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This weekly series shares what life is like for your fellow community members while sheltering in place.

CAUTIOUS CACTUS

A mask fashioned out of masking tape is keeping Janet DiMaria’s cactus, complete with googly eyes, safe during isolation time.

CROSS-SPECIES TRANSMISSION

It seems pandemic poetry has become a new genre, with many Tucsonans penning poems while isolating. Take this one by Christine Wald-Hopkins:

He hopped up on the window sill, trophy lizard limp in his beak.

Tail erect and crown high, tricolor swoosh gleaming behind his eyes,

He peered in.

A roadrunner, barely a foot from the piano.

You kept practicing for the Zoom jam.

The Greater Roadrunner. Geococcyx californianus. Habitat SW US –cent.

Mexico. Rumored to take down rattlers.

Apparently satisfied with smaller reptiles.

He cocked his head, turned it, and with the other eye (his irises are gold), peered some more.

At what? At you? At the tinkling black and white machine? Or was it his ear he turned?

“I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing� you repeated and repeated as he paced and

peered

Peered and paced

Until he’d had enough

And took his lizard elsewhere.

Strange times, Corona Days:

Ducks strut Las Vegas streets

Monkeys reclaim Thailand

Roadrunners critique old capitalist happy ads.

(However many times you replayed “It’s the real thing,�

He didn’t return for an encore)