I Tape My Mask to My Face

Ron Riekki

In the COVID ward, I tape my mask to my face.

So that I can’t take it off.

I tape my gloves to my face.

So that I can’t reveal the screams of help.

I sign paperwork saying I won’t speak with the media.

I tape the paperwork to the sky, the part of the sky you can’t see, where the nipples of the stars

            are before night comes.

I see another patient die, her mouth in an O, as if she was speaking the word COVID and stopped mid-word, as if she was saying 0, zero, nothing, silence, as if she was gasping for breath in her last moments, which she was, which all of the patients are, in all of the deaths, how I’ve watched them, DNR written in red above their bed, drowned in quiet, drained, drunk in silence, burned, cindered, entered into the other world, if there is another world, one where organ donors aren’t needed desperately, daily, now, and now, and now, and

I’m gown-owned, faceshield-diced, where the PPE masters me, tames me, makes it so that I can’t breathe, a CNA tearing her mask off her face, mid-COVID ward, saying she can’t handle the heat of it, the humidity of it, the claustrophobia, the way it chokes us continuously, weakly, our glasses fogging up nonstop, our dumb-asses fucking up nonstop is what the head nurse says when she comes in the one time she comes in each week, working from home, a coworker whispering, How do you work from home as a nurse? and another nurse whispering back, You can’t and the head nurse unleashes on us, us, who are understaffed, the fires nearby so that we can’t go outside on break, the air quality too dangerous and she calls us lazy when we’ve been working eighty hours a week and a CNA whispers, You cunt, and a patient coughs in the background and coughs in the foreground and vomits on the ground and the ceiling is the color of melanoma and I tape my stethoscope to my tongue, go home, fall asleep in my COVID clothes, wake up and shower, get out of the shower, sit down, then immediately go back in the shower, worried I’m not clean enough yet, scrubbing until my skin bleeds an Arctic flood of blood, until the floor becomes a good aortic wood. My God, I think to myself. My fucking God.