Welcome to my late-30s-anger-mom poetry blog.

It's March 2020 and I'm posting my first blog ever. Ideas for days, but of course hanging over it all is the coronavirus pandemic.

I was not an early adopter of coronavirus fear. SARS and H1N1 happened, but I barely noticed. I wasn't young, or old, and at the time neither was anyone in my family. It was my 20s, and I was struggling mightily with mental illness. 

And besides, nothing REALLY happens here. I mean, bad things happen to me, and you-- but not to the country, you know? We've got localized tragedies covered. We've got structurally unequal tragedies covered. But so few things change the air's composition. So few things come home.

The first time the air changed in my lifetime, I was 9 and sitting in the dark backseat of a tiny red Subaru idling in traffic on I-95 north of Miami. A reporter in Baghdad, in my memory missiles whistling in the background, I could see the dark buildings, the streaks of light.

My mom would go to India sometimes when I was a kid, and when she'd call us on the landline (still a rotary phone on the wall) she was so, so far away. Tinny and staticky. An echo. I missed her very plainly, very cleanly during those calls (I very infrequently have plain and clean emotions about my mother).

The reporter sounded like that. Thin, remote, made of radio waves himself. I remember looking out the window at the brake lights all around and seeing the flares of missiles instead.

Then a couple years later Hurricane Andrew, the largest hurricane before Katrina was the largest hurricane before Harvey was before Maria, hit my family's house hard. We lived on the edge of Miami-Dade County's Urban Development Zone, just a few blocks from what is now still protected agricultural land, a buffer dividing us from the Everglades; protecting the Everglades from us. Now the area is completely paved over, literally unrecognizable but then it was pockets of Dade County pine forest, dirt road, horse farms, palm farms, trailers and unaccountable gaudy mansions all on lots of a few acres. To think of Princeton, Homestead, the Redlands is to smell the hot sun baking our cypress house. They said it would hit Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, Miami Beach. They said it would hit the rich. Instead it hit tiny plaster houses and trailer parks. Instead it hit Homestead, Kendall, Cutler Ridge.

They were wrong, the roof was gone, I was driving past National Guard tanks, I was living in the headmaster's pool house, I was starting seventh grade struck dumb. Struck into staying up all night crying about the state capitols, into a scattered and deep fear of losing control of what I could control. Struck into alienation if not dissociation. Added to that deep anxiety was the mere fact of being an economically at-risk girl in America, conditioned to spend my most urgent energy on ensuring others felt right, felt safe, felt heard. 

And then Bush v Gore and 9/11 both changed the air too, for all of us. but what happened after, and how the country responded, careened me from patriotism to protest to confusion. The air was changed, yes, but not to the poised clarity of emergency. It was thick with mixed signals, with cynicism, with selfishness.

I've spent a lot of time biting my tongue, or speaking in the tongues of my poetry. So much time that ambivalence is my default position. That I'm really not sure what I think, about much of anything. I've turned inward, and I don't know how many more times I can catalogue my own anxieties to myself within the walls of a poem. 

It feels like every time I don't speak, my voice gets thinner, feels farther away. I don't want my son to see a mother afraid to speak. I don't want my life to end without feeling like I've stood up straight and opened my fucking mouth.

And the air has changed.

I've been angry, mostly, the past 3 weeks. Angry and afraid, and bottled up. If I must literally be bottled up I'll be fucked if I will be virtually, too. If I can't even muster the courage and decisiveness to start a personal blog to run its small course through these days of a pandemic in a country gasping through late capitalism.

So there. Welcome to my late-30s-anger-mom poetry blog.