Paula Kaufman
Triptych for the Police Officer in Spring

Trilliums During Corona

The sheriff rinses hands in sink at home,
removes rust from nail.
The prisoners cannot go home.

Trillium root is fine enough to
escape through keyhole, bloom.

A sheriff, inmate and trillium
are all locked together in a cell.

Nobody can go for a walk until next spring,
some, never.

Wild

Salem, Va.—The sheriff spent his off day
gathering quartz from creek bed.
Filled floor of front passenger side
and trunk. He pocketed small ones
from creek, shoveled larger ones from mountain.
Played air with singing bowls,
left quarters facing a certain direction
under a stone in thanks.
Shortly after, he found a flat rock, shaped like a gold Buddha’s foot.
At home he placed quartz crystal on bathroom and kitchen sink,
nearest water. Crystal by the bedroom window, towards freedom,
outside on front porch and back.

Everyone needs the river, wild ginger, dogwood,
and long-spurred violet. One night, when his soul wavered,
he let the candle burn all night.

The Sheriff’s House

Is small. Like a fairy cottage. Each branch holds candle.
One wall, supported by books.
Another, music from every nation and decade.
One room sounds like a fountain.
Moroccan fairy lights dapple lights
upon the alter, owl’s feather, wolf’s howl, cards,
a crystal wand he fashioned from the stream’s driftwood
and his own two hands.

—Submitted on 04/23/2020

Paula Kaufman is the author of the chapbook, Asking the Stars Advice (independently published, 2018). Her work has appeared in Heartwood Literary Magazine, Lily Poetry Review, Rusted Radishes, West Trade Review and Gyroscope. She was born in West Virginia, and lives in Washington, DC.

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Anggo Genorga
Three Poems

The triumph

the human
spirit

is nothing
short
of
a ghost
now

restless
haunting
wandering
silent

a shadow figure

akin to this
air of quiet
death.

Love Covid-19 Style

On earphones, she watches me burn
same time as she watches compiled
epic fail videos of cats on YouTube
& short clips of Vietnamese drama.

*
Round midnight all get locked down;
a precaution to the virus, says the news
asked me about my plan to score
—love sick, dope sick—
I said, what to do honey?

*
Marked 14 minutes past 12mn—
Locked down. Locked jaw. Still,
I went down on her to fulfill
an obligatory backscratching.

Work From Home Fighting Man

But what would a so-called poet do
except reflect the times
took on the issue of the day
as he take a pick
on what to eat later
tonight on his shift

—sinigang or calamares—

& call it a damn politically correct stance?

—Submitted on 06/13/2020

Anggo Genorga lives in the Philippines. His work has appeared in Alien Buddha Zine, Jerry Jazz Musician, Silver Birch Press, Red Flag Poetry, Paper And Ink, and other journals.

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Chad Parenteau
Clean Break

Someone challenge me
to survive,

head bent over toilet,
tongue inside.

Watch me
make love

to store cameras
with my mask on,

brandish two-fisted
protection

while I fondle
French loaves,

party in my closet
like it’s 1918,

live to tell
my boring story.

—Submitted on 04/23/2020

Chad Parenteau is the author of Patron Emeritus (FootHills Publishing, 2013). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tell-Tale Inklings, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, Molecule, and Résonance. He serves as associate editor of Oddball Magazine and hosts the venerable Stone Soup Poetry series in Boston. His second full-length collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, is forthcoming.

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Ellie Pourbohloul
COVID-19

In the year of silence
Spring was in full bloom
Bodies tilted and cracked open
Towards the earth, as if to say:
Tell me your first memory of blood

A sapphire eye
Caught under the spell
Of an hourglass
When the dead were rising
The glass-caught eye
Stared back at them:
What about all the bodies
We can’t hold?

As for us, we looked for the living
Among the dead
We cocooned our bodies
In rooms black as the sound
That brought us into this world,
As the sound of silkworms that fatten
And crack under mulberry leaves
Their wings hung on a white nail

At night I hear you
Whispering our names
Back into the earth
We hush to one breath
The wind carries it away

—Submitted on 06/13/2020

Ellie Pourbohloul‘s work has appeared in Shock of the Femme, New South, Floromancy, and other journals. She earned her BA at Emory University, and holds an MA in cultural anthropology from UCLA, as well as an MA in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis. Pourbohloul received a Fulbright award to teach in Turkey, as well as a number of grants and awards for her creative and academic and work.

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Susana H. Case
Two Poems

The World as We Know It

after Olafur Eliasson’s project, Earth Perspectives
on Instagram during COVID-19

Focus on the dot in the center
of the pink and orange earth,
then the blank surface

of your wall, because you have
been staying within your walls.
Test the afterimage

as you become the artist,
new world in new colors.
Repeat nine times, for each

earth, an earth that does not
have nine lives, and think
about what you’re doing,

this vastness full of us crazies.
Think: what is the perspective
of a thawing glacier: does it know

that it’s dying and taking
us with it. Think about the raw
emotion of the Mariana Trench,

deepest in our existence,
full of plastics,
and the other dots: the Ganges,

Greenland, the Great Barrier Reef.
Do you feel any way differently,
maybe more alliterative.

We’re all dying, and it’s all dying,
people, coral, water, creatures,
on every dot and not,

every tilted axis. Even Chernobyl
with its returning wolves
and Przewalski’s horses in their

pudgy, feral beauty can’t save us.
What will we want in the After.
Think.

Corona April

A red bird lands on the terrace rail
and pecks at some chips
of paint this rainy day.
(Lately, I have to remind myself
to look out the window.)

The bird that represents happiness.
No, wait—that’s the blue one.
How ironic to negate the blues
in that sad way. Red bird,
I have nothing for you,

just the cigarette butts blown in
from my neighbor upstairs.
My mother used to feed the birds
that flew to her porch,
more new ones every day,

she claimed. It became an impossible
obligation in her later years.
Red birds, blue birds, all birds,
like you,
they just took and took and took.

—Submitted on 04/23/2020

Susana H. Case is the author of the poetry collections Dead Shark on the N Train (Broadstone Books, 2020), Body Falling, Sunday Morning (Milk and Cake Press, 2019); Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press, 2019); Erasure, Syria (Recto y Verso Editions, 2018); 4 Rms w Vu (Mayapple Press, 2014); Earth and Below (Anaphora Literary Press, 2013); Salem in Séance (WordTech Communications, 2013); and Elvis Presley’s Hips & Mick Jagger’s Lips (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012). Case is also the author of the poetry chapbooks Manual of Practical Sexual Advice (Kattywompus Press, 2011), The Cost of Heat (Pecan Grove Press, 2010), Hiking the Desert in High Heels (RightHandPointing, 2005), Anthropologist in Ohio (Main Street Rag, 2005), and The Scottish Café (Slapering Hol Press, 2002). Her poems have appeared in Calyx, The Cortland Review, Portland Review, Potomac Review, Rattle, and other journals. With a BA from NYU and a PhD in sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center, Case is a professor at the New York Institute of Technology.

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Gerald Wagoner
Three Poems

A Grumble of Muffled Voices
April 8, 9:50 PM

I hear a grumble of muffled voices
from a second floor room.

Outside the hospital, a row of
ambulances wait idling.

Shuttered shops
spawn wind strewn trash.

Someone in shadow,
mad in disappointment,

declaims a poem
of non sequiturs.

Across the canal, it echoes
through hollow buildings.

The tide comes in heavy
on yesterday’s wind.

The pink moon untangles
itself from still black branches.

The flaccid flag’s halyard
taps the pole wearily.

It’s the same empty
night after night.

I am lost to myself.

I Want
April 4, 9:30 PM

I hear the subway rumble
through down there.
I want to go somewhere,
but alas, I am now too
aware, so das’nt dare.

How Grand It Must Be
April 5, 9:15 PM

Tonight I came upon two big rigs
parked head to head on the sidewalk
opposite Con Ed. On each lowboy
trailer tons of copper cable
spooled onto five tall, wide wheels.
Each cab sported gleaming chrome,
an array of custom running lights.
Each was painted lustrous white.
Scripture, lettered in silver script
behind the driver’s door on one.
I don’t remember the text, exactly,
but it rang Calvinist, and once
I would have dismissed the driver
an unthinking drone. An enemy
of complex thought. A stranger
to the sceptic’s requisite doubt.
But, tonight, I imagine how grand
it must be hauling Interstate 80 from
your Indiana to my Brooklyn.
Up high, maybe the window down,
your elbow out, with what you
believe to be truth hand lettered
meticulously beside you
for all the world to see.

—Submitted on 06/10/2020

Gerald Wagoner‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Right Hand Pointing, Ocotillo Review, Passager Journal, BigCityLit, The Lake, and other journals. He went to college at the University of Montana and holds an MFA in sculpture from SUNY Albany. Wagoner moved to Brooklyn in 1983, and taught art, writing, and literature in the New York City public schools for over thirty years.

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Elizabeth Warner
Little People

The big people are supposed to look out for the little people,
But the little people are big people,
So now they’re disposable people.
And in the “almost heaven” community,
We are just two steps away,
Because these blessed, god loving people,
Have all the right underlying conditions
And none of the right education.
So we’re left with blissful ignorance,
And these towns barely had business before the pandemic
and small business was struggling as is.
And now, when we certainly don’t have immunity,
we will pretend that we do, and suffer with no impunity,
so that maybe we can survive through the year.
Because somehow the sickness,
the worldwide killing machine,
is less threatening than the small town horrors
of poverty.

—Submitted on 04/22/2020

Elizabeth Warner is a 17 year-old poet from Morgantown, W.Va.

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Anne Kenny
Refuge

Our home is a small island, with a shoreline
no stranger can cross. Its rooms,
unused to such constancy, wonder why we seldom leave.
Why suitcases gather dust and goods are quarantined.

Windows look out on a sea of long grass, afloat
with daises and dandelions. Here all is new life:
improbable pink petals on the trunk of a Judas tree,
sprays of lady’s mantle spreading across shingle,
the scarlet poppy flirting among artichokes.

Some days we walk to where ancient yews
are gathered in a churchyard. They’ve seen it all before.
Pestilence, the carrying of coffins. Renewal.

—Submitted on 06/12/2020

Anne Kenny‘s work has appeared in Equinox, South, Blue Dog Australian Poetry, Contemporary Haibun Online, and other journals. Along with co-authors Judith Dimond, Nicky Gould, Frances Knight, Gillian Moyes, Lyn White, and Vicky Wilson, Kenny’s work appears in Mirror Writing: An Anthology of Poetry by Common Room Poets (Categorical Books, 2009).

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Cecilia Byer
Economy of the Forest

He was there at the layoff, where
The forest shut down—the rippled pond
In every oak recessed its banded babble

And chilled its notched marking of age.
The forest held its swell (indefinitely),
Waiting for two trillion to be carted in.

Up, up were the halos, stacked in swollen pause—
The trees, in wind, neither twitched nor ached.
Nothing, not even the rings, moved. And he—

He was there, at the layoff, the only thing
Growing in that awful place. The unripe,
The stillness, it rattled him. So empty it was,

Like gutted things: fish and plums and chests
And hollowed trees; trees hollowed,
Hollowed by him, by him! His fist

Punched holes in all that wood. He clenched
The pulp of backyard oak; soggy rings,
A puree of engagement between his fingers.

It was then that his veins branched and scratched at skin.
Blood sapped and the wedding never came.

—Submitted on 04/22/2020

Cecilia Byer is a 2020 high school graduate who will be attending Emory University in the fall. She has received a Certificate of Superior Writing from the National Council of Teachers of English, and a Gold Key for poetry from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. You can follow her poetry page on Instagram @celipoems.

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Stephen Huiting
Distancer

He totes a slim flask
Of alcohol, slips
It in
And out of a hidden
Pocket
In his coat.

His mask
Makes mystery of mood
Or of mouth
At all.
Tarnished by his silver
Breaths; when
Retracted to a shadowed
Groove, a corner
In the room,
Distance
And gloom swear to secrets
Whether breath moves
The faceless
Fabric, which an eerie
Faith,and his eyes,
Say it must.

He is a lone man,
A splitter, fractured
From the main flow.
No
One has seen
Him come close;
Whenever another
Seems to approach—
To finally,
Peeringly
Quench question to known—
He is gone,
Inhaled by a
Wall, by his own
Masked aura,
Own sorrow.

He is hardened,
Yet he has never killed a man.
His hands
Share their spiral
Souls
But with gloves.

Who is
This stranger?
Why is he feared?
Others fight
To be less alone.

He is a survivor,
A wizened
Distance strider, with careful
Life thudding through
Sterile veins.

—Submitted on 06/12/2020

Stephen Huiting‘s poems have appeared in The Union, a newspaper serving Grass Valley and Nevada County, Calif.

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