Pandemic III: I Dreamed the Pandemic Was Purged

when a storm surged for days off the Mexican Coast
and finally breached California shores

Old Testament style and flushed our streets
with epic amounts of spring clean rain.

In the morning epidemiologists
reported the virus was last seen

in filmy rivers jumping the curbs
in San Diego. Oceanographers

are saying this event makes history
since it seems the virus was scoured

off the street as if it were grease and guttered
down through storm drains and culverts,

beyond nursing homes and airports and
people panic-buying toilet paper

in case of sudden outbreak of indecency.
Then the viscous infusion floated

on high sea swells and coated them with
an enormous oily rainbow just before

ghosting into a grave the experts are sure exists
on the ocean floor. They speculate

that decades later it could be exposed
on the beach by the haunted remains

of the hotel that burned in 1885
like a new local myth, but with the sick

mechanical smell of beach tar. They
also predict in 2320

someone might point with its left frontal lobe
and say: Look, just above that ribbon

of Del Mar sandstone there on the cliff,
that streaked black sediment—do you see?

That was the Pandemic of 2020.









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