Deborah Wanzer
October 2020

October,
Crawls into town on all
Four years, wondering:
Has this been an interlude?
An interrupting minstrel-show
For the basest of the base?

Some say, an aberration,
An oddity, an albino squirrel,
Spectacle of the neighborhood—
Shocks of white
Amid autumnal leaves.

Exhausting and exhausted,
October
Plays songbirds sinking
From smoky skies,
Swallows from a firehose
Of cock and bull stories.

Out of breath,
October remembers organs
Once pink and supple,
Blaze now with the sickly
Sour of pneumonic bonfires.

October,
Eighth month of the Roman calendar
Older now, timeworn.

—Submitted on 10/25/2020 to the erstwhile What Rough Beast series

Deborah Wanzer is a clinical social worker. 

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Xiaoly Li
Two Poems

The Voice of Air

We are pigeons
flying olive branches
to our mothers—
boxes and boxes—
building a great wall
of tender hearts
to reduce wind’s ravages.

We are bees
seeking flowers
bringing sweetness
where most needed—
the care-givers and
the care-given.

When this frozen wind
sweeps from East to West,
we have to fight two fights.

“Traitors,” some brothers say from afar.
“You, virus,” a few brothers point fingers here.
The double swords split the sky and ocean
rendered by the bleeding sun.

Spring Still Comes in Spite of April 2020

The minutes grow to be ready—
the first cut of chives of spring.
I drop lemon into the chive dumplings—
wow, explosive taste of spring.

Frank and Violet run back and forth
next to one neighbor’s fence—bark no more,
they just come to say hello.

Across the street at a birthday party,
everyone sits 6 feet apart.
Kids cheer and wave from a honking car,
stand in the sky window, and drop a giant
teddy bear beside bright yellow forsythia.

Air is so translucent after days of rain,
influx of magnolia, peach flower and
rhododendron—the universe is breathing me.

A grosbeak on top of the snowy weeping cherry,
picks and drops flowers—throwing stars.
Oh, I want to catch those stars bloomed fresh.

—Submitted on 10/24/2020 to the erstwhile What Rough Beast series

Xiaoly Li‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, American Journal of Poetry, PANK, Atlanta Review, Chautauqua, and other journals. She holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., and a masters in computer science and engineering from Tsinghua University in China. A fiction writer and photographer as well as a poet, Li works as a computer engineer and lives in Massachusetts. 

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Judith Skillman
Three Poems

Great Northern Fur Seal

Flaherty—young astronomer
to whom we come after sea horses,
octopi, anemones, jellyfish,
the hermit crab and Moray eel, otter
preening near its red rubber ball—
you remind me of my father Sid,
staring up after dark at the sky
as if it could free him from his own
sad news of living alone while married
to my mother. She the social butterfly,
he the eccentric physicist. Throat-
clearing, cleaning his glasses on his shirt,
staring with a homemade telescope
at eclipsing binaries. Your pronged tail
folded beneath you on a fake sea rock,
we watch as you polish one flipper
then the other, fur glistening beneath lights
of the Seattle harbor. This a Saturday
like any other, except—how explain
the depths and deckled edges
of the two party system—how make sense
of your pose as we round this corner
to find a monk-like almost-
person-animal-sea creature
in an attitude of beatification
observing, as it were, the last white clouds
cross a sky whose stars,
erased by sky glow, seem more holy
for their disappearance.

Lot’s Wife

~O Pillar of salt
erect prayer of halite
how come to these late years
without the two angels
begged by your husband
to stay

~two daughters
offered to men
who would harm child-virgins

The cities spread
in checkered burns

~O pillar of salt
left behind
by plump girls decked out
in finery

Say we are Sodom
we Gomorrah
we perceive temptation

Where is north
~where not south

~O cairn see our passage
from four years of yester night
changed into today

The Time to Ask Questions Has Passed

Sunset, and the rains are over. Stout birds sing.
There are no children here and none visit.
The body is its own quarry. An eye
turns inward, notes of Bach fly alone.
A contagious spring reigns in the garden.
Crescendo of purple clouds, lime green leaflets,
bawdy weather unsuited to the mood.
Soon, in the dark, the old depression
lifts. Leo Tolstoy’s Nikita
wakes in the sleigh beneath his master
to live twenty more years as laborer.
To measure with his steps how many straws
it takes to warm a horse in winter.
Three toes gone from each foot, still he walks.

—Submitted on 12/13/2020

Judith Skillman is the author of twenty collections, including Came Home to Winter, (Deerbrook Editions, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Zyzzyva, Field, and other journals. Skillman is a faculty member at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, Wash. Online at judithskillman.com.

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Francis Fernandes
Release

It was so dry and windy back in April
I had to take a polishing cloth to my
Gibson Byrdland almost every day
like in that film where the world
has to live with the constant threat
of dust storms and families keep their
plates and bowls upside down
and sweep the dirt off the dining table
before every meal. That’s how it was,
the pollen-filled dust getting
into your clothes and books and sheet
music, it was enough to drive you
crazy. Plus the fact we were at home
the whole time, work being so scarce.
I tried not to worry, while the pink
and white blossoms blew through the
air, like snow. I heard Billie Holiday
sing the snow is snowing, the wind
is blowing and I remembered those
winters back home when the rumble
of snow-plough trucks would fill
my dreams and the next day I’d have
to shovel the snow off the driveway.
Snow is crystalline and all that,
as everyone knows, and so when
it melts it runs down the back
of your neck like cold silk, in a purifying
way—pure as Christmas. Like that
Christmas it rained and then
the sidewalks and streets froze over
making it well-nigh impossible to go
to church, but we did anyway: we
walked, holding on to each other to keep
our footing and then the priest joked
about it, Thanks for checking your skates—
and your sins—at the door…ha ha!
which I missed because just then
the Three Magi and the shepherds
broke out into a hockey scrimmage
game right before the altar, with
the ghosts of Rocket Richard and Gordie
Howe and the rest of them. All I could
think about in those days was hockey.
And now I hide from the news
and the germs by playing jazz covers
all day. It’s tough not being able to jam
with the guys: jamming is our bread
and butter, as John the bassist would
say. I told them I’m tired of these
strictures and just want to play in front
of a crowd again, see all those faces
and the joy unmasked. Hey, they expect
a storm the day after tomorrow, so
I’m hoping for one of those crazy
blizzards that will blow and freeze
away this bloody virus, wash it clean
off the streets and walkways and window
ledges and off our cloistered minds. And
you know who I want to hear—I want
to hear Billie Holiday sing the snow
is snowing, the wind is blowing, and
when she does I’ll improvise something
like that feeling you get when ice melts
down the back of your neck, and my
bandmates will stop their playing, look
at me in surprise, and wonder where
that one came from.

—Submitted on 12/11/2020

Francis Fernandes‘s poems have appeared in The Zodiac Review, Amethyst Review, Beyond Words, Third Wednesday, Montréal Writes, and other journals. Having grown up in the US and Canada, he lives in Frankfurt, where he writes and teaches.

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Jona Fine
My body only wants to live in velvet

a very specific green gold—mossy
I want everyone to feel how soft I am but
you’re on the other side of Zoom
I pretend it’s comfortable to sit cross legged knees up
I contort and smush my body to frame myself
in hopes that you will notice
that you will text me
telling me how much you wish you could
rub your face against my velvet thighs

I only want to live in velvet because—loneliness
I only want to live in velvet because I am alone
and have been alone for a very long time
I only want to live in velvet because I never have to leave my house anymore

touch is something I took for granted
the last time I hugged my sister and she was surprised by that
she doesn’t believe me, that one of my love languages is touch but
she doesn’t come over enough to know my closet is
filling up with velvet and
sometimes I sleep in it

—Submitted on 10/18/2020 to the erstwhile series What Rough Beast

Jona Fine‘s poems have appeared in journals including DryLandLit and Polari Journal, as well as in anthologies. A 2016 Lambda Literary Fellow, they hold an MFA in poetry from Naropa University. Living in Colorado, Fine works at an LGBTQ youth suicide hotline and lives with their leopard gecko, Max.

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Michael Cunningham
The Great Communicator Communicates

(Camera pans into scene of the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan, in very orange make up, speaks.)

“Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement”

“What would this country be without the great land of ours”

My fellow Americans, “we are trying to get unemployment to go up,
and I think we’re going to succeed.”

“Poverty is a career for lots of well-paid people.” Especially in Washington.

“It’s difficult to believe that people are still starving in the country
because food isn’t available.”

My fellow Americans, “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles.”

We should use nuclear power. “All the waste in a year from a nuclear
power plant can be stored under a desk.”
Although, no one in Washington will sit anywhere near it.

“Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession.
I have to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”

“I never drink coffee at lunch. I find it keeps me awake for the afternoon.”

But “I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency…even if I’m in a Cabinet meeting.”

“My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve signed legislation
outlawing the Soviet Union. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

“Let us pledge to each other, so help us God, that we will make America great again.”
Thank you and good night.

(Lights fade out on Ronald Reagan.)

“How could an actor become President?” Oh, we’re still rolling?

(Blackout)

Editor’s Note: The poet avers that all statements in quotation marks are actual documented statements of Ronald Reagan.

—Submitted on 10/17/2020 to the erstwhile What Rough Beast series

Michael Cunningham is a school librarian and outdoor nature educator trained in Waldorf education and biodynamic farming. He lives in New York City. 

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Melissa Eleftherion
Two Poems

New Biota

To be natural & occurring
Internal order of a structure
Fine-grained translucence
Some failure
Salt carvings for the landmine
Geyser what cherishes
Salt all the bodies
Salt the wounds
To purify & extract
We are magicking through
Equinox of vortices
We salt our way
Let the coarse granules
Mix & cleanse
Let the clear stones
Light a path
We coax & glide
We move through
tear-drop shape
opening
We suffuse
We crackle in the mixture
Fold in like new
biota—
or erosion—crystals
rising in one fluid
wash—we
effervesce with
its life we
heal

There is no separation
We maintain & coalesce
We part & whole
Clover & cup

Justice

We’re coming for you//dizzy with sweat & consequence//

Disoriented and still reeling//Our collective body politic

A dull quick-moving consumption//alive with the pain and suffering of its people

Its monotonous movement over the city//how crowd culture grows like a festering boil

rancid with its own racist heat //its own clamor for the oyster

how the snapping conch aches to trap the vile many in its pearlescent teeth //its grit
sealing its ardor//the crowd is a dull roar//but we are unifying we are
gathering//strength and you won’t see us coming//

—Submitted on 11/21/2020

Melissa Eleftherion is the author of field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), little ditch (above/ground press, 2018), and trauma suture (above/ground press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Entropy, Flag+Void, Lunch Ticket, Pith, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and other journals. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Eleftherion lives in Northern California, where she manages the Ukiah Library, teaches creative writing, and curates the LOBA Reading Series. Online at apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.

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Sara Epstein
Bar of Rest

Semi-breve, that silent rest,
hangs from the middle staff,
indicates nothing, goes nowhere,
pauses before the next lively
relentless phrase.

Gentle rain splatters stones
and oak leaves outside my window,
oak leaves float, swirl, crash down
or still cling and hover mid-branch,
they bide their time until they fall.

Saturday morning at 11:30
we pause, hold our breath
as phones ding, chime, sing
Biden has won the election.
Now we tremble, shake,
release waves of tension
more than we can name.

Semi-breve, name of the restaurant
I want to open, who knows when?
Where we can pause, eat, drink,
in between what was
and whatever comes next.

Like La Llibertària cafe
in Barcelona, still serving
as it did during the Spanish Civil War
the resistance fighters and us,
we who remember them.

Menu at Semi-Breve:
Chicken pot pie, soft double chocolate
brownies with blueberry sauce.
Edith Piaf sings.
On the walls, rotating exhibits,
paintings or photos of the rest:
ballots being counted,
pussy hats from the women’s march,
a cactus plant’s sangria blooms.
Doctors, parents, nurses, teachers, kids:
those who lived and those who died.

—Submitted on 12/07/2020

Sara Epstein‘s poems have appeared in Mocking Heart Review, Silkworm, Paradise in Limbo, Mom Egg Review, Chest Journal, and other journals. She is a clinical psychologist and lives in Winchester, Mass.

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Scott Chalupa
Pandemic Vignettes

I.
Virus hives the wood grain. Along with this pier’s planks and beams, its microbial multitudes will soon shamble to the sea. Contagion is a smuggled promise that brings one closer to life. D.W.’s stencils and dada-dada-do-me graffiti proclaim the silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated. I tell you it isn’t the case and it isn’t not the case. My beloved not-yet-painter splatters the walls with acrylic and spray-can joy dubiously free of time’s constraints. Here a place to forge, not fuck. To come tell me to come tell you to come when I come too. Here a place to snap a pic of Rimbaud shooting up—B.B. in a mask, a truth behind the truth. It’s always never gonna be quite unlike this or that nothing we had to see once again and say girl, girl, OMG girl. This. This is everything. It’s a Reaganite name-drop several years too late. It’s a dirge mistaken for matins that taps the overripe valves of an angel’s trumpet. Rescue me from the hightide of a lowgrade fever dream. Ride with me an unflattened curve of our always-already unavailable ventilators, presidential promises begotten, unmade as though twin bed sleeping three beyond the post-party after-glower. Carry me to where we will not-say it all, will not-say not-no to another joint, unsure of the limits of mustn’t do. Where our beginning unspooled itself back through two summers. A superposition of star-struck duckwalks in Central Park. Your overnight Tuileries bag a clutch of travel-size toothpaste and misdirected lust. The down-drooped assent of devil’s trumpets surveilling our weeks-long cruise. Larches lurching in lamplight. Virus beetling beneath the bark.

IV.
A life after a life after a life after, a cherrywood cortege cavalcades past a parson unborn again. To step out from old boots onto bare ground opens us into afterlife. To breathe beyond any arbitrary moment in a life is an afterlife, isn’t it? We’ve been here before just then and there husking aeons by the hour to leave behind what we have yet to square what we must always carry with us. A broken toe—a threshold to afterlife. Post-orgasmic sleep is afterlife after a fashion, no? The bar against heavens once set so high that all life withered before the before, our lives wasted on thoughtless anticipation, an antedated antidote for never here and never now—the hoped-for heaven were never there in a pinch, a foxhole promise only half-delivered until erenow. But heaven could be here, now, here yes here, a clockwork door sprung ajar and tolling its come-hither cocked-brow antechamber always opening to another after-living after all our lives undreamt fashioned after an ever-unfolding field of windowpanes windblown open by ebullient gales blowing apart the promise of heaven to reveal heaven. Oh God, it was always wasn’t it always yes it was always meant to be like this.

VII.
We could leave Monday but the coastal connecters will crush us beneath the weight of all those golfcart-towing Tahoes. Some stupid meme calls it a Corona-cane but mom calls it several nights without sleep. Thousands are dying and I just wanna pack my blender and cast iron before the drowning starts. Din of Denalis drowning out the storm roiling up the seaboard. We thought we’d leave Tuesday when potential tropical cyclone nine was a mother’s worry stalling north of Venezuela. Krogering oftener than we should, eating half what we planned. Gratitude is a fridge overflowing with the shame of overpurchase. Did I tell you that B. bought a car on vay-fucking-cay? We came to the beach and B. goes home with a Lexus to replace a Lexus. Isaias is blowing their corona northward as I trek out of Babylon back to Babylon. Truth be told is usually followed with a selfish half-lie firmly fellated. Everywhere I run I take Babylon with me. Isaias is my quarantine and I wont to hunger. I hunger to return to my transplant but the babies behind golfcart wheels are tipping at tropical cyclones. Three derelict teens rolled a golfcart on Atlantic Avenue trying to catch a couple of two-ft barrels at low tide. We could leave we should leave tomorrow before Monday crushes this barrier island into more a gorgeous marsh.

IX.
After all hope was the only little one left behind in Pandora’s cursed amphora No wonder we’re sore when our stories sour our awestruck poses When our world is less is more than six millennia immature When we see Nietzsche hit the nail on the nose of God When ain’t nothin’ operant in the omniverse but Occam’s algorithm pulling upstream as we cross the tracks It will all come undone once done even the galaxy gone go dark drift to space beyond place Even the information in our mad mumble to inscribe ourselves on the ceiling of spacetime’s untender belly will unravel Beginning and end arbitrary points of convenience same as me and you same moraine same mountain Show me some body without a story aphasia without a named self without Narcissus’ referential tic There were no creator here beyond an ego and we be all Echoes in a polymorphic triangle twain by twofold twins in love with another at the fork of a lazy slipstream

—Submitted on 12/06/2020

Scott Chalupa is the author of Quarantine (PANK Books 2019). His work has appeared in PANK, pacificREVIEW, Nimrod, Beloit Poetry Journal, The South Atlantic Review, and other journals. His work appears in an anthology of poems related to Eve (of Biblical fame) forthcoming from Orison Books in 2021. Chalupa lives in South Carolina, and teaches at Central Carolina Technical College.

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Kendra Nuttall
Hope, Like an April Morning

when dew dots fresh blooms
and patches of sun fill the cold
gaps between houses too close together.
Our throats are parched from screaming
into what we thought were
silent nights
when winter only sighed,
stretching into never-ending
dark.
I know it’s not spring,
but do you see it? Just there,
where the pine tree grows,
where you watch the birds come home.
On the canyon’s edge,
where a solitary cactus reaches
towards the sky.
It’s in our home too,
in the glow of the lamp
and the soft belly of our sleeping dog.
Let me open the clouds,
do you see it now?

—Submitted on 12/05/2020

Kendra Nuttall‘s debut collection of poems, A Statistical Study of Randomness, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2021. Her work has appeared in Spectrum Literary Journal, Capsule Stories, Califragile, Chiron Review, Maudlin House, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus Volume Two edited by G.A. Cuddy and Liz Kobak as a benefit for Doctors Without Borders and Partners In Health. Nuttall lives in Utah with her husband and poodle.

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