest until her heart froze, blue topaz: the maiden encased in ice. Nothing felt good to her—the best. So why did she break up with him? His icicle penis? His one-track mind? The fact that, at core, he was a man of business? Was it something he said? “Disintegration”? “Final Solution”? Something he hadn’t done? Killed the mice? Changed the light bulbs? Yes and yes. Mostly, it was September. New England is gorgeous in October. In November, she’d need to rake the leaves. Come December, gifts for nieces. As much as she loved death, she wasn’t dead yet.

Cathleen Calbert, Author Headshot

Cathleen Calbert’s writing has appeared in Ms., The Nation, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Women’s Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the author of four books of poems: Lessons in Space, Bad Judgment, Sleeping with a Famous Poet, and The Afflicted Girls. Her awards include the 92nd Street Y Discovery Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Sheila Motton Book Prize, and the Mary Tucker Thorp Professorship at Rhode Island College.

Amuse-Bouche Archive

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Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published the second Friday of every month.

Today’s course:

Behind the Eight Ball: How to Become Homeless in the Richest Country in the World

June 13, 2025/in Blog / Michelle Hampton
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Meeting My Child Self at the Trauma Play

May 9, 2025/in Blog / Michelle Hampton
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Products of Our Environment

March 14, 2025/in Blog / Michelle Hampton
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Midnight Snack

Take a bite out of these late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

Dig Into Genre

May 23, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Michelle Hampton
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Lauren-Howard-credit-Terril-Neely-scaled-773x1030-1.jpg 1030 773 Michelle Hampton https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Michelle Hampton2025-05-23 23:59:492025-06-17 18:29:02Dig Into Genre

The dreams in which I’m (not) dying

April 25, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Michelle Hampton
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On The Map

March 28, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Michelle Hampton
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School Lunch

An occasional Wednesday series dishing up today’s best youth writers.

Today’s slice:

I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Lizzy Young
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A Communal Announcement

April 28, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Lizzy Young
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SL-FB-Isabella-Dail.png 788 940 Lizzy Young https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Lizzy Young2021-04-28 11:34:132021-04-28 11:34:13A Communal Announcement

Seventeen

April 14, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Caroline Shannon Karasik
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Word From the Editor

The state of the world breaks my heart every day. Broken hearted, I stay online. I can’t log off. Because my career and schooling are all done remotely, I tend to struggle with boundaries regarding screen time, with knowing when to break away.

Like many of you, I have been spilling my guts online to the world because the guts of the world keep spilling. None of it is pretty. But it’s one of the things that, having searched for basically my entire life, I found that tempers the chaos that lives rent free inside my head.

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