From a  Sheltered Place by Michele Witthaus

FROM A SHELTERED PLACE takes us inside, from where everything’s cancelled or deferred. But there are no refunds for this postponed life.
We must: 

blow out the candles on the cake  
at this house party for the end of what
we hardly knew we had.

In these poems, Michele Witthaus explores how our natural concerns and suspicions are magnified by the intensity of lockdown

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And when you look back on this time,
perhaps you will think of
your father’s constant presence
unmarred by weekday departures.

​Of how, in this time,
his smell was different,
in the absence of the aftershave,
that used to linger, long after he left.