My weekly Italian tutor asks if I feel safe
about his coming to teach me.
He calls himself a potential viral vector.

Certo, I assure him, knowing he needs
the work. There are two men parked
in my bathroom, carefully installing tile.

Mornings, we bump elbows in greeting,
because we don’t share a language
and none of us are the type that prays.

In the late 1800s, it was mysophobia,
thought pathological, the constant
washing of one’s hands. Now we all

scrub prudently, and hesitate to pet dogs.
There’s no such thing as truly safe,
a word which originally meant uninjured;

all of us are injured as, in shops
around the world, people push one another
out of the way over toilet paper and sanitizer,

hoard Chef Boyardee and rice.
In the early 1900s, when TB spread,
men shaved off their long beards, women

wore shortened skirts. When that didn’t stop
disease, they blamed immigrants,
like the ones in my apartment, slowly

building a ceramic wall for a shower stall,
not the kind of wall for keeping out,
a soft grey one, for stepping in.