Dick Dale Cures the ‘Rona for Jason Vivone. By Shawn Pavey

Let’s just say you had a meltdown in the grocery store

because your hands are so dry from washing and sanitizing

that you can’t open the plastic produce bags

and your glasses are fogging up from your own breath

escaping through the top of your quickly fashioned 

quarantine mask constructed from cut out swaths

of an old trade-show t-shirt and elastic hair ties

and there’s no toilet paper on the shelves

and they’re out of the brand of toothpaste

that has kept you cavity-free since college 

which, now, was more than thirty goddamned

years ago. Let’s say you had that meltdown.

Let’s say it’s late afternoon on a Thursday

and even though you should be working from home

this trip to the grocery store is the closest thing you’ve had

to a vacation all fucking year and there’s no real work anyway

and after parking the car, sanitizing the groceries, 

putting the groceries away, and realizing that your 

very public and, now, embarrassing meltdown

is going to eat at you for weeks, for months (let’s be real, years),

you turn on the radio and your guitar teacher

who is also a part-time DJ on a local listener-supported station

starts playing Miserlou and, later, Pipeline by Dick Dale

and the magic of Fender spring reverb tanks and single-coil pickups

cures the corona virus blues.

Shawn Pavey has delivered newspapers, mowed lawns, bagged groceries, cut meat, laid sewer pipe, bussed tables, washed dishes, roofed houses, crunched numbers, rented cars, worked in hotels, worn an apron at Kinko’s, and been paid to write everything from résumés to music reviews.  Currently, he earns a living as an Executive Recruiter in Mission, KS where he lives with his wife and two worthless but adorable cats.  He’s hosted poetry readings in bars, coffee shops, haunted houses, bookstores, libraries, front porches, seedy motel rooms, and abandoned warehouses.  He is the author of Talking to Shadows (2008, Main Street Rag Press), Nobody Steals the Towels from a Motel 6 (2015, Spartan Press), and Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse (Spartan Press, 2019). He is a Co-founder and former Associate Editor of The Main Street Rag Literary Journal, and a former board member and officer of The Writers Place, a Kansas City-based literary non-profit.  His poems, essays, and journalism appear in a variety of national and regional publications.  A graduate of the University of North Carolina’s Undergraduate Honors Creative Writing Program, he likes his Tom Waits loud, his bourbon single-barrel, and his basketball Carolina Blue.