Faricy Poetry Award
An excerpt from Nadalyn’s poem Interview Eight:
I. Waiting rooms
Two years of contagion culminate to
two days of containment in a holding
center that spread time across a consciousness
like warm mayonnaise. Flies bump aimless
along water-stained walls, fat and lazy,
no rhythm or rhyme or urgent will to move
endlessly toward survival. She spent two
days spent waiting next to some bodies also surviving
with no sense of time, waiting for lab results
to confirm what they all knew to be feverishly
true. Two days of waiting stood between proper
food and drip IVs, two days spent stacked
like lunch meat in a room with bodies,
the bodies, and the fat
flies that may or may not die before she does.