by Lauren Coggins
© Lauren Coggins
In dark times we light matches.
-Nelba Márquez-Greene
Beside my sleeping son in a time
of pandemic, I worry about the fever
he’s brought home, how we who have not traveled
might have had it carried to us. About what this night
will hold besides we two—besides my irrational
fear—and when he might break into the sweat
that tells me it’s passing, this fever I’m sure
I’m sure
is not newsworthy, is not those other
knots of RNA unfurling across the world
like party streamers, microscopic
celebrations of arrival. Nothing I do
is so efficient as a virus. How would it be
to have a shape with so clear an intent:
existence a recursive unrolling, with being
and doing much the same? The machine
of my own body is less perfected, inexpert
in ways I wish it weren’t, though I did manage
in the catalogue of my attempts
this boy beside me, this splay of limbs
and heat I face in the dark,
this marvel.
© Lauren Coggins
Lauren Coggins lives in South Carolina and works in the insurance industry. Her poems have appeared in journals including Southern Poetry Review, Nimrod, Jabberwock, and The Briar Cliff Review. This poem began during a sleepless night with her eight-year-old son, toward the beginning of the pandemic in this part of the world. Her son is well and, as ever, a marvel.
© Lauren Coggins
