Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Two Poems

Lingua Naturae

The green promise of new leaves
opened like a jewelry box this morning,
the one I remember

from my mother’s dresser;
it was leather, gray as the leafless
branches of last week’s trees.

I can still hear the brass hinges
click open. And from the larger
box of our family house,

still hear my father’s voice, his anger
that seems endless
and without mercy like the sky.

Last chance, he warns
in a kind of shadow chorus
with these trees. Last chance.

And I think back to those bare
branches of last week,
so late to bloom.

And how for a moment,
I feared they never would.

How to Bear the News

I swipe my finger
down the iPhone screen,
until the stories blur

and I can no longer read them,
a window in heavy rain,
water pouring down

from overflowing gutters
And for those few moments,
the clicking of the phone

as I scroll through
is like the cricket I once
discovered as a child

in a pause between
bursts of torrential rain;
it must have entered the house

on a pant leg or a sock.
I followed its sound
to a dusty corner

of the living room
and took solace
in its green company.

—Submitted on 06/25/2020

Sally Bliumis-Dunn is the author of Echolocation (MadHat Press, 2018), Second Skin (Wind Publications, 2010), and Talking Underwater (Wind Publications, 2007). Her poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Plume, Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, and other journals. Bliumis-Dunn teaches creative writing at Manhattanville College in Harrison, NY.

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Maggie Hinchliffe
Indoors [Pandemic Poem #5 | April 3, 2020]

This morning, after accidentally
Burning my tongue on a cup of coffee,
I buried myself beneath an over-
Sized blanket on the living room couch. From
This mummified position, and peering
Through a condensation-covered window,
I counted all the neighborhood passers-
By: There were three middle-aged joggers, two
Hyper-active dogs, and a single man
In his pajamas I had never seen
Before: I wonder if he reads any
Fantasy, I thought while returning my
Attention to warrior Wistan and
His mission to slay the dragon Querig.

—Submitted on 04/28/2020

Maggie Hinchliffe is a classical pianist with an interest in the interaction between text and music. She recently completed a master’s degree in collaborative piano at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Several of her Pandemic Poems have been set to music by Ben Morris, and may be seen and heard as performed by Hinchliffe on YouTube:

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Koss
Write / Like Them / Deer Editor (Whose Poetry)

Dead deer poems

Dead deer poems

Dead deer poems

skinning / what white guys do
poetics of slaughter
some call it redneck
or writable rite of passage / manhoody stuff

poetry fodder / banal glory / hole
man hole / man cover / holy hole / white mite
straight narrow arrow / white schooled boys
write right / white write / write white

And furthermore:

dogwood

magnolia

wisteria whispered in breathy metaphor (think Marilyn Monroe)
winnowing across a creamy / linen / fat / edition
Whitman-coopted / a likable queer / worthy of eating
all dead now / all harmless / all whitely-bearded / disappeared

nature or nurture / how did “we”
get to this place / or you / me-them
this place of writing / of skinning / of publish /
of material-thin / of privilege / of ownership /
of word-other worldness / tradition

think / nothing much to write home about
or poems / “don’t be so serious,”
said the white-faced joker to the native girl
and the black wiry girl
and the thin queer boy
and all who didn’t “fit” in
and all of those lovely poet heads with their mouths full
of stories lolling along macadam highway shoulders
as the fast sleek cars full of exquisite bourgeois language slashed by
speeding towards their glory
to the colossal listening
those who gobble their mirrors

let me just say this / let the dead deer sleep
without affected elegies
you ate them after all
there is no redemption in your pen

people without mouths or tongues are dying everywhere

—Submitted on 06/25/2020

Koss, a writer and visual artist, holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Hobart, Spillway, Exquisite Corpse, Diode Poetry, and other journals. Twitter @Koss51209969 and Instagram @koss_singular.

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Amanda Leahy
Quarantine Song

And a shadow passed over
the land. And the war
began. And they closed
everything
to us. Only
our streets
remained. And so we took
to walking. We took
to each other’s uncurtained
windowpanes.

They took our
books. They took
items, small,
numerous, all. They took
the new light, spring’s
open
mouth, every
child’s
crown. They took our
time. Our hair grew
long. Our fingernails,
too. Our bones
came through. The years,
they left. They took only the
days.

—Submitted on 04/28/2020

Amanda Leahy is an MFA candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poems have appeared in Thin Air Magazine;  Cease, Cows; Bodega; Crack the Spine; Pithead Chapel; and other journals.

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Sophia Falco
Hourglass

The sand in the hourglass is missing
though the glass is not shattered.

I discovered the tan grains scattered
in my green porcelain bathtub.

I decided to let the water flow from
the silver faucet, and the sand swirled.

The crystal-clear water was too
transparent so I added blue dye.

I created an ocean, and when I shut
the faucet off, time sank back to the bottom.

—Submitted on 06/24/2020

Sophia Falco is the author of The Immortal Sunflower (UnCollected Press, 2020), a winner of the Raw Art Review Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared in The Mindful Word, The Esthetic Apostle, The Festival Review, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, The Poetry Matters Project, and other journals. Falco recently graduated magna cum laude from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Kelli Brommel
Morning Recess

On my walk today I saw
a man washing his car
and a paper wasps’ nest full of hibernating
lives held up high,
a cement lamb painted white,
a grey slab of sky both thick and cool
and covering us all the way the blankets hold you in
when you first go to bed—too cold but
soon just right.

Today on my walk I heard
music in my ears, designed for calm,
hallelujah,
and birds of all kinds,
young footsteps jogging up from behind
then crossing the street,
a siren scream plus my own suppressed sob
at all things ambulance-related.

The drivers’ ed car made its
slow, slow way down the street,
tire treads rasping leftover
winter sand.

An old woman waved on
my walk today, our gloved hands
and smiles in tandem, while a life
set on pause kept scrolling
behind windows full
of paper hearts.

In my own dead-leaf garden
purple crocuses flirted
despite the brownish crunch
all around.

As I stepped onto my porch
the bright wet world outside
reached toward green
and smelled of pine.

—Submitted on 04/28/2020

Kelli Brommel lives in Iowa City with her husband, two kids, and a cat named Little Grey. Her poems have appeared in Short Édition and The Esthetic Apostle.

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Haley Wooning
Elektra in the Act of Grieving

summer stars spill and split over the heathered hill
where a melancholy fog sits
thick with the mist of sleepless creatures

night soft, a long red swan wind

fluttering, long curls of hair
a gown beneath the seam
of lilac waters

I move
like a word’s trickster vein
like a word, a root-worker

moon-mad with conjuring
the language of the soul
the woman
an organ, a feral, a scythe

I am changed, I pluck words from
the gloom of another death

I once again love the things I cannot know

like a neck I lean into her soft secrets, I speak
the chasm
the cave
this monstrous fissure
in time

I am or
am not
a song that flows and stops itself

or altogether, something soft unfolding
like a tablecloth into ruin

with the yellow fields, the holding of so many
wings pulling away from
the earth’s small egg

the quick black gut flux of visibility

I, unescorted, dance
absurdly close,
and final
in the mind’s red bloom

to ask that this place no longer be empty,
sour with the world’s laborious opera

or how I come to find the eternal
the exquisite cold of becoming
something
disregarded

this is the danger:

coming too close to the thing
that cannot be named

—Submitted on 06/10/2020

Haley Wooning is the author of mothmouth (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Bird’s Thumb, Hypertrophic, Lit Cat, ArLiJo, Mangrove, and other journals. Co-founder and editor of Figroot Press, Wooning lives in California with her partner and their cat, Puck.

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Jeff Scott Lane
Nothing Left Here but the Ghost

End of last week the dumpster
was dropped in the driveway

The driveway had been empty
but their kids’ car on the street

With a weekend gone
the dumpster now full

The model railway and town torn
down and its pieces discarded

But the empty chair in the
basement where he once
sat with the controls in
hand now an empty shell

The empty bed upstairs
would be the next to go

The smell from food spoiled
while he was in the hospital

The smudge of the hand
print on the window over-
looking the lake lingering
like the breath he was
unable to take during
those last days here

Reflections in mirrors and
the well-polished surfaces
capture the photos on the
walls telling stories of the
times gone by and people
that were no longer there

Those ghosts he lived
alone with for years

Now

Nothing left
here but the

ghost

—Submitted on 06/13/2020

Jeff Scott Lane has a BFA in the study of graphic design from for Virginia Commonwealth University. His art has been mostly in the form of graphic design, photography, music, writing, block printing, and video, but will work with the medium that best suits the project. He has recently had collage work published in High Shelf and photography in The Esthetic Apostle.

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Kerry Trautman
Referring to a Pie-Chart of Quarantined Time

Here is a 10% slice for
the baking then eating of bread,
a 1% slice for watching
our governor on TV,
a 30% for jigsaw puzzles,
a 30% for TV movies,
a 4% for watching online concerts
and poetry readings where
the dime-sized faces have no idea
I’m listening,
a 1% for clicking online models of
animated dots spreading, spreading,
a 1% for worry everyone’s
had enough of me,
a 10% for worry the earth
has had enough of skins,
a 1% for worry I’ve
chosen all wrong,
a 3% for assessing slant of sunlight
for a reasonable hour for wine.

Where might time have been salvaged?
Here: cleaning-out a junk drawer
could have been, say,
editing a chapter of my novel.
These Netflix hours—
letters to my mother and
phone calls to my sister.
Here is where avoidance occurred,
here: denial of ticking clocks,
here: pokeweed took quiet root
in backyard mud, and I did
nothing to stop it,
here: distraction to slow the pulse,
here: busying of the mind
like skipping stones in a lake
beside a capsized boat.

—Submitted on 04/28/2020

Kerry Trautman is the author of To be Nonchalantly Alive (forthcoming from Kelsay Books), Things That Come in Boxes (King Craft Press, 2012), To Have Hoped (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and Artifacts (NightBallet Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Slippery Elm, Free State Review, Midwestern Gothic, Paper & Ink, Alimentum, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies. Trautman is a poetry editor of Red Fez.

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Debora Lidov
Summer

—in memoriam

I repeat my order—
“a Quarter Pounder
with cheese, a medium
Diet Coke”—and again she says
“What?” On my third
attempt to be heard,
I project from the belly—
through my slack surgical mask,
past my plastic visor,
past her Plexiglas pane,
stressing cheese for cadence
and diet for clarity.
Now, she stares. Next, she scoffs,
“This isn’t a McDonalds, you know.”
Now I’m floating and tingling.
Next I’m frozen
but burning. If I’m dead
I’m actively dying.
I gasp and ask for the Whopper.
She raises her brow and nods.
“I don’t even
like the Quarter Pounder,”
I add, which is true. I don’t—
but this sounds like a lie
the instant it leaves my lips.
Does she roll her eyes?
Of course she rolls them.
I’m thawing, I’m freezing.
I’m “sorry,” I say,
as if I am lying some more.

—Submitted on 06/24/2020

Debora Lidov is the author of the chapbook Trance (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Paris Review, Salamander, upstreet, and Tarpaulin Sky, and other journals. She is a medical social worker and lives in Brooklyn.

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