Corrected Version of Liz Ahl’s REMNANTS

final stanza restored

Still, these tattered masking tape traces 
on the scuffed tile floors, hieroglyphs  
of our attempts to demarcate safe zones  
of coming and going through  
the narrow public vestibules. 
 
The box of “take one” surgical masks 
still perched on its pedestal at the entrance, 
offers only its lonely cardboard; empty, 
too, each strategically placed 
hand sanitizer dispenser, which exhales  
a sad, shallow breath when pressed. 

Some smudged plexiglass remains, 
having been more difficult to erect 
and therefore more bother to remove. 
 
Outside, the windswept tumbleweed 
of a facemask, its torn elastic bands 
flapping their tired fronds against 
the asphalt with the other winter trash. 
 
Refrigerator trucks rededicated 
to the chilled storage and transport  
of anything but the human deceased.  
Small town campus ice arena 
bearing the slightest scars of cot-legs 
and privacy screens, the strange dream 
of soldiers fading to fragments. 
 
A ghost of myself, figment out of phase, 
measures distances, haunts the far edges  
of what bustles and churns, a clamorous  
bullying desire for “normalcy” 
almost passing for “normalcy.” 
 
And of course, the counted dead, 
the dead uncounted. The brutal 
and insufficient arithmetic. The long  
and the short, the landmine damage 
lurking in bodies, biding time 
until the next innocent footstep. 

And of course, the virus, not cc-d  
on the report of its demotion 
from emergency to some other rank, 
still lingers on the perpetual threshold: 
overstayed guest or one just arriving? 
It’s hard to know any more, if we ever could, 
the coming from the going.