Elya Braden
Elya Braden took a long detour from her creative endeavors to pursue an eighteen-year career as a corporate lawyer and entrepreneur. She is now a writer and mixed-media artist living in Los Angeles and is assistant editor of Gyroscope Review. Her work has been published in Algebra of Owls, Calyx, Rattle, Willow Review and elsewhere and has been nominated for Best of the Net. Her chapbook, Open The Fist, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
You can find her online at www.elyabraden.com.
How Not to Disappear (Pandemic Style)
Take your temperature. Blow up the same red
balloon at irregular intervals; expel your breath
into the sink. Schedule Zoom calls with your dog.
Screen share every pimpled, buck-toothed photo
of your younger self to remind you who you were
and whom you’ve tried to leave behind. Read
every story you can find on the 1918 Spanish Flu:
how it spread, how it ebbed, how it returned,
how it killed and how quickly history wiped
30-50 million souls from its pages. Scissor
your old love letters and yesterday’s obits into a collage
of loss. Google the word for “death” in 27 languages.
Drift through every new Facebook group, mushroom
clusters of panicked souls searching for connection,
liking random posts in a Morse code of caring. Name
your age spots “freckles” and play connect-the-dots along
your arms in sidewalk chalk as you wait in six-foot intervals
outside the only local Trader Joes not closed for illness.
Magnify every detail of your shrunken life: post
photos of yet another home-cooked meal, your sleep-
curled cat, the first lemon fattened on a branch,
the hummingbird sexing your pink hibiscus. Fill
a jar with the dimes and nickels of these moments,
a currency you’ll invest in poems to remember
what we’ll all soon try to forget, clutching at our memories
of “normal” like fragments of last night’s dreams.
Sheila-Na-Gig online 