<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div dir="auto" style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class="">Notes on a Stay in a Hospital Quarantine Cell</span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class="">December 27, 2020<o:p class=""></o:p></span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class=""> </span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class="">I swallow my pride and it tastes like honey and salt.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class="">The air has embraced my private body and has approved, and it quietly rejoices in its revelations and the liberation of its childlike spills and neediness. How I reach to love it suddenly, this stranger I’ve kept in a fifties New Jersey suitcase, only removing it for one afternoon on a nude fire island beach.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class="">Now it is truly liberated in a small windowless quarantine room in North Carolina.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class="">The machines behind me beep, shining little christmas trees, watching my pulses, systems, and disturbances like grandmothers, occasionally clucking, unfashionably faithful through the night. I am pinned head to toe to a proud family of counters, weighers, and witnesses. This little womb and its divine protocols.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class="">Shame is peeled from the human body when the body is wet with sweet tears and shocking love. It has suckers like snails and they make marks. The shameless body houses the soul proudly instead of shrouding it.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class="">My mother tells me I began to walk on my first birthday. Today I took steps alone from the commode to the bed, to the applause of my caregiver. Eighty years has incensed up in a laughing swirl of smudge smoke. A laughing swirl of smudge smoke and ageless birthday courage.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class="">Echoing a hated preachment, I see that my life is just where it belongs, that mistakes are potholes filled in with diamonds.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class="">If this dream goes away in the glare and blare of rough reality I will lovingly remember it the way I recall my dying mother squeezing my hand that is now identical to hers. My tenderness spills over in tears of recognition and reconciliation.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class="">Message from a Quarantine Room.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class="">Little womb of a room.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class=""> </span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>- Patricia G. Horan</span></div></div><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class=""><br class=""></span></div><div style="margin: 0in; background-color: white;" class=""><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class="">After testing positive with COVID one week earlier, Patricia Horan, has passed away. <o:p class=""></o:p></span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class=""> </span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class="">This was her final poem, written with insistence and ferocity via text from her hospital bed according to her friend Elizabeth Sabo.<o:p class=""></o:p></span></div></div><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(5, 5, 5);" class=""> </span></div></div></div></div></body></html>