Linda Lerner

POLICING

I drop my mask, prepared to lift it up over my mouth and nose when necessary, caught by someone passing a safe distance from where I was, in no danger of catching anything from me on this nearly deserted street. I catch her disapproval. The same look I once got in a grocery store when telling the sales woman, “plastic if fine.” Of course it isn’t, aware of the harm it’s doing to the environment, our oceans, but that’s not the point. Nor is the point to discourage people from wearing a mask to stem this pandemic. What is, is the silent policing continuously going on among people looking to catch someone at something, to show they are one of the good, law abiding, ones; others trying not to be caught, become overzealous in an attempt to prove it. And, we’re back in 17th century Salem, prepared to hang another witch. Of course, I’m exaggerating. Of course. I’m not.


Linda reads "Policing":



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Linda confesses: "Even in the most liberal circles, I've found that there’s a constant, silent—sometimes not so silent-- monitoring going on. That covers a range of things form politics to something like surprising someone I ran into one day, on my way to see a 20’s or 30’s musical at City Center; it just didn’t fit my bohemian artists’s image; another is being caught reading the NYPost sometimes to get an opposing view. People are often put into categories, and are expected to adhere to certain things. While I’m praying that Trump doesn’t get elected, and not voting for him, I might have, agreed with something he said at one point. This is anathema. It’s that kind of thing."

LINDA LERNER is the author of 17 collections including Takes Guts and Years Sometimes (2011) and Yes, the Ducks Were Real (2015) from NYQ Books; recent chapbooks include, When Death is a Red Balloon (Lummox Press, 2019 and A Dance Around the Cauldron (Lummox Press, 2017), a prose work consisting of nine characters during the Salem witch trials, brought into our own times, nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems currently appear in, or are accepted by, Maintenant, Café Review, Trailer Park Quarterly, Wilderness Literary House Review, Gargoyle, Home Planet News, Cape Rock, Illumination Magazine, Piker Press, Patterson Literary Review, and Chiron Review. In addition to poetry, she’s published essays, short prose and book reviews in magazines throughout the country. In 2015, she read six poems on WBAI radio for Arts Express.