More on: pandemic

I’m crowdsourcing these skills from local weavers and the older women in my family—my grandmothers and aunts—who are now scattered all over the world. They’re sharing stories of various such beds they’d woven or inherited and sending videos and patterns over WhatsApp.

We cannot see our loved ones, shut into hospitals / like mysterious shrines, taken out alive or dead. // They close our eyes. We have no say in whether / we breathe or not.

A psalm for the plague year by Philip Metres: “Loss, you have been our regent, / Refusing the refugees / you sent. / / Truly we’re boxed in an annex / Of the mansion / of your text.”

I was so undone—not by Lola’s death but by the prospect of flying halfway around the world again only to turn around to fly halfway around the world again again—that I had to Skype my therapist in New Jersey for guidance. Meantime, Sam was jabbering away in idiomatically perfect Hebrew on his cell phone and telling me to chill out. “Mom, it’s not like we’re being put on the next transport to Poland.”

At present, we are standing inside of the pandemic, and so its bitterness defines first and foremost how we feel about it.

Like the strange paradox of social distancing, where we step away from our neighbors in order to protect them, so the artist loves the world by retreating from it. The art of solitude is ultimately social.