Contact Tracing (Honolulu, HI, March 22, 2020)

Abstract

I try not to touch my face while shopping at a crowded Costco. I'm lucky to still have a job, to afford food and rent in the most expensive place in the world to buy toilet paper. Today, the governor issued a work-from-home order. Community spread, panic. Yet thousands of tourists continue arriving aboard cheap flights and cruise ships—reservoirs of disease. Not even a pandemic can shutdown paradise. Then I fill my car at the gas station, pick up my daughter's prescription pills and asthma inhaler at the pharmacy. I sanitize my hands after every errand. When I return home, my wife and daughter are playing dress-up. CNN echoes on the television (‘250,000 cases worldwide’). I put away the groceries in the pantry and fridge (‘10,000 deaths’). Freeze enough meat to last a month (‘bats and pangolins butchered’). Disinfect handles and doorknobs (‘habitats destroyed’). My mom calls. Cough, sore throat— “Just allergies,” she reassures. ‘It's cold in California.’ I ask about grandma (92-years-old, dementia). ‘Her care home is quarantined,’ she answers. ‘If she dies, we aren't allowed to have a funeral service.’ Yet isn't grieving together our most essential business? ‘Tomorrow, I'll visit her,’ my mom continues. ‘Wave through the window.’ I feel an ocean length apart (‘rising like an invisible tide’). My daughter falls asleep on the couch: her body curls like a flattened curve. My wife takes her temperature: 99.5 degrees. How long can we shelter-in-place? How long can we shelter each other in a world where children can't play with friends at school, where elders can't breathe without ventilators, where we can't touch without fear? How long can we shelter a planet where there's no vaccine for the virulent outbreaks of human greed and violence? ‘I want to hug my grandkids,’ my mom sighs, no longer able to hold our tears at a safe distance. even on maps tracking the coronavirus pandemic the pacific islands are invisible as if we are quarantined from sight don't fear ‘social distancing’ the ocean will always connect us Craig Santos Perez is a Chamoru poet from Guam. He is the author of five books of poetry and the co-editor of five anthologies. He is a Professor of Creative Writing in the English department at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.