It’s hard. Not all of 2020 can be kneaded into grief-
shaped poems, most parts are so silent and so
alone – pages filled with punctuation marks that
have lost their words: forlorn ellipses going nowhere,
commas waiting between space and space and question
marks that know answers have been quarantined.
Not all of 2020 can be shaped into light, darkness
shifts in unexpected places, strange, defiant. On a mid-
November Diwali morning, in a year that broke in
March, I wonder what poetry is – anymore? Stepping six
feet away from a stranger, I look into his indifferent
eyes. I pretend he is smiling behind his cotton mask.