By Yash Seyedbagheri
Tweeting Sorrow
I’m tweeting coronavirus statistics on the toilet
older sister’s handling corpses in overcrowded fields
how do you confront grief? I’m sorry? It’ll get better?
I could go tell death jokes, corpse jokes, pretend to smile
but it’s hard to get up.
Truth
you think your truth
is proclaimed in electronic glow
of unsterilized phones, words like dissection, intersection, problematic, paradigm
and likes, bandied while you tweet from a Starbucks bathroom
and corpse statistics rise
but it’s all right.
you just had a twelve-dollar latte.
Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction. His story, “Soon,” was nominated for a Pushcart. Yash has also had work nominated for Best of the Net and The Best Small Fictions. A native of Idaho, Yash’s work is forthcoming or has been published in WestWard Quarterly, Café Lit, and Ariel Chart, among others.
While I personally have remained relatively safe, I’ve been contemplating the ramifications of technology, communication, and empathy during these difficult times. These ruminations have only been further amplified by isolation. It seems that technology offers a false salve to very real problems, physical, emotional, and psychological. These ruminations are the catalysts for my poems and dark humor an even more specific portal into the explorations.