There is no way out of this By Martha Deed

There is no way out of this
 
Music opens your soul
you cry and ask
why have I waited so long
for this?
 
The mouse
mangled in the dryer motor
slowed me down
the smell of death
 
The printer that stopped dead
mid-page of a poem
its replacement a maze
of  fractured prose
 
The phone box down the road
filled with water and rot ‒
inarticulate with static
in the pandemic
 
I spoke to no one
except to shout
deaf to friendship
in the dying
 
The man in the living room
beloved, slipping away, said
"This is the sickest I've been in my life"
I held his hand, his hand warm and squeezing back
 
He knew

Martha Deed’s poetry collections, Climate Change (2014) and Under the Rock (2019) were both published by FootHills Publishing. Seven chapbooks, including 65 X 65 (smallchapbookproject, 2006) and We Should Have Seen This Coming (Locofo Chaps, 2017).  Individual poems in Shampoo, Moria, Gypsy, CLWN, Earth’s Daughters, New Verse News and many others. Chasing Whitman, her research on her family’s connections with Walt Whitman is featured in Huntington Historical Society’s Whitman Bicentennial Exhibit catalog of the same title, 2019.