Published August 31, 2021
by Eric Goodchild
(Sudbury, Ontario, Canada)
For this latest day of now incalculable number,
I've decided errands could be deferred just a bit longer,
paced hurriedly back, forth, and across in lieu of a walk,
and decided I didn't that much miss small, cursory talk.
So normal these collective lock down health measures,
to in place shelter with caution upon the redoubtable advise
from the government for families of middle class
yet still needed be done by every abnormal, of slight
community person like me: one "just, too weird" at view.
It's not a surprise, despite corona extant
reality of harm being one non-discriminatory
to any and every human body on earth,
that my life's experience has now become one a worse type of isolate
disenfranchisement; where those average no more façade
even their former minimal affected politeness.
Requiring eight to ten feet when, from where I stand in a line-up,
or fleeing the store entirely to glare back through the glass, accusing angrily,
my provoking their choice of lesser ill, the cold, with my presence.
Known factlogic supports how "An inferior identity
corresponds to an inferior system of immunity".
It's no less a disappointing, realism, either.
My whole entire hallway I now slow tread to at kitchen table
sit for the hundredth hour too late, too early
for any meal. My thoughts again stray, during all this, what
are all the other othereds, from the bars, centres, out reaches, groups, and 'nish
moean houses where, blunt put, I didn't connect
pre-pandemic, doing to manage it? Stories of mainstream solidarity still
turn up occasionally, via media. While Queer seems brought silent.
For the LGBTQQIP2SAA,
it's as though no similar accord has been as well to occur.
Granted, my own distance from my own diversity
is far flung, but have such lives and safety been covertly redacted
back to that comfortably believed past invisibility?
Have the smiles dropped off of tolerance for all of they too?
Biography
My name in life and on Facebook, is Eric Goodchild. I am a 2Spirited person, a continuing student. and aspiring poet. I belong to the Ojibwe peoples of Pic River First Nations in Northern Ontario.
Previously published in First Nations Poetry Magazine:
"Di Salone Uman / The Sierra Leonean Woman" by Sanah Mara
First Nations Poetry Magazine is part of the Wax Poetry and Art Network.
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