1 April, Domodossola
First to go were the gatherings. With the gatherings, gone was the sound of the gatherings—the voices, the music, the cars, the vespas, mostly the voices. Once in a while, a sudden band of teenagers rounding a corner or tucked between buildings, laughing, breaking the law by gathering. Then spring came in out of the stopped-dead Carnival—birds, flowers, trees in bloom, everything budding, and then even the teenagers vanished. In came the changing of the guard of sounds. Bells got louder. Birds got louder. The electric saw across town of a man cutting wood got louder. Shutters going up in the morning, down in the evening, deafening. Silence got louder, so much louder that it covered the streets and windows and faces behind the masks of the few people allowed to go out and got into the skin and blood and started to take hope away because here, now, silence is synonymous with death. It isn’t beautiful or zen or musical. It is the song of the virus, of the Carnival it took over, of the virtues and vices of the human race it is eating as it slides across towns and regions and borders and oceans, hunting down people of all ages and shapes, growing stronger and longer as it gathers into itself not our bodies or money or talents or dreams, just our breath.
Larissa Szporluk's sixth book of poetry, VIRGINALS, will be published by Burnside Review Press in fall 2020. She teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
