1.
Traipsing barefoot down the hall
to close the door to earn a living
in a time increasingly imaginary, thinking maybe
the old times will come again, or maybe
the world will slowly end, but
in good faith and changing protocols,
we wore our shirts clean with
baggy, wrinkled pants.

2.
When a son dies
there is no more map to earth.
You can stay in the first
stages years later, denying,
bargaining, showing anger,
but two years in,
pandemic had sent us back
to the room
we’d left to later resolve,
a mess, to use now as
the new set for work.

3.
A few weeks in,
we cleaned other rooms
but it wasn’t time
for his, counselors said,
“There is no right time.”
Instead, in the corner, with
coffee stains on the bedroom
desk where I sat I
cleared his desk where he had doodled,
looked up past the computer screen at
boxes and see-through bags
of yarn, old guitars on the floor,
and his long silent TV screen. And on the wall above,
his Jedi and Yoda posters, and toys left
in crates, Lego blocks in boxes behind shelves,
in Zoom calls, the mattress backdrop covered with a blue sheet, it could look like a blue screen, or, one colleague said,
“like the movies.”

4.
Denial. Perhaps Hollywood prepared us for all of this.
We’ve all been faking it, all learned
to look at roles through screens at TV game shows
glamorous and prize laden, and
there at that desk I taught
and I answered
the occasional question—
in this still moving point
where he doodled,
where he laid his head that last night weeping
at the grayness with the window open on October breeze, dogs barking,
barren sirens coming closer, where
he took the last
wrongly diagnosed anti-depressant,
here, where I now ran meetings
looked out the same window
saw what he won’t ever see again,
wondered, really, what he did see, or
if he ever could those last days, see the sun
on the leaves and shadowed on
the white speckled fence and
sounds of cars going by somewhere—             How             is it? they asked.             “Okay,” I’d say. “It’s okay.”

5.  

Bargaining. “I’m okay” or some version of okay
in front of the blue sheeted mattress
because it was messy in here and
the committee meetings and classes
ran on as I looked out
                                and thought, I have been looking past
                                and I can’t tell if this is light in
                                darkness or light failing to escape
                                 gravity I cannot
                                 ignore, look
                                 into the distance
                                 learning and
                                 telecommuting, what must dampen this torch meant for
                                 the deeper chambers of our grief.

Thomas Allbaugh’s work has appeared in a number of journals, including Poetica Review, Panoplyzine, River Heron Review, and Broken Sky 67.  He has published a chapbook of poems, a novel, and a collection of short stories.