By Poetry inspired by the pandemic and submitted by Mills graduates. If you wish to contribute, email quarterly@mills.edu.
Shelter in Place Perhaps today is the day the creatures of the earth take it back I miss touching you in the late afternoon, but by nightfall I am grateful for solitude A day to be empty to watch time without time crawl along the wall as sunlight We make shadow puppets by the fire, animating the void, filling with mimicry what life once was now bound up in the home, purely, ventures out among the throngs Limited My cup runneth over Spilling out little ways to perform aliveness and rainwater as a form of contact It’s a haphazard way of cleaning I mop up the spillage with my hair while singing an ancient song Repetition protects what is tender, makes it forget Like a brace against the dissipating reality Your stability lends itself to certain righteous indignation over people walking outside Masks on or off, it makes no difference The “true self” has always been a lie A self could form around aspiration The body extends into a sphere of mist Or maybe it’s smoke from a wildfire Stay away to come near Find messages in the heat of the pavement Think back to licking to make clean, to soften In a way we’ve been preparing for this Our whole lives, a niggling feeling in the back Of the mind, or your throat Reminding you you don’t know what’s coming Your anxiety a search for meaning in the unknown But here is a picnic blanket laid out in the sun The abrupt transition from spring to summer temperatures Drawing us out of our hunkering Shouting “I LOVE YOU” from the sidewalk to your open window –Kate Robinson Beckwith, MFA ’13; Madison Davis, MFA ’13; Ivy Johnson, MFA ’13; Leslie Martin, MA ’13
At Mills We Walk, Unless We March We walked, Through the Civil War As Young Ladies, We walked Through the centuries’ page turning 19th to 20th Then 20th to 21st, We walked through The flu pandemic Of 1918–1920 We walked Through the first world war And the second, too Korea Vietnam We walked and marched through Integration Each ’60s assassination, Through civil unrest AIDS Apartheid The strike of 1990 9/11 And all the rest. For one hundred and thirty one years, Mills Women have walked Across the meadow For our degrees. And now, We walk . . . in place. The world Still turns But we— Stand still . . . Freeze frame, Holding our Collective breath Until We can Walk Again . . . And walk, We will. –D. Lynise (Debra Conick ’85)
Like some apocalyptic fashion show the lines wrap around the block are you ready for your close up Our bodies like haunted sacs ventilating on their own while a woman dies in New York and another woman lies quiet behind a pulled curtain, the stark bird call of machinery works alone, steadily, without interference, without touch and we too work steadily without touch The strain of a smile behind a mask is too much and we resort to waving or a nod, no less human but no less machine, our bodies funneling nutrients and expanding the lungs, heedless to the space they now occupy, a wide girth between us now, Six enforceable feet We have laid the evidence at the feet of our minds, and they have succumbed, suppressing desire, arresting the impulse to reach out for that stranger’s drooping basket, to retrieve the oranges that have rolled away, over the curb To reach out for our brother and nestle between his fleshy arms, to touch the hands of the sick and the dying, to grip the fingers and slide yours inside, one hand, one living, one world, one dying, and we are somewhere in between. –Ashley Stewart ’09
