Long Covid
It moves around, my friend reports,
to where her body suffered hurts
at various moments in her past.
Here, where she crashed her bike at nine
and cracked a rib, it hurts again,
although it shows up on no test;
now in her healed meniscus, now
in her lower back, old pain is new,
old random injuries revive.
On rising, she cannot foresee
which part of her will hurt that day.
Long Covid is a lot like love.
Jane Greer is a Catholic formalist poet. She founded and edited Plains Poetry Journal (1981-1993). PPJ was an advance guard of the New Formalism movement—although Greer didn’t know that at the time. Her two most recent poetry collections are Love Like a Conflagration (2020) and The World as We Know It Is Falling Away (2022), both from Lambing Press. She lives in North Dakota. This is her first appearance in Light.