In Which I Fear the Coronavirus Is All My Fault by Barbara UngAr

I started out gently enough, with a Green reader,
but it was out of date. The Norton Anthology
of Nature Writing didn’t suit. I tried Half-Earth,
then The Sixth Extinction, mentioning that semester
The Uninhabitable Earth was way too scary—
so of course they wanted to read that. We began,

It is worse, much worse than you think,

and were only a few weeks in, up to the chapters
in “Elements of Chaos” called “Plagues
of Warming” and “Economic Collapse”
when the stock market crashed and pandemic
shut down our school, sent them packing
and all of us panicking online, where I posted,

How often does your course work get this real?

Suddenly, I was afraid, like when I had to quit
teaching Satan in Literature because weird shit
began to happen, like when Marlowe’s Doctor
Faustus was first performed, and the audience saw
an extra person onstage and, fearing the words
spoken by the actor playing Faust had conjured

Lucifer himself, the theatre emptied in terror.

© 2020, Barbara UngAr

Barbara UngAr’s (barbaraungar.net) fifth book, Save Our Ship, won the Richard Snyder Memorial Prize from Ashland Poetry Press and was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2019; it is currently a finalist for the IBPA’s Ben Franklin award.  A limited-edition chapbook, EDGE (named for the EDGE list of Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered species), is forthcoming in April 2020 from Ethel Press. Her prior books include Immortal Medusa, named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2015; Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life; and The Origin of the Milky Way, which won the Gival Prize and a silver Independent Publishers award. A professor at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, she lives in Saratoga Springs