June 2020, the restaurants reopened

The waiter sets my cat ear noodles down                        猫耳朵

and asks, “do you want to return home?”                        “你想回家吗?”

not to nudge, just curious like others

he watches me eat. I can’t right now.

Home is a familiar grammar construct,

a S-V-O clause. In Mandarin I ground myself,

root ankles in the present tense: right now

I am writing a poem, right now I am running

现在我正在写诗歌

现在我正在跑步

around the lake after six weeks in which

I only opened the door once a fortnight

like this manuscript. I studied my body,

stretching in the apartment, and found

that my limbs folded like a penknife

after a decade underwater. The city

saw me at a midpoint, moving between

Peaceful Warrior and Triangle Pose,

offered a critique through the window,

its many straight lines and sharp edges

textbook – this is how you stay composed

in a crisis. I hold Downward Facing Dog

until I shake, thinking about two pictures,

one from my father, queues outside an ASDA,

another from Lara in Wuhan, more people

queuing at a crematorium to collect ashes.

The time difference arched from eight hours

to a month and the air cleared; we emerged

inhaling. Lara cancels a class on conditionals,

allowed out after nine weeks, sends a video

of grass shoots growing from her car boot,

says, if we’d stayed inside forever, only nature

would have noticed. She books an evening lesson

instead, our cities identical when the sun sets.

Down Dog, if I keep my fingers splayed,

one day grass shoots will grow between them.