(Carbondale IL, April 2020)
Rumi: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field, I’ll meet you there.
Beyond: a hospital sign: We thank our doctors nurses emts first responders Beyond: Longbranch Café where we had our last woman’s salon. Beyond: the Saluki statue’s bronze snout wrapped in a t-shirt. Beyond: the house of a ninth grader I tutored. Beyond: gloves littered in Evergreen Park. Beyond: the field where marching band practiced. Beyond: a wild red strawberry. Beyond: honeysuckled Campus Lake. Beyond: McLafferty Road which reminds me of Fluffers Mcfluffernut the name of a poet’s parrot. Beyond: the hills where I lifted both middle fingers and shouted fuck off virus! Beyond: graffiti that reads Beware Big Brother and Remove Racial Images of God. Beyond: a telephone pole striped red, white & blue & an American flag painted on a barn roof. Beyond: a Confederate flag flying over someone’s lawn. Beyond: a tombstone’s inscription The last person who asked directions. Beyond: a mustached man’s wave. Beyond: a teapot shrieking in the kitchen. Beyond: windchimes sounding a warning. Beyond: another ambulance howling. Beyond: a sign that reads love is love science is real no humans are illegal women’s rights are human rights black lives matter. Beyond a church sign: We lament 197000 deaths.
Sunday Drive, In the Time of Covid
Laura Sweeney
Artist statement: This poem was inspired in part because during my MFA years at Southern Illinois University, (SIU) I had focused on documentary poetics. This piece is about a drive around the southern Illinois area during the early days of Covid-19. Carbondale was closed down, a ghost town, so different from my usual Sunday drive (with my dachshund Freya!) corroded with all kinds of signs of the pandemic. In this “Sunday Morning” poem, I aimed to capture a snapshot of the times. I don’t know why the Rumi poem came to mind, but I used the epigraph as an entry point, and the repetition of the “beyond” as a driving anaphora for the piece, initially a couple pages longer, until I condensed to the catalogue or list poem form. This is also a found poem. I was playing with the idea of poetry as evidence, collecting and juxtaposing the conflicting signage and artifacts, which depicted the politics and gloom and uncertainty of that historical moment. I wrote this in situ instead of as a post pandemic reflection, trying to convey the moment as it unfolded, the eeriness of the events and mixed messages. I was trying to take the reader along that Sunday drive, a road trip of a once in a lifetime phenomenon.
Laura Sweeney facilitates Writers for Life in Iowa and Illinois. She represented the Iowa Arts Council at the First International Teaching Artist's Conference in Oslo, Norway. Her poems and prose appear in seventy plus journals and twenty-five anthologies in the States, Canada, Britain, Indonesia, and China. Her recent awards include a scholarship to the Sewanee Writer's Conference. She is a PhD candidate, English Studies/Creative Writing, at Illinois State University.