Two potatoes on Imogen Cunningham's table

This is the last of my fresh food. I arrange it with respect and will cook it carefully tonight. If the people who do deliveries feel safe enough to go outside their homes tomorrow, I will have a food delivery, but who is out there driving in this muck? Who is picking and sorting food? Who, if anyone, is risking their lungs to deliver food to people like me? If no delivery comes, I still have half a box of dry cereal, some long-life milk, and half a tin of sliced peaches. After that I’ll have to venture out in it myself, as Sue did today. She texted me, “I hauled my ass to the store and bought crap to eat.” Our lungs are irritable and sore. 

After a break of some hours at merely “Very unhealthy,” the toxic smoke is back, and it is once again “Hazardous,” AQI 417. The air seeping into my apartment smells like melted plastic, steaming garbage, and dead rats. The taste in my mouth is week-old cigarette butts. I cough, my throat is dry and raspy. Climate change takes us, not with a bang but with a whimper. 

There is no way to make this upbeat. Sealed into my bedroom, gazing out the window into thick white gray hell, I see that Greta Thunberg’s warnings made no difference to the people who had the power to do something. This is what we have.