Pandemic Door Dash (Rosch Eifert)

I never knew Door Dash would deliver
to a car
in a hospital parking lot
or that my identity would shrivel to
“Black Kia Soul, 4th parking space (or 8th or 1st) from the
entryway sidewalk to the Emergency Room door.
I brought my husband
to Hospital Emergency.
I could sit with him in triage to explain why
but then they trundled him away in a wheelchair
vanished him past swinging double doors.
For five hours
I huddled
in my car, tethered to the phone
hoping to hear, calling the ED to make sure they
knew of this or that medical history fact.
I’d skipped breakfast
waited through lunch, four hours into vigil
I needed food,
couldn’t leave in case of discharge,
so I got delivery.
A whole row in the parking area,
people who waited for The Diagnosis
and the Big Decision –
admitted or not -
pizzas and Chinese and chicken sandwiches
handed through car windows to agonized families.
He was admitted – not for COVID-19,
for another of his body’s booby-traps.
For five days, we had only Face Time
keep your chin-up and jokes
but also yearning, tears, worry.
He got home
a downturn
back to the ED
same parking lot, flapping crows, argumentative gulls.
I parked in a row of 8 cars
bright toys in an acre of asphalt
“Hey, I know you, Strawberry Lemonade Chicken Sandwich –
I delivered to you a couple of days ago, right here! I’m Tony, hi!”
pandemic news scrolled over my
silent phone
everything surreal
except Door Dash Tony.

Deborah Rosch Eifert is a poet and psychologist from Maine. She is the 2020 winner of the Raw Art Review Poetry Collection competition, for her chapbook manuscript Sewn from Water. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the top literary journal Constellations. Her poems have appeared in The Gateway Review, Cathexis Northwest, Persephone's Daughters, and other small presses, as well as in several anthologies.