Carrying

This is my suitcase of summer clothes.

My carry-on full of fluttery cloth.

When I left, it's all I brought.

Now, I watch the thin snow

and the governor says to stay at home

and home is wherever you are.

I wear the winter dress I left

when I left for Brazil

when I left for New York.

I lived another life I'm so much more

beautiful in this than I was before.

Amanda Peery-Wolf's work has been published in the Harvard Review and the Colorado Review, and is forthcoming in the Iowa Review. She is the winner of the Iowa Review Award for Poetry 2020. She is also the communications lead at Get Us PPE, a nonprofit founded during the pandemic to get personal protective equipment to people in need.