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We traded voice notes on Instagram, like pages from our diaries. “I’m sad,” the hollow notch cloaking your throat / left me a cluster of ranunculus that broke and skittered across the kitchen tile like silenced 쌀. Did you know that our mother’s throats, too, punctured through that coulee centered there, where sparrows rarely land and yet, a ring as rounded wounds open, bare? 

Indented, a thumb carried the brown bird to my window, yesterday, together with a pamphlet for “work at home” insurance policies and a new membership card for the local arboretum where I like to run inside a green cocoon.  When the branches, still, the leaves shuffle, I hear the hollow song your mother sang to you when 

we were both little and afraid of what waited beyond the screen door--

“I’m lonely,” is gorgeous in its long indolence, in the ashes left from yesterday’s rain, still caked along the sly half moon, like an unseen secret, maybe a name we can’t quite re-collect, lost along the way from that screen door and the sparrow’s shudder, slitting  my chest, as Hahlmuhnee counts  chili seeds for summer. The finch’s chants,  a dull thud, where there is no hollow

song. But no 

more strength, either, to hurl four-lettered words at the TV screen. I watch / a policeman turns his back to a man drowning in open air, I watch / a policeman buries an octet of rice grains because “it was a bad day,” and a vector grows between the two, “there is the grey horizon,” I reply, as it stretches around me before I can swallow the ocean. Omma tells me she has tennis elbow. She can no longer julienne the vegetables for 잡채.

I want to cover my mother’s body with my own, in the same way my husband’s shadow looms over mine along the subway tracks, inside the lush ovaries of Central Park, but I can’t seem to find the words to tell him that my mother’s name sounds too much, too much like six grains of buried rice, but maybe you are

who I love / my finger dips / the sparrow’s  feet landed, there, and Omma’s silver song washes over both of us, as we collide, as we shiver.

Only Day 3 of Quarantine Diet. This is the first “diet” I’ve undertaken since 2014.  All other “diets” were really “just cut out a few lbs for this and that.”  I amassed probably 10 lbs since lockdown went into place--which i took as a lovely excuse to stop running while my ankle healed (still not healed--going to get an MRI tomorrow).  I ordered a scale yesterday, but I assured my husband--”it doesn’t tell you how much you weigh, just how much you’ve lost.”  This--all of this--the MyFitnessPal, the 25 minutes a day doing P90, the meal planning--offers comfort in a weird scary sort of way.

I work from 7-5 most days. Anthony spends the first half of the day on assorted projects--usually making videos for his students or cleaning out one of the 17 closets in our house. This morning, he spent a full hour wiping down the kitchen countertops.  I never understood why the sound of cleaning makes me so anxious, but now I know--it reminds me of my mother. I remember she once threatened to leave us because I didn’t sweep the floor the way she wanted.

I have no meetings this morning, but several in the afternoon. Those light blue blocks on my calendar fill me with a sort of dread, on the one hand, and purpose, on the other.  

I nearly finished it, but before I did, I got sidetracked with something. I can’t remember what. And before I knew it, I was knee deep in a long overdue re-read of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series--a sprawling 14-installment fantasy series and what many view to be the predecessor to Game of Thrones. Instead of turning back to Shantaram when I finished WoT, I moved onto Philip Knight’s Shoe Dog, followed by a couple of “fluff” novels--mystery/suspense thrillers I liked to listen to during my long runs. Recently, I started the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Richard Powers, The Overstory.  Two chapters in and then I decided to start reading R.O. Kwon’s Incendiaries, an intimidatingly and wretchedly beautiful novel I started reading right before Shantaram, but never finished.