For mobile devices, this poem is best read in landscape orientation mode.
Tharuna Abbu
Day 1 the enemy is not the virus 3a
Day 2 it is the replication 61b
Day 3 of forgetting 159c
Day 4 that to live is the privilege 760d
of surviving
Day 5 that we drew the borders 1,181e
and built the cages
Day 6 that freedom is in the 5,500f
knots of our binding
Day 7 that we are in this 202, 520g
together and have always
been
a. the number of deaths per day from drug overdose in 2019
b. the number of Canadian reserve communities without drinking water in 2020
c. the net worth, in billions of dollars, of Jeff Bezos
d. monthly payout for a single person on income assistance in British Columbia
e. the estimated number of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada to date
f. the number of migrant children separated from their families under the Trump administration
g. estimated deaths from HIV/AIDs in the United States in the 1980s
Tharuna Abbu is a poet, writer, and family doctor living on unceded Coast Salish territories. They are a student of The Writer’s Studio program from Simon Fraser University, and they have work forthcoming in the program’s annual anthology, Emerge. Their work has also been published in CV2 and Room Magazine.
