Heather M. F. Lyke
Independence: July 4, 2020

Large celebrations not recommended,
I sit alone on my balcony.

Wrapped in my blue robe worn thin,
the cool breeze is interrupted by fireworks
illegally purchased from across the river
where freedom apparently looks different.

Their red starbursts blasting
warning shots into the sky:
an insistence that their traditions
are more important than lives.

Their thick smoke suffocating
the white flag we keep waving
to this pandemic that doesn’t subside.

Humidity restrains the torched air
from these fires that cut the blackness
and burn our skies:
creating a cloud across our country.

I couldn’t sleep if I tried.

—Submitted on 07/10/2020

Heather M. F. Lyke’s poetry has appeared in Frost Meadow Review, In Parentheses, The Dewdrop, and AfterWork. She holds a BA from Concordia College, and teaches writing and literature at a high school in southern Minnesota. Online at heatherlyke.weebly.com.

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Rebecca Thrush
Three Poems

Before Letting Go

Living with you is like breathing under plush blankets—intimate and all-consuming, warming me up from the inside out and every angle—until suddenly the oxygen ratio falters, slowly dwindling as we pass each exhale back and forth. We posture and repose to find space to breathe—clinging, pulling deftly away, as we silently realize we needed more than our own recycled air to fill these desperate lungs, and more to love than softness and safeguards, as we dreamed of ventilation and backwoods breezes

Pressure Points

I imagine the feeling
is quite like that of the
fulcrum on a seesaw

Enough weight to hold
me down, but not enough
balance to stop the pull

And I’m telling myself
that the weight is getting
easier

But each night I can feel
the pooling blood and
overwhelming fatigue

And suddenly all my strength
is gone and I’m left with
an empty shell

Can you sit with me on either end?
Will you help me balance
this never-ending loss of control?

Please, tell me
When will I stop teetering?

Take Shelter

The sky turned yellow today
Hazy, inescapably hot and heavy
And tomorrow it will become
The dullest of grey-greens

Today isn’t the calm
But it is the before

Before the world collapses in upon itself
Before the winds turn endlessly in anger
Before the ground trembles in fear

Today the sky turns yellow
It’s a warning of what’s to come
And there’s no changing tomorrow’s path
You can only hide and wait for the storm to pass

—Submitted on 07/10/2020

Rebecca Thrush‘s work appears in Open Minds Quarterly. She is a real estate professional in New England.

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Lauren Linkowski
The Last Good Day

I didn’t realize it was that day,
our reservation. 3 Star Michelin, made way back
when the future still existed.
I am in my practical raincoat, weak at the knees
corduroys, a shoddy men’s t-shirt hanging
on my shoulders like fog.
I wait by the polished baby grand, idling
my fingers over the keys with no purpose,
savoring the luxury of making sound without a song.
You arrive, throw your Burberry coat over me
like a half finished painting. You look like shit.
We run to Bloomingdale’s. You hold shadows
of black dresses against my body until one fits.
You zip me up, have nude heels in my size ready
at the register. You rifle through my purse searching
for the mints and hand cream you like to borrow.
I sample everything at the makeup counter:
wand loaded with mascara, three shades of foundation
on my wrist, lip gloss, a spritz of Tom Ford
that smells like our trip to Granada at Christmas.
Orange trees. Sherry. Woodsmoke and tobacco.
Cinnamon cookies sold by cloistered nuns.
It’s for men, you say and I say then you take some too.
At dinner, we settle on the same side of the table.
We listen to the couple next to us and pretend
they cannot hear us gossip. Before you ask
I hand over my cocktail, sunny with Aperol.
You feed me a razor clam from your fork.
There is a tank of unblinking fish
who have no clue what is coming.
Outside the windows, the sky darkens.
We pass your Metrocard between us and cram in
to the crowded subway car. The pole is sweaty
warm, we find a place to stand and hold on tight.

—Submitted on 07/09/2020

Lauren Linkowski is a learning specialist in upstate New York.

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Carrie Jewell
After This

After this I promise I’ll leave you alone.
Wouldn’t a trip be nice right now? Or even a cruise?
I’m sorry but that vacation will have to be postponed.

Cross the road when you see a dog, a bike, a crone.
At least the sky and crocuses are blue.
After this I promise I’ll leave you alone.

How long do we stay alive in our phones?
If you hear something over and over, it’s true.
Look (don’t touch): how your grandchildren have grown.

Maybe we’ll start flying in your groceries by drone.
Do you have a slow cooker, a microwave, a corkscrew?
After this I promise I’ll leave you alone.

Try to write down all the things you’ve ever known.
Do you like lilies, lilacs, peonies, or feverfew?
We need to know what you want on your headstone.

Maintain a minimum of six feet between grass and bone.
Have you tried painting a picture of the view?
This is the only sacrifice you’ve never quite condoned.
After this I promise I’ll leave you alone.

—Submitted on 07/09/2020

Carie Jewell writes: Having taught English for 18 years and started a family, I haven’t had much time to write. I haven’t published anything since 1993, when I had one poem accepted by the Youth Edition of the Worcester Review. The name of it escapes me now.

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Mary Lou Buschi
Three Poems

Lusus Naturae

It was his only friend
that opened the gate to his spectacle.
The only way he could rest
was to place his monstrous skull
on his knees or risk dying of asphyxia.

Like Pip and Flip Snow were freaks,
characterized by abnormally
small craniums, wide smiles, and high chignons.
Their parents loaned them out to freak shows
to earn money for the family.

Freaks shows were common.
Life as a curiosity—
At the end of pier in Atlantic City,
I entered with my parents. There she sat,
a bearded woman whose eyes looked like open cans.

I had a dilation and curettage
when I was 9, a D&C.
I was told there was nothing
in there, just a body hyper
to get started. I asked my mother
if I could have my breasts removed.

How many fields did I lie back in?
Shut my eyes and wait until I
swallow the dark and endless winter.

Learning to meditate, one body part at a time:
hip socket-tighten-focus-release. Curve of my elbow,
tighten-release. Wet my lips—let them part.
Release into the soft lid of light.

When Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man
decided to lie flat he did so because of a poem
his mother read to him; Tennyson’s, Nothing Will Die.
If release means to give up—

Ride

When he slapped her
she held the hot blow on her cheek
and continued to love him.

They rode bikes.
She still had training wheels,
not permitted to leave the drive,
so she’d make hard circles,
leaning into the center
until he dared her to ride away.

She went to his house without her bike.
He came around the side,
on his Schwinn, told her to climb on
he’d show her what balance felt like.
She didn’t know where to put her hands.

The air thick, her throat dry, as the rush
came up over the slate, up-rimmed from
thick roots; a catalog of house sailing past.

Her father standing in the drive under
the shadow of the open door,

leaves her in the garage
among the boxes of forgotten things

How To Snake A Drain

As the auger begins its journey down the drain,
push the end in until you feel resistance.

It was a shoe, one that could not be snaked.
Brenda sobbed when she found her Kork-Ease
unceremoniously jammed into the toilet.

It all happened between English and gym
in the 2nd floor bathroom.

No one would come forward to say that they had done it.
Was it an accident? Was someone playing catch
over the bathroom stalls? Did Brenda do it herself?

You may have to apply pressure as you rotate the snake
around the tight curve into the trap.
The rotating action enables the tip of the snake
to attach to the clog and spin it away or chop it up.

Brenda denied the claim.

If the clog is a solid,
the auger head entangles the object.

The janitor fished the shoe out and put it in a plastic bag.
Brenda was wrecked and what a shame, her hair
was in such a perfect twist on top of her head.
Her sweet face looked even more honeyed
wet with tears.

If you don’t feel the auger breaking
through and twisting getting easier,
pull the auger out of the drain—

Brenda sat up front the rest of the day
receiving first-rate attention from teachers and students alike.
I sat back braiding my thoughts around who
could have done such a thing to so sweet a girl.

—Submitted on 07/07/2020

Mary Lou Buschi is the author of Paddock (Lily Poetry Review, forthcoming), Awful Baby (Red Paint Hill, 2015) and The Spell of Coming (or Going) (Patasola Press, 2013), as well as three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Willow Springs, Chestnut Review, Midway Journal, and other journals. Buschi holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a Master of Science in urban education from Mercy College.

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Cheryl Caesar
Melissa Rein Lively, off rein and lively

Finally we meet
the end of the road.
I’ve been looking
forward to this shit
all my fucking life.

So, Target, I’m not playing
any more fucking games. This shit’s
fucking over. This shit’s aaalll
fucking over. This.
Shit’s.
Fucking.
Over.
This
shit’s over
this shit’s over
this shit’s over this
shit’s over this shit’s over
this shit’s over this shit’s over this
shit’s over this shit’s over yay this shit’s over

yay wooh yay
fucking shit. Get that shit
off the shelves. I don’t want
any of that shit. Get it outta here.
Fuck this shit.
Fuck this shit.

No, I’m not
doing it. I’m not
doing it. No. I’m not doing
it. We don’t want any
of this anymore. This is over.

No uh uh no.

—Submitted on 07/06/2020

Cheryl Caesar is the author of Flatman: Poems of Protest in the Trump Era (Thurston Howl Publications, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Prachya Review, Panoply, Light, Origami Poems Project, Ponder Savant, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Nationalism: (Mis)Understanding Donald Trump’s Capitalism, Racism, Global Politics, International Trade and Media Wars (Mwanaka Media and Publishing, 2019), edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka. Caesar holds a PhD in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She teaches writing at Michigan State University.

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Nancy Young
Naked Mole Rats in the Pandemic

Immobile under a stay-at-home order?
Try tuning in the Smithsonian special
on naked mole rats. They’ll draw you,
as anything naked can. Marvel
how they live thirty years below ground,
led by their queen, also naked, and a mole rat.
Watch how, when she dies, females fight
to be the next Queen of Naked Mole Rats.
Warn them: This is not worth dying for.
If you survive, you’ll reign over
only naked mole rats.
They will not listen.
Still they’ll tussle, then grow wrinkled
as they hunker blindly in their burrows.

—Submitted on 07/03/2020

Nancy Young is the author of The Last Girl Standing (Finishing Line Press, 2013), as well as three novels. Her poems and stories have appeared in Belle Reve, Flying South, Fresh, Iodine, Kakalak, and other journals. A former reporter, newspaper editor, and college educator, she now watches birds at her feeder, placates her basset hounds, and writes whatever she wants.

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Sanjana Nair
Two Poems

Traveling

Might we just go—abandon
the abandoned pavement of Brooklyn,
hop in a cab, make small talk with the driver
commiserate with him, over his daughter in college,
the fees. She’s the first he says proudly
and just like that, his late shifts shine,
medals on the returning hero’s uniform.
In the airport, we’ll lounge on chairs
without thinking who has been there,
capture children in our arms
as confounded parents trail behind,
terrified, out of breath.
We’ll exchange small talk—
they will offer to buy us a round,
and we’ll round ourselves at a table.
You know, they will say, remember what it was
when being this close felt like asking to die?
We will laugh.
I’ll walk out into my garden,
the farthest distance I’ve traveled for so long.
I will speak to the birds,
whisper to the worm I catch between soft fingers
to say don’t stray from the dirt! It isn’t safe.
I’ll think of all the ways safe has evolved to mean
there’s no cure, to mean living alone, to mean
a widowed father and a daughter, to mean
the couple who never made enough for that honeymoon.
The rising voices inside, coming from
my own daughter and husband
will remind me, not all is abandoned.
The small wars of a family, boundaries in motion
inside, while the outside world waits for us.
I’ll finally understand, what the great poet meant
when he said you don’t know what work is.
I’ll move back into confinement
and words and dreams
and then, I’ll do it.

The Things We Did

Morning, noon and night—
in the twilight on Church street,
or the bold daylight in Union Square.
Do you remember the way we looked?
Gleaming. Shiny. Our flushed cheeks—
the violet hue we saw
printed on the lids of closed eyes,
the way the palate and tongue tasted.
We did it in parks, on benches
even on the cold, November pavement.
Nothing could stop us.
The hunger.
Oh, do you remember what it was
to eat, to be sated?
The doors are still locked,
barricades and shields are still up
reminding us we are still at war
But baby, oh baby, when they open—
How we will feast!
Remember all those rows and rows of restaurants?
We’ll find each and every one, I swear.

—Submitted on 07/01/2020

Sanjana Nair is an English professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Her poems have appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, Fence Magazine, JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, The Equalizer, Swimm, and other journals. Nair lives with her family in Brooklyn.

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Rayssa Pinheiro
Year of the Repetition

I live in a world of my own. I make my surroundings what they are and I adapt accordingly. I place much too much into far too little. And here we are, sad and disappointed seeing the word is crumbling. We can’t hide behind the veils that once existed. We see our world for what it is: full of flaws and full of broken promises. We see individuals lying and promising things they cannot deliver. But we stay here because we have no choice. We wake up every day for our children, our spouses, ourselves. Here, where every day is like the last day and happiness is a harder and harder commodity to find. Everyone maintains a 2-meter distance out of fear as this pandemic lives on and we live less.

—Submitted on 07/01/2020

Rayssa Pinheiro is a Brazilian-American POC poet living in California. She holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MSc in psychology from the University of Essex.

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Millicent Borges Accardi
We Still Are Not Breathing

from a line by Alexis Smithers

And we expect the temple of our
tragedy to disclose a first-hand
account of what is going on, that
little voice inside our head that says
murder, unfair and break down the ice.
Get through enough to talk back and say
all you imagine before the voice tells
you to stop all you wanted to do and be
and have and what has not happened
yet. It was as if we are at a café enjoying
brandy in a short glass and the clouds
build up in front of where we are sitting
And we consider loss in this
scene right before things all went down and happened.
It was what we thought of first before we
did not know any better, an attic of grief
and a piano that passers-by used to play
in the courtyard in front of the café,
and please, yes, I would like a basket of bread,
and some cold butter shaped into a square
rose. Love is not a currency, neither is it an assignment.
People are supposed to be born, knowing
how to love, no one learns how to kiss of course
they might practice on a mirror or with other
children, opening and laughing together
playing at being adults. Break the ice, as if you are
stopping a social stiffness. How can you not know
how to break through and touch me? Isn’t love
like drinking water for thirst or words that
resemble gold. I am down for the count here.
Give me the bread and nod as the brandy sits
in its glass, in your hands, as they are holding it gently
like something that looks to be defeated, or nearly so.

—Submitted on 07/01/2020

Millicent Borges Accardi is the author of Only More So (Salmon Poetry, 2016) and three other poetry collections. Her poems have appeared in Anomaly, Another Chicago Magazine, Moonday Poetry, Levure littéraire, Miracle Monocle, and other journals. A Portuguese American, her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Program, CantoMundo, The Corporation of Yaddo, Fundação Luso-Americana, and other organizations. 

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