The first thing I've been able to read in this Bad Time

On a beautiful, thoughtful book of poetry

My friend Fred asked for my address a few weeks ago. I love to receive mail and I love Fred. I thought he would send me a little card because it seems like all my friends are making little cards in order to distract their brains from the madness outside our windows, in the spaces we aren’t allowed to go. 10 of my friends now have fevers and shortness of breath and cannot smell. Fred didn’t send me a card, he sent me a book.

Everyday at 2:00 p.m., I take our temperatures just to make sure.

He bought the book from an independent seller close to me, which is a nice thing anyone could and should do. I opened it and was confused. I buy a lot of books, but had never seen this one before. It had a cover I certainly would have remembered, and who was Sarah Vap? "It’s not a light distraction but it just completely overtook me,” Fred said. He said he fell in love with it before the plague arrived. It was the first time I had realized that this is a pivotal moment in consumption as well. Our tastes will change. Already some of the books I wanted to read before this became so real to me I do not want anymore. This book, this I wanted.

One of my friends was very sick, and somehow she has already recovered.

The book is called Winter: Effulgences & Devotions by Sarah Vap. It is a book of poetry in that there are many line breaks, but not in that things rhyme. It is a book about motherhood, and though I do not like books about motherhood generally, I really liked this. Vap spent more than 12 years compiling it from scraps of paper written in the moments of time she could steal from the three children she formed, birthed, and raised.

There is no flour at the grocery store.

The book is about children and salmon, about not having health insurance, about a cabin in a wood, about how we struggle to focus. For Vap, that struggle is because she has three young sons pulling at her body and her mind and her time constantly. For me, maybe it is the fear that is pulling, the anxiety, this new adjustment to a new world.

I got so angry yesterday because an Influencer I follow drove from NYC to her family’s house in Florida. How selfish can a person be?

There are two things I want to mention about Vap’s book that feel really deeply relevant to me. The first is that in talking about her children, she often admits to a kind of demonic selfishness. She writes "There is nothing I wouldn’t steal or destroy for them. There is no tree on earth I’d spare. There is no throat I wouldn’t shit down I. / I ‘d impale myself. On that poker over there by the fireplace. Then jerk around to enlarge the opening. So they could better devour my.” So often in books about parenting, this kind of endless, boundless, unstoppable love is billed as a beautiful and necessary thing without acknowledging the insularity it requires. The earth is on fire. There is not enough food. The oceans are getting warmer. The virus often spreads because we want to protect the ones we love without realizing (or perhaps willfully refusing to acknowledge) that other people deserve to be protected as well, that just because we love someone doesn’t make them worth more.

I noticed yesterday that I have been doing something terrible. Whenever I read a story about someone dying, I try to distance them from me. Well they were old/alone/in Washington state/ didn’t have health insurance, I say to myself. I want there to be a wall between those who die and me, between those that get so sick they need to be hospitalized and my friends who can no longer smell. I want to build it with my teeth.

The second thing that really stuck with me in Vap’s book is much more subtle. At the top of every page in most new books, is the title or maybe the author’s name. This is convenient in case you forget what you reading, but it also helps with marketing. When you post a photograph of a page to Instagram, the title is right there. No one has to slide into your DMs to ask. I don’t know when this started, but most of the old books I read don’t seem to have this small font of attribution. At the top and bottom of every page of Sarah Vap’s book in small font it reads: “Drones are probably killing someone right now.” We have been in a war in Iraq for most of my memorable life that I do not think about at all. I thought about it a little bit when my oldest friend was still in the Marines, but even then I forgot. The war is far away. The drone killings are far away. They are not ever circulating in my mind consistently. But the reminder so often on every page did several things: it contrasted heavily with the fun stories of her children demanding their Star Wars underwear be put on backwards so they could see Darth Vader’s face, and it became normalized so quickly. For the first hundred pages, the drone comment would jar me every once in awhile, but soon I got used to it.

I think about the fact that this virus is killing more people every day the most when I am laughing so hard that I cry.

I worry that too soon, that already, it is becoming normal.