Listen to Ann E. Wallace read and discuss her poems on our podcast:
Breath / is not something / anyone would dare / to hold right now, / even for luck, Ann E. Wallace wrote on the 33rd day of her acute COVID-19 case, during the first wave of the pandemic in spring 2020. Half a decade later, breathing still doesn’t come easy for the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Jersey City. Like 400 million other people around the globe, her life has been upended and reshaped repeatedly by Long COVID.
Her heartbreak was compounded when it became apparent that both of her daughters were also affected by the multi-systemic disease that still has no cure. Again, again, again. I thought it was about me, she wrote. But: When first one daughter, / and then a second, / fell sick and sicker, / I should have been ready.
Wallace shares her experiences in her poetry book, “Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul” (Kelsay Books).
The chronological collection opens in the first days of the pandemic, harkening back to the hobbies we scoff about now: endless bread-baking and crafting homemade face-coverings (as they baste and stitch mask after mask), as well as the traumas we hardly ever acknowledge (the morgues are full, / and the refrigerated trucks, / and the cemeteries).
“Days of Grace and Silence” follows Wallace through her own struggles to understand her body’s collapse, to get doctors to take her seriously, to manage her endless medical bills, to treat her shifting symptoms. And it concludes with clear-eyed resilience: threads of faith and grace, excavated from pain and fear, woven together with hard-won hope and defiance, in the face of endless institutional failure (a kindness or surprise that spreads / like a ripple into a smile, a day set / into motion, expansive, unknowable, / with potential that is infinite).
Excerpted below are three of Wallace’s poems from “Days of Grace and Silence.”
Synesthesia
Spring, 2021
I was thinking about hungry birds
and spring and the returned fever
of my daughter but these things
do not inspire hope
so her sister suggests music
and plays a song she says
is orange and pink
and sounds like a painting
and now I know
we both hear color
and texture
when others are stuck
listening for the words.
New Driver
Summer, 2021
Walking, like breathing,
is not yet easy.
Last year the tick tock of teenage
progress came to an unwelcome stop,
and the world closed up
as my daughter, then I, fought for air.
But as spring gave way
to the steady warmth of June,
we reemerged together
to make our way, halting,
up and down our mile-
long street, counting
our breath, in and out,
checking oxygen,
and speaking
of times ahead,
waiting on our return.
Our long illnesses
relapse and persist,
and I am trying,
with my small energy, each day
walking up and down our street.
My daughter though,
she drives now, away,
away, from Ogden Avenue
and reminders of our long virus.
And in the car, it is easy
to forget that walking
still holds the power
to take her breath away.
Passages
Spring, 2023
It’s been decades since
my body held a narrative
clear and simple. It turned
to poetry long ago, when
a refrain emerged, was
repeated with life
interrupted once, then
again, and again.
A poem always begins
in the middle, or someplace
nearby, because truly, have you
ever tried telling a poet
to begin at the beginning?
When doctors ask me,
or my daughters, how
our illnesses began, oh,
the poems we compose
on paper-lined examination
tables, each one of us a stanza
braided to the other to the other,
with no beginning and no end.
The poet in me dares not ask,
if we are always muddling
around in the endless looping
middle of this story, how
might we ever write our way out?
Link to purchase the full book: “Days of Grace and Silence” (Kelsay Books)
