Everyone feels safe at Gramma’s so that’s why we’re all here to quarantine. Each of us does what we think will save us from Covid. I’m washing my hands again. The old ones stand at the door armed with tradition: Grampa’s pipe for negotiating, Gramma’s pistol to get down to business. My hippie uncle plays an old-fashioned drum in a new-fashioned way. So do the figments of his imagination. That’s what Gramma calls them. They seem like angels to me. Papa tells stories to the little ones of other times when people were tested. Tonight it’s about Passover. He ends each evening with the story of the brave doctors fighting the virus. When he touches his chest, I know he really believes it. The tiny bison stays in the oven to keep warm; the javelina and jackrabbit want to roast him but so far, it’s been like Noah’s Ark with them. Our family stays inside a lot breathing each other’s air; outside is something big I don’t recognize, it scares me. I just keep washing my hands.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s

most recent chapbook is The Vaudeville Horse (Etchings Press, 2022). Her first full-length book of poetry, Dominant Hand, is available from Mayapple Press, and she is co-author with artist Mary Hatch of Art Speaks: Paintings and Poetry (Kazoo Books, 2018). Other books by Kerlikowske include The Shape of Dad (a memoir in prose poems), Last Hula (winner of the 2013 Standing Rock Chapbook Competition), and Chain of Lakes.

She has been publishing her poetry and fiction for more than 40 years in such journals and magazines as Encore, Cincinnati Review, Passager, and Poemeleon, among others. Recent poems have appeared in New Verse News and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.

Her work is also anthologized in Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence (White Pine Press, 2016); The Female Complaint: Tales of Unruly Women (Shade Mountain Press, 2015); two of the annual KYSO Flash anthologies, Accidents of Light (2018) and Earth Hymn (2019); and in the Michigan writers anthology published by Western Michigan University (WMU).

Formerly an arts activist, Kerlikowske was president of the Poetry Society of Michigan, and she served for 30 years as president of the Kalamazoo Friends of Poetry. She’s retired from a teaching career at Kellogg Community College. Recently, she took a project years in the making to a gallery, and the show opened on 22 August 2023.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ If my grandfather walked toward me with two arms, I wouldn’t recognize him, micro-CNF by Kerlikowske in Issue 11 of MacQ (January 2022); nominated for Best of the Net 2023

⚡ Into the Oak, prose poem by Kerlikowske in MacQ-9 (August 2021)

⚡ Three in Prose by Kerlikowske in DIAGRAM (Issue 5.1): “Forty Winks”; “The Girls’ Room”; and “Midway”