~
Nothing Personal
Is it the wind carousing the birch tree across the street?
The reliable creak of the screen door, or the cats
sleeping face in sunlight? Maybe it’s last night’s dream
of your mother played by an actress who looked
nothing like your mother. These long weeks of
quarantine? The daily stats? The white-washed
sentiments? The flat statements? Your dead brother
maybe? The sudden storms of grief, the ball of anxiety
in your stomach like a coil of barbed wire, that long-ago
blue inked letter from your father to your sister
speaking of everything except his father’s
recent death. The way it undid her. Is it the black
steamer trunk heavy-breathing in the basement,
holding fast to the menagerie of your past? The self-
interrogations, confessions to the wall, masks and
gloves, soaps and sterilizers? Or is it the tongue-tied
cars strung out like dead Christmas lights lining the
street? Maybe it’s the demise of reason and empathy
and whole civilizations? The unlikely accident of your
existence? I refuse to question. Refuse to know.
Equate life to this if you must. I’ll not take any of it
personally.
~
Tina Schumann is a Pushcart nominated poet and the author of three poetry collections, Praising the Paradox (Red Hen, 2019) which was a finalist in the National Poetry Series, Four Way Books Intro Prize, and the Julie Suk Award, Requiem. A Patrimony of Fugues (Diode, 2017) which won the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition and As If (Parlor City, 2010) which was awarded the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. She is editor of the IPPY-award winning anthology Two Countries. U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents (Red Hen, 2017.) Schumann’s work received the 2009 American Poet Prize from The American Poetry Journal, finalist status in the Terrain annual poetry contest, as well as honorable mentions in The Atlantic and Crab Creek Review. She is a poetry editor with Wandering Aengus Press, and a graduate of the Rainier Writing Workshop. Her poems have appeared widely in publications and anthologies since 1999, including The American Journal of Poetry, Ascent, Cimarron Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Nimrod, Parabola, Palabra, Poetry Daily, Poemeleon, Rattle, Verse Daily, and read on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. www.tinaschumann.com