An Evening Exercise

            A sonnenizio for the pandemic year

 

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free
in the land of the free, and we the beautiful people
are exercising freedom. Toned and tanned
in our athleisure wear, how free we are,
freed by the wonders of delivery service
and grocery shoppers, buy-one-get-one-free
our vespers hymn. Oh, how serenely free
we seem, free-sweating, heart rates pumped and primed,
each trainered foot aiming its freeform way
well clear of any dangerous free breathing.
Like birds, like air, so free, the way we sidestep
that free-range threat that waves its sign on the corner:
barefaced rogue actor, mask-free anarchy,
roaring as we thud past, You think you’re free?  

 

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Maryann Corbett is the author of five books of poetry, most recently In Code from Able Muse Press. Her work has won the Richard Wilbur Book Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and has been published in venues like Southwest Review, Barrow Street, Rattle, River Styx, Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Measure, Literary Imagination, The Dark Horse, Subtropics, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, and The Writer's Almanac, and in an assortment of anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2018.