The lab tech at Quest Diagnostics apologizes,
answers her phone. I– forearm naked on the table –
listen: her teenage daughter requests pickup. School exposure.

Last summer – the first summer – walking through my childhood
neighborhood: a cartoonish red wheelbarrow, freshly painted on a lawn.
William Carlos Williams was also a doctor.

My mother, a doctor, writes tankas in retirement,
sends me pictures of hummingbirds suspended at the feeder,
yellow beaks sharp as needles, wings a blurred suggestion.

At the start, she floated volunteering at a make-shift clinic.
Just transport, she’d assured of her role at the proposed hospital-
on-the-track-field, gurneys rolling over green below former freshman dorms.

I snapped a picture of that wheelbarrow, showed her. I understand a desire
to help, I said. To feel less helpless. Us around the dinner table, dad’s frittata
and he agreed. I soon changed my mind

and anyways they didn’t, after all, need the overflow space.
You’ve paid your dues, friends told me to tell her, friends furloughed
from their known lives. And mine – alone in my parents’ basement,

unable to leave (like a young child) except for weekly clinic trips for IV saline.
Mom and dad didn’t want me to get them, the infusions,
fearing I’d bring home the unspeakable

from fellow (surely viral) patients in the waiting room.
All six feet away in every direction. Every Wednesday I’d drive
dad’s Subaru to that sole urgent care in town willing to administer IVs. I liked the nurse

who always checked me in. They didn’t take out of state Medicaid
so she gave me a discount, practically radical in light of the $200
per clear liter charged at the nearby IV wellness centers

popping up all over town. Feel better, girl,
‍she’d said upon my final infusion before moving back to the city,
her blue-gloved hands stretched through two surgical gowns, face double-

masked and goggled, hair blue-capped under a plastic shield.
I know she had two young girls at home, no vaccine yet
and even when, still a decade too young.
                            Get well soon.