“The virus had gone through 50 people before I got it. Many of them took precautions and then just got unlucky, but some of them were careless or didn’t think the rules applied to them …”

Leslie Hayes, M.D., treats patients in Española, New Mexico, a state experiencing one of the most severe crises from the late-November / early-December COVID-19 spike.

Just before Thanksgiving, Leslie caught COVID.

So, 2020 has not been kind to me. I broke my hip and then I got COVID. Unrelated but inconvenient.

So far, it has been a “mild” case, but mild COVID is still quite unpleasant. As I write, I am on Day 10 of symptoms, which have included fatigue, shortness of breath, a horrible sore throat, and a runny nose. …

“… I don’t know if his hands are moving

but I bet they are somehow I’d feel

washed over like that too and be so

proud of us”

who we were when

.

Isn’t it a great country he asks me

as we cross the Panhandle

for the second time in three days

I suppose I answer but

why would you say that

right here right

.

This paved road he says

through these fields and

trucks carrying every imaginable

somewhere many trains you think

we passed in both directions between

these poles the government

look at them put up a long time ago

just to bring electricity so these…

“In the last few years, when I’ve gone abroad it has become an increasingly bigger test of courage to state I’m from the U.S.”

Shortly before leaving England, I took my daughter to our favorite park to let her stomp about a pitted soccer field. It’s an old park surrounded on three sides by woods and on one side by a brick wall of a Victorian-era prison.

Another father was there with two kids: one a toddler the same age as my daughter, keen to push his own stroller; the other was in primary school, huddled over her phone. We got to talking, as people so often do now when emerging from lockdown, and because we were non-white people in an English city. …

“I think for me what is interesting about this series of work is the diversity of voices within myself.”

Editors’ Note: Alexandra (Ali) Blum is a California-based artist who draws on influences from around the world. When the quarantine was put in place, she started a series of paintings — which quickly became a series of mixed-media artworks — addressing the pandemic, politics, climate change, racism, protests, and other big topics of 2020.

On her website, Alexandra describes her goals as an artist: “I am interested in capturing the moment of seeing when something changes and the magic in the everyday. Hiraesh — a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home that maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past is essential to my work. My interior world is of memories of childhood, books, songs, and stories. …

We at Broad Street are proud of everything we publish, and we wish we could nominate all of it for every award out there. Alas, we can choose only a handful. For Best of the Net, some nominees come from our Summer/Fall 2019 “Birth, School, Work, Death” issue, some from our 2020 Pandemonium Blog. All of them come from the heart. Why not give them a read or a re-read right now?

PROSE

“I Got Grown,” a memoir by Joe Milan, Jr.: A young man begins work where others’ lives end.

“On learning that I should sacrifice myself for the good of the public,” by Lise Haines: from the author’s COVID journals. …

When a tsetse fly

-

chews your skin with its scissor teeth, through delicate capillaries for the sweet stain of red, it does so completely in earnest.

-

It ushers in the flagellate protozoan Trypanosoma brucei gambiense. Those misshapen parentheses swim — and they must swim — through passageways, the secrets of your body. The tsetse fly is long gone by the time your central nervous system starts to stutter.

-

A child catching her breath over the steep hill of a consonant.

-

What the doctors call sleeping sickness is to the tsetse fly nothing more than the squeal of a hawk catching a barn mouse. …

Screaming at the Brooklyn Bridge

After Robert Lowell’s “Waking in the Blue”

*

I weigh one hundred and five pounds

after my New York breakfast

of vanilla Soylent, all I can keep down these days, thanks

to the anti-depressant. I swallow it, beige smoothie,

every four to six hours.

SSRI? Every twenty-four.

*

My roommate asks if I will eat something.

No, a real something,

and I do.

Nobody wants to live with a corpse.

I want to show him — all of them —

strut around this city, skin melting off bones, screaming, “I am here!”

to the Brooklyn Bridge, all 14,680 tons of her. …

“Maybe depression is a normal response to a global pandemic. We don’t really have benchmarks for such an event. If I get down, what can I use to help me bounce back?”

I do not plan to cry.

I am lying on my back, watching my husband put on his pajamas. I have brushed my teeth and turned out my light.

“That was a good episode,” he says, pulling on his flannel PJ pants. “The scene when the brother and his wife…” He trails off, chuckling.

Oh god, I think. He is laughing about a scene on the show Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist in which Zoey’s brother admits to his wife that he has been counting — down to the hour — since the last time they had sex. …