Age of Isolation So many shops downtown are closed. The liquor stores are still there of course, but maybe every third store has been boarded up since the pandemic started, knocked out like teeth on a fighter’s mouth. Bookstores gone, coffee shops too. The place where you used to go to buy records gone, but you suppose that would be abandoned anyway like the video game arcade you loved before you discovered girls. You wonder if this is the way of things, the turning of an age as the world moves on to a new way of being alive. It feels like that summer day twenty years ago, where you were at the park, but realized that kids didn’t go there any more. It’s like those first days of COVID when you looked out your door and understood that you could have a picnic on the highway, and not a single person would care.
About the Author: John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines. He has twenty-one books of poetry, memoir, and fiction including his latest, Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press) and Kitkitdizzi (Bamboo Dart Press). He lives in Jamestown, New York.
Image Credit: John Margolies “Liquor store sign, Bossier City, Louisiana” (1979) Public domain image courtesy of The Library of Congress
As It Ought To Be 