Sixteen months in, well, I still work from my basement, that deep part of the home, submerged in earth, indelibly cool window opening itself to the promise of midmorning light, disappointed by another gray day. I notice my desk, cheap finish fading where dry elbows have sanded away edges, tense hands stretched too often to the keyboard, now missing the letter Q. There’s a hole where the character once was, orderliness left gap toothed, grimacing between Tab and W. Odd I didn’t notice until now. Maybe I hadn’t needed it? I guess it’s okay. I must not have used it (much, anyway), and with so many words to come up with, no one could have realized it was gone. I’ll just work around the Q, choose different diction, look to the thesaurus or alternate spelling, justify omitting it, because why can’t kuestion or kuarantine serve as well as anything else the pandemic dragged in? See, if C were missing, we’d be a bit screwed. Coronavirus. Covid. Vaccine. How to cash that stimulus check, or video conference on a PC or Mac. But Q? No, we can navigate some letters’ coming loose, snapping off from the erosion of office hours. We can lower the shade if we don’t like the weather, slam the door when the world gets too loud, replace the chair warped with the weight of our labor, buff the desktop scuffed by pen marks. The Q is the least of our problems. Who else has disappeared? -Katherine Gotthardt
Posted in Katherine's Coffeehouse, Poetry Month 2021
