Real News About This Barefaced Lie Poem by Chen-ou Liu

Eighty-Ninth Entry, Coronavirus Poetry Diary

Any resemblance to current events or actual locales, or to living persons, is not coincidental.

blinking EXIT
down the hospital hallway
six feet apart
from a line of masked generals
the masked President

In a dimly lit attic room where I shelter my time and my drunken shadow, I doom-scroll for the latest update: "New Coronavirus Cases in U.S. Soar Past 68,000, Shattering Record."