By: Fran Abrams
I ask myself what might make me happy.
Would I like ice cream or a new sweater? My
response: “It seems that I am always tired.”
I feel as if I cannot sleep enough, as if my
engine needs to be tuned or battery recharged.
I am not flourishing while staying home. My
energy grows when I am with other people,
when I can see smiling faces unmasked. My
survival in this pandemic relies on isolation.
I worry that solitude may be the death of me.
Fran Abrams began writing poetry in 2017 and has had poems published in print and online, including in Cathexis Northwest Press in 2019, in Work Literary Magazine, the Winter 2021 Bulletin of Alan Squire Publishing, and forthcoming in GargoyleMagazine. Her poems appear in eight forthcoming and published anthologies, including This is What America Looks Like from Washington Writers Publishing House. She was a juried poet at Houston Poetry Fest in October 2019 and a featured reader at DiVerse Gaithersburg (MD) Poetry Reading Series in December 2019. For more, visit franabramspoetry.com.
"I went through a time when the only subject I seemed able to write about was the pandemic. I was taking a class about poetic forms where we learned about the Ghazal. The instructor told us to let the Ghazal inspire us, not constrain us. This poem is what happened."