Ginger Yifan Chen
this city will breathe again this city will breathe again

the fog creeps past the window at night,
my new roommate sticks his head out &
breathes in & points, “the fog” he says, at
the marked boundaries of the streetlight,
at the dragon’s breath of the sea.

my new roommate leaves boxes of pizza
on the shared kitchen counter my new
roommate smokes at the front steps my
new roommate cooks better than my
parents ever did my new room

peeks out to rows of empty windows. people
are leaving because of the air, the thing in
the air we don’t talk about & my new room
mate & i keep our distance in the kitchen,
the tile-topped island protects us.

i eat his pizza & i think of high school again,
of playgrounds empty of children but occupied
by teenagers (us), i think about how i will always
love this goddamned city. my new roommate
points & i turn my head & the bus passes by (the 5)
and the powerlines spark &

i remember the field & the park near Austin’s
house, the bleachers by the always-empty baseball
field (much like the underpopulated swings) & i
wonder when Je ́sus told Christine he loved her &
when she loved him back &

i wonder wonder wonder when the city will feel
alive again when i will move without fear again
when the city will breathe again its ugly dirty breath
its beautiful cold foggy salty breath its clam-chowder-
from-the-pier smell-of-sourdough taqueria-california-
burrito shrimp-dumpling-take-out breath, its sea-howl-
that-hits-me-when-i-cross-Cabrillo-St-breath.

i wake up at 6am to some neighbor’s alarm,
loud for 15 minutes and echoing through gray street,
i walk up the hill again run up the hill again breathe up the
hill again, i huff with cabbages in my backpack, with fish sauce
& bamboo shoots in chili oil in my backpack, i lock my
door again i lock my door again i close my door

i eat my new roommate’s pizza till i am full to bursting i
close the window when i hear wet coughs outside i stay
& i stay & i stay still inside & it rains & we have a one-day
heatwave & the sun & the fog they come & come & they
go & go & go & i am still in love i still love you i still love you
& i’m sorry i left i’m sorry i left i’m not sorry i left & please tell me
tell me tell me do you still love me, san francisco?

—Submitted on 09/12/2020

Ginger Yifan Chen is a recent graduate of Chapman University in Orange, California. Her poetry has appeared in the undergraduate art and literary magazine Calliope, The Underground Experimental Zine (also at Chapman), and Kelp Journal.

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Christian Sammartino
Supper with Fried Apples Ending in the World Series

You peel back the skins of a few apples
            with the blade of our best knife, split them
into unbroken spirals of delicate gold.

They are worthy of the tales of comets,
            the vapor trails on the moonshots the Sox
launch into orbit over Fenway.

Your palms are slick with juice that gleams
            just as bright as stadium lights and the morning dew
in the orchards back in the Lehigh Valley.

We could grocery shop in the Back Bay
            with those shades of gold. We could own this whole city 
with that hometown discount, walk off home run swagger.

You make me a believer, even as you pretend
            the incantations you mutter are just instructions
for this ramshackle recipe, not a prayer for work.

Not a quiet anthem to disguise the grumbling
            from your stomach, which groans like an anxious
crowd in the bottom of the ninth.

Dog days are fading into September harvests,
            sizzling like the cast iron skillet on our stove,
burning our last drops of clover honey,

filling our appetite with a hive of radiant
            light so bright it oozes all over the half-moon
slices of apples you cut and keeps going until

Commonwealth buzzes with a glowing
            colony of wings from Boston College to Park Street.
Until mothers sing your recipie as a lullaby.
 
We don’t celebrate with sprayed champagne,
            championship parades up Lansdowne and Boylston.
Our trophy ceremony is eating apples straight from the pan
 
as sugar and honey drips off crescent slices,
            until we have batted for the whole lunar cycle,
and our cabinets are as empty as the new moon.

You became my favorite player—the way you won
            the World Series of our last meal, loved the orchard
of our starvation until it was heavy with fruit.

—Submitted on 09/12/2020

Christian Sammartino is the founding editor of the Rising Phoenix Review. His poems have appeared in Yes Poetry, Rogue Agent, Apiary, Tilde, Ghost City Press, and other journals. Sammartino studied religion and philosophy at West Chester University, and is a library communications technician at Francis Harvey Green Library. When he is not writing poetry, or creating new graphic designs for his library, you can find him hiking through Pennsylvania’s state parks with his wife Kelsey.

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Christian Sammartino
Vigil

Your breath arriving in torrential gasps
             while you sleep in this hospital bed
is the first thunderstorm of spring.
 
Lightning’s silver fingers explode from your mouth,
            illuminating translucent hospital gowns, frantically
clinging to a clothes line above our bodies.

Those gowns murmur the muscle memory
            your body spent summers crafting, then tucked
inside those gossamer threads.

As the fabric fills with barrels of rainwater,
            your lungs recall the shape they made when
you first inhaled the scent of wild junipers.

When you gazed through Angel’s Window and
            promised to grow up as patiently as the Colorado River.
How you breathed so deeply the whole sky

above the Grand Canyon inhabited your lungs.
            As if to say, joy chooses to live in the absences
we carve, the spaces we convince to be sacred.

Your breath begs the ecstatic air, crackling
            with florescent light, to transform into a body
who can inhabit the contours of that holy shape.

Thrashing tongues of wind threaten to tear
            the gowns off the line and shred them until
the tatters blow through the streets,

like tumbleweeds christening a town full of ghosts.

I keep vigil over year bedside, monitoring
            the storm that threatens to steel you from me
on a Doppler Radar—call me a tornado chaser

in the eye of the funnel cloud. call me a dumb
            daredevil for holding your hand.
Wake up from this and call me anything.

I will stay up all night with a needle and thread,
            coaxing my hands to sew a blanket from the cloth
you discard in the wind. Stitch by stitch,

            I will make a patchwork quilt
                        out of your vanishing breaths.

I will carry your joy around my shoulders
            like a prayer shawl. I will make
my body a cathedral carved and blessed

            with the shroud from your tabernacle.

I vow to worship by your bedside, until
            your fever breaks, until your hospital bracelet
is cut from your wrist—until you trade  

the shape of your hospital gown for the shape
            you make in my old shirt—until your lungs
are strong enough to say my name again.

—Submitted on 09/12/2020

Christian Sammartino is the founding editor of the Rising Phoenix Review. His poems have appeared in Yes Poetry, Rogue Agent, Apiary, Tilde, Ghost City Press, and other journals. Sammartino studied religion and philosophy at West Chester University, and is a library communications technician at Francis Harvey Green Library. When he is not writing poetry, or creating new graphic designs for his library, you can find him hiking through Pennsylvania’s state parks with his wife Kelsey.

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Christian Sammartino
Equinox / Outbreak

Today the sun is an IV bag dripping
light to us through a slender tube of clouds.

We call this the first day of spring,
a slow trickle of raindrops pleading with the earth

to forget all this violence. Forget the body
and it’s breaking. Forget the feeling a fever

makes in the morning mist as it dispatches
chills through the lightning rod of your spine.

Today’s first color is the sharp silver tip of a needle
gleaming in my wife’s arm in the emergency room.

The first sound of spring is her name
becoming a hospital bracelet in my mouth,

Followed by the unfolding of pediatric masks
over our mouths to sequester our breathing.

In the waiting room, I gaze at the sky and see a weather
system of hospital beds floating above East Marshall Street.

All the clouds have been quarantined
and are working from home. Maybe they labor

hand making miracles or testing kits to spare
the people I love from the angel of death.

Maybe they rest beside the god I pray my wife
does not meet today or the next day.

But maybe they never took the doctors’ orders,
and are still above us, pleading for her fever to break

into conservatories flush with lush flowers, mercifully
returning from their slumber in the underworld.

I have never wished harder for her body
to personify springtime, for her to become

a garden of crocuses, perennially returning
to me from the relentless oblivion of winter.

—Submitted on 09/12/2020

Christian Sammartino is the founding editor of the Rising Phoenix Review. His poems have appeared in Yes Poetry, Rogue Agent, Apiary, Tilde, Ghost City Press, and other journals. Sammartino studied religion and philosophy at West Chester University, and is a library communications technician at Francis Harvey Green Library. When he is not writing poetry, or creating new graphic designs for his library, you can find him hiking through Pennsylvania’s state parks with his wife Kelsey.

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Rijan Britanicus Acharya
Impulse of Hope

I hopped in terrace and caught a bird
its wings were as in storm of liberty,
like thrush it flooded a trail of notes.

I caressed wings soft feathers toiling
like clouds. The sweetness served me
As it flew when I left my desires with it.

It swept suspending like an arch
Or those waves of the warm seas
Intersecting the undermined sun.

My case of vision I leased it
It measured the blueness of reddish skies
Projecting like an angel of old reciters.

My edge of soul tied in its feather
I am claiming the spectrum spread.
I have no strain of being here.

—Submitted on 09/12/2020

Rijan Britanicus Acharya is a Nepali poet whose work appears in the biannual journal Of Nepalese Clay. He work as a tutor.

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Rijan Britanicus Acharya
Dark Edge in Viral-cage

I am done in myself
Dark is me. Like Milton wind
Hell in outlaw, I am progressive
In the walls with pledge of darkness
undertaker is winning my region of silence.

Who you know in the wilderness
the drums reverberates the conscience?
I had dealt for years and I know
what sense is rescuing me
Against the fragment of this sadness.
Oblivion is dripping in my veins
The violence of thoughts within me
Murmurs what is edge of this?
I walk someday in orange paths of sun
Cast with broken dry leaves
Drinking coffee and overwhelming
for an errand of life.
Where is end of season entangling birds?
I am jealousy myself, turmoil of
A long silence crunching like paper
Filled with random words of life.

—Submitted on 09/12/2020

Rijan Britanicus Acharya is a Nepali poet whose work appears in the biannual journal Of Nepalese Clay. He work as a tutor.

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Rijan Britanicus Acharya
Virus Disgrace

Has corona entered my nose?
I am feeling nose being poked.
Hell no its pricking dust
i am not in sweeping game
in this conservative walls pulling over
Eyes of sons of men
like tyrants hosting my soul and heart.
Who the virus is that man?
am i free not born like sparrow.
Make hell in me like soiled liberty.
Who you virus pact man fill me
On the sagging pockets like hungry squirrel.
Damnable command! I duck your words
blahman you hold my mouth?
Hell is in your feet. I don’t give a pinch
to you of my winged life to die in your plight.
I break my hands on my mates
and drink thousand beer to drown
self in solitude of the conjuring ears
mind floating in dark roots of my veins
clustered with the entangled spears.
Aye! what crap you listening
I ask. Maria Bot plays Hip Hop. I’m done
Too drowsy. I say. Aye! Maria, is
Siri like more sweet or tangy over you?
Not at all i mean she is sweet.
Maria sweeps the case of mind
All dust of thoughts are merged in nothing.
I don’t know I say. Maria is Bot.
What race Maria?
Hell to my Botrace i am like E black.
I am done. I sleep.
You hate my asking Maria.
Yep. I am no man in mood
i am myself. Don’t rush my mind
you human, butchered by own imagination.

—Submitted on 09/12/2020

Rijan Britanicus Acharya is a Nepali poet whose work appears in the biannual journal Of Nepalese Clay. He work as a tutor.

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Ron Drummond
The End of the World As We Know It

They’ve given notice:
TV listings in The Times
shall shortly be extinct.

“You will be left
to your various devices,”
sniggers Lady Gray.

We guess, quite
thinkably, what’s next?
No Book Review?

But reader, write
this awful query down:
“No crossword puzzle?”

—Submitted on 09/06/2020

Ron Drummond is the author of Why I Kick At Night (Portlandia Group, 2004). His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Columbia Review, Global City Review, Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, and James White Review, among other journals. He lives in New York City. 

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Marjorie Moorhead
When the Pandemic Is Over

There will be something else.
Pessimistic, I know…
but, will the planet even be living?
Will it be nurturing home to a species
who’ve abused and disrespected it so?

When the pandemic ends, I will hug
my father who’s been sealed up
into the pod of his elder care home.
I will dance and sing, wave feathers,
light a smudge stick.
I will feel good for my son who’s still trying
to have college experience.
And my other son who’s been working “remotely”.

When the pandemic ends when it ends
Will it end?
Will there be another, different virus?
Will we have killed off all underprivileged
and underserved, leaving only
previously pampered survivors?

When the pandemic ends, I will pick a bouquet
and smell the flowers.
I will drink pure clear water and wade
at the meeting of sand and surf on a beach
where there are only shells and no plastics
strewn or oil surfacing in footprints.

When the pandemic ends
we’ll sit around a campfire
and tell our tales. We will remember the lost;
the dead and damaged.

When the pandemic ends, will I have learned
something? Anything?
There will be tv shows, plays and books
about it. We have to tell our stories.

When the pandemic ends
ends
ends.
Fingertips will touch another
and really feel
feel
the surface of a skin
that isn’t our own.

When the pandemic ends
clean air will be valued.
Breathing will be sacred.
We will build statues to our lungs.
The shape of lungs, like a heart.

Breath. Breathing.
Feeling. Seeing.
When the pandemic ends,
will there be heightened awareness?

—Submitted on 08/31/2020

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of the chapbooks Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press 2019), and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books 2020). Her poems have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig, Porter House Review, Verse-Virtual, Rising Phoenix Review, Amethyst Review, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including most recently Covid Spring (Hobblebush Books, 2020). 

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Marjorie Moorhead
Only Love Songs

From now on, every poem I write
shall be simply
a love song.
Closing my eyes
because the planet is dying.
I must sing its beauty.
Closing my eyes because people
are trying for breath;
in a white supremacist grip.
And breath is peace. Breath is ease.
May we stop policing BREATH, please?!

From now, I’ll sing only of love;
write words of description;
petals, leaves, clouds, trees, hoping
We Shall Overcome. Peace, please
find us all on this overheating planet.
With the benevolent beauty
of a cooling breeze justice must prevail.
March in throngs, in a rainbow arch,
write the wrongs, chant the songs.

—Submitted on 08/31/2020

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of the chapbooks Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press 2019), and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books 2020). Her poems have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig, Porter House Review, Verse-Virtual, Rising Phoenix Review, Amethyst Review, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including most recently Covid Spring (Hobblebush Books, 2020). 

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