By Austin Smith
No need for social distancing then. When
Christ came riding into Jerusalem
On a donkey, his bare feet nearly
Brushing the roadside rye, he was
At once vaccine and cure, his breath
Their ventilator. Death’s dominion had come
Under his sway. All the throng could think
To do was to lay palm fronds down
Before him to calm the dust the way,
In 1918, they’d spray the unpaved roads
Of Middle Western towns from tanks on trucks
Driven by men whose faces were lost
Even to their children under the masks,
Worn not for the dust (which they were
Darkening as if with anointing water),
But for the air.
Austin Smith grew up on a family dairy farm in northwestern Illinois. He received a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an MA from the University of California-Davis, and an MFA from the University of Virginia. He has published three poetry chapbooks: In the Silence of the Migrated Birds; Wheat and Distance; and Instructions for How to Put an Old Horse Down. His full-length collections, Almanac and Flyover Country, were published through the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. Austin’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Yale Review, Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Poetry East, ZYZZYVA, Pleiades, Virginia Quarterly Review, 32 Poems and Threepenny Review, amongst others. His stories have appeared or will appear in Harper’s, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, EPOCH, Sewanee Review, Threepenny Review, Fiction and Narrative Magazine. He was the recipient of the 2015 Narrative Prize for his short story, “The Halverson Brothers,” a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in fiction from Stanford University, an NEA Fellowship in Prose, and the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. He is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, where he teaches courses in poetry, fiction, environmental literature and documentary journalism, but he mostly lives in a farmhouse in Schapville, Illinois.