Jon Wesick

My Car Sits Alone on Christmas Day

The salt-stained pavement empty
of those spreading COVID to friends and family.
Santa brought chemical fumes this year
so I hole up in a hotel room
with a refrigerator wheezing like an asthmatic.

Merry Christmas to the lone desk clerk.
Merry Christmas to the hardboiled eggs
at the breakfast buffet. HBO, frozen dinners,
Philip Marlowe, what more is there?
Dull conversation? Dumb opinions?
A necktie under the tree?
Count my blessings.
Santa brought cancer and MS to some.

Still, it’s a bad sign being this alone, the invisible hand
having moved me from square to square
on the Monopoly board of market capitalism.
A bad sign that I no longer care

 

Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, Pearl, Pirene’s Fountain, Slipstream, Space and Time, and Tales of the Talisman. His most recent books are The Shaman in the Library and The Prague Deception. http://jonwesick.com