Fall 2022 | Christine Rhein Reads "Pandemic Playground” – MQR Sound
Christine Rhein reads her poem "Pandemic Playground", from MQR's Fall 2022 special issue, 'Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink'.
May 2020
Weeds creep up the slide, the jungle gym,
and the swings hang twisted,
bound together, off-limits now,
like the grade school—the one
where I go to vote, the one my sons
attended. I used to watch them
climb the slide—slip and laugh, scramble
their way up—fighting gravity.
Next week, my younger son—teaching
5th graders from home—turns thirty.
My husband and I hope for a sunny day,
plan to visit him in his backyard,
sit on lawn chairs six feet from his.
Everything is fine until it isn’t,
experts warn of exponential spiking.
Everything changed overnight,
my father says, near the end of the war
in Germany, children starving,
mothers doing anything to get food,
even hitting, kicking each other.
Everything will not fit inside a poem.
Fifty miles away, in Lansing—
a protest against the lockdown—chants
of Freedom, men with AK-47s.
I zigzag past the other people walking
around the flagless school
and, at the chin-up bar, feel the muscle
it takes just to hang on.
For more from the Fall 2022 special issue of MQR, “Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink,” you can purchase the issue here.
