Pandemic Noir 2020: Love and Loneliness
The poem about the woman who gets seated at a restaurant table across from a manikin; the poem about a man surrounded by a worldwide pandemic, trying to live nine lives all at the same time; the movie that has Lt. Commander Clint Reed, M.D,. and Captain Tom Warren (Richard Widmark and Paul Douglas) racing to save a city from a version of the Bubonic plague–all this packed into this month’s episode of They Write by Night. The poems are by Mehnaz Sahibzada and Kurt Lipschutz (pen name Klipschutz), and Elia Kazan directed Panic in the Streets.
Yes, poetry.la followers get all this for free, together with certain diversions that appeal to my sense of humor, though–no doubt–not everyone “gets” my humor. And who could blame them? Not me. I’m too busy blaming that killer known as “Blackie” for getting too close to a small-time hustler when he put a bullet into him, thereby catching the dying man’s bug and almost infecting a whole city. And I’m too busy blaming a certain someone in the White House, and his enablers, for the spread of a virus that really didn’t have to travel this far, this fast, and the deaths of thousands more Americans than needed to die.
– Suzanne Lummis
Top image credit to www.Poetry.LA
