Funeral for April

April 2020

A nurse was shot while pumping gas by a guy who yelled, “You’re infecting the public!” The hospital sent an email
saying you are no longer allowed to leave work in scrubs.

My body is a fool’s day with no fever. Your body is called the frontline. At the end of each shift, 

you wash danger from your beard, nails, arms without even humming a tune. Nothing new about scrubbing hospital 
from your skin, machine tones from your ears. You pump cool mounds of gel into your palm,  slip off your mask like

an ill fitting gender,  a holey condom, target practice, I am trying to find a metaphor that will solve this, you remove 
your scrubs like evidence, like the time we removed April from the calendar. From our mouths. That time you 

became a man and I slept with my ex-girlfriend. You moved out of our house and into an apartment with sleek cabinet doors and only beer in the fridge. You sent videos of your True Self   singing songs about me. Not for me. Your new voice, a package you’d never open near me.

At the end of the month, you moved back into our house. For the next two years, we spoke of April like that selfish bitch who stole everything worth believing in.  Our therapist suggested we hold a ceremony.

A simple healing ritual, you know, like a funeral, for April.   What with my keen imagination and your deep wound, it would be easy to throw together. 

I already had the table setting. I wrote I’m sorry 100 times on wax paper and tossed it in the fire. We screamed under the moon, promised to never say her name again,

recalled the pain of nights we could not hold each other, nights we could not take a single breath           of uninfected air.