We have a bad habit of replacing humans with numbers,
as quantities added and subtracted to meet
predicted patterns of lines and charts and arrows
What if we replaced the numbers with flowers
A football field worth of dandelions died today
Three dozen sunflowers
Enough bouquets to fill an entire room
What if I told you A forest was razed today
Enough petals fell today to be strewn from ocean to ocean
What if I told you that a day’s worth of breaths:
Inhales and exhales
Have died in the United States because of COVID19
Twelve million miles of airways in the lungs of eight thousand humans have stopped working by today
What if I told you that?
Would you feel more?
I am tired of seeing human lives fit along curves
I want if you zoomed in close enough to see faces
Like murals instead of graphs
Like heartbeats instead of trendlines
I wish I could handle the goddamn curve like saltwater taffy you get at the boardwalk
Stretched and sticky beneath my fingers
I want the math to be as dirty as the graves they’re digging
Like i want the math to be hard to bear
Hard to breathe through
I want new constellations for every funeral that won’t have any guests and will only ghosts
I want choruses that never stop singing because they have to sing the names of all who died and everyone they’re survived by
I want continents constructed as memorials
I want cosmic action
I want someone to light a candle
A field of candles
So many candles when the International Space Station spins over us
We are glowing
Like we lit a match from the inside out
I want to carve these memories in our sediment
See those lines there
Those lines in red velvet dirt
People died there
People stayed inside there
People lived there
What if we replaced numbers with people
And our hearts broke under their weight
For people are a lot heavier than numbers
They fill more space than ones and zeros
They hurt more
It is easy to compartmentalize
We do not want to be Atlas
With the world on our shoulders
Back crumbling under its weight
But I worry that our shoulders are too light
That Gravity hasn’t yet beared down on us yet
I don’t know when the worst will be behind us
How long Will we have to keep planting flowers,
Erecting continents,
Forming galaxies
When will the dying stop and the mourning start?
What does a global funeral look like
When human souls all hurt the same
At the same time
Will there be earthquakes
Because we feel things from the heart to the head to the foot
We have bad habit of replacing humans with numbers
because it’s hard to start a tally with faces
And for now, it’s okay
But when this is all over
I need your help to replace them back