Jennifer A. McGowan: a poem

Covidsomnia

Your heartbeat is loud in your lips

and you can't unthink about it

and it's pretty damn weird actually

then you discover no pulse in your wrist

is this another kind of death

or what

you so hot in the airconned heat

pinned and needled

your hands so cold

and your head goes existential

and pained

and the dark room explodes in stars

Jennifer A. McGowan’s latest pamphlet, Still Lives with Apocalypse, won the Prole Pamphlet Competition this year. She’s a professional calligrapher and illuminator, is disabled, and prefers the fifteenth century to the twenty-first.