99 Lines for 2020

by Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade

A pair of spectacles washes up on the shore,
the lenses still intact. I pick them up and try
to see the world through salt-spackled glass.
When I was a girl, I wanted to be a fish
or even a mermaid, which seemed sexless, safe,
no legs to spread open, only a tail to slap.

These days I’m filled to the gills
with rage. So many things to protest,
my voice muted under my mask.
If only this were a persona poem
set in another time—how I would testify,
my writer-self knowing future outcomes,

relying on dramatic irony: In Century 21,
I stock up on Levi’s vintage denim.
I refuse contacts, wear Steinem-inspired
Aviators, make passes at girls who wear glasses.
Bellbottoms return, and The Bell Jar remains
on syllabi. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Sylvia

in the biopic, though I favor Great Expectations,
Paltrow’s Estella spurning her suitors.
Were my own expectations great in 1998?
Pre-9/11, 2008 recession. Pre-COVID-19,
10 years of stop-and-frisk. MAGA
hat as metaphor in Spike Lee’s new movie.

In 2020, hindsight is just a hashtag like
its former use, the pound key or number sign.
So much we should have seen coming, should have
met his crazy with our fury, should have
refused to dignify with answers later dubbed “fake news.”
Sociopath or psychopath? Narcissist or sadist?

Careful not to say his name, I simmer in euphemisms—
accepted norms, unprecedented times. How will we
un-mike the maniac, unflip the panic switch
that’s gripped our gut these past four years?
Long walks on the beach fail to assuage my fear
of the climate crisis. The only mask he wears

is his own face, bed-tanned and sand-blasted,
atop the red ire in his brow and cheeks.
When I try to change the channel, his voice
booms through imitators, late-night comics
whose parodies only enhance his power.
The white half-moons under his eyes

must be waning, though—I need to believe
America will wise up, rise up, that we’ll see
something new in the dawn’s early light
with 20-20 vision, this year’s namesake.
Christians speak of a Second Coming, 
and novelists invoke deus ex machina.

I guess intervention always seemed a given.
Monuments toppling at last, the Supreme
Court swerving at the last second like a car
avoiding a cliff that hangs over the sea.
Is it wrong that I still long for a savior
with a bagful of miracles, multiplying fish?

Century 21 Christ is most likely vegan,
a savior to cows and chickens and pigs,
a slender brown man who rides his bike
wearing yellow Dollar Store sunglasses
and a God Made Dirt So Dirt Don’t Hurt 
t-shirt. When a truck cuts him off,

he says “Bless you” as if the driver had
given him a hummus club sandwich.
Century 21 Christ works at Goodwill,
sports a “Radical Feminist” ball cap.
His blue apron pocket holds a small adze
to smooth any furniture’s rough edges.

If this were a persona poem, he’d tell 
you how he loved carpentry, restoring 
old wood and reclaiming discards
from families—drunks, homeless teens, 
atheists and Bible-thumpers alike.
He’d turn water from Flint faucets

sweet as ambrosia, Confederate flags
into BLM banners, rifles and pepper spray 
into bran muffins with coconut butter.
Who would be his Judas? Too many
to name: a supervisor at Goodwill who,
for $30, turned him over to ICE;

a kid from youth group who heard him
speaking Spanish, grew suspicious.
Another heard him singing a Farsi
party song “Qataghani” in dark shades.
And what about that time he gave directions
to Hollywood Beach, then asked for a lift?

Century 21 Christ ran the Rainbow 5K
and prefers to be known as “they.”
Non-binary, anti-racist, multi-lingual, pro-
choice. As the human face of a Trinity,
they are dismantling the Tower of Babel
in hopes that everyone will understand

simple messages of safety and compassion.
Frog & Toad is selling “Just Be Nice” tees,
an honest cotton compass always ready to wear
with a smiley face mask to protect others.
I use the soft shirt to wipe these spectacles
of empathy, hoping the person who lost them

has goggles instead, or perhaps can see underwater.
When I hook the temples over my ears, I can see
where the ocean bows to the sky as if in prayer. 

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Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade are the authors of The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, published by Noctuary Press in 2019. Their collaborative poems and essays have appeared in many literary journals, including Arts & Letters, The Bellingham Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Common, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, The Louisville Review, Nimrod, No Tokens, PoemMemoirStory, Prairie Schooner, Quarter After Eight, So to Speak, Story Quarterly, and Tupelo Quarterly. Together they were awarded the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize from Prairie Schooner for their co-written lyric essay, “13 Superstitions.” Duhamel and Wade both teach in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.