Indran Amirthanayagam
Sheltering In Place with Your Poem, Susana Case

A good poem for its time, but now, none of us should let strangers into our homes. Glad that nothing happened to you.
—A comment posted on FB

I am lifting up my hands in the general direction of Heaven,
stones in my palms. Must I carry my fellow man or woman?
May I just arrange for myself and immediate family? How
will I, or you, dear poet—who wrote the original “Sheltering”—
change even one bigot let alone a few million, and they are
scattered throughout the globe. Go home Chinese virus. Get
thee behind closed doors, Central American fruit picker,
and God forbid, you will allow Spanish-speaking, Creole-
warbling, Arabic-moaning handymen into your private
bathroom to fix a ceramic wall and a shower head?
Have you lost your marbles? Strangers in the sacred
space of your toilet? Thank God, the co-op board
stepped in and corrected this utopian fantasy.
Thank God you are alive and I am too. As for
the handymen, well, it is a free country still and
they can go in search of the American dream, across
to the borderlands and beyond, so help them God.

—Submitted on 03/30/2020

Indran Amirthanayagam is the author of The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, 2020) and six other poetry collections. The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose Press, 1993) won the Paterson Poetry Prize. He has received a number of other prizes, awards, and fellowships. Amirthanayagam edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly. He lives and works in the Washington, DC area.

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Maeghan Mary Suzik
Quarantime

By 3pm, I have washed my sheets and the dreams from underneath my fingernails.

At 9am, I wake to discounted cereal, college loan emails, and cat litter like glitter.

Around noon, I imagine the dancing I will do and reenact it in the sliver of hardwood I have between kitchen and couch.

7 to 7:05pm the neighborhood beats pans and hollers cheers at a city on fire.

When 4pm hits I take a third shower. Sitting down.

11pm I check the front door. Deadbolt, chain, and knob.

5am the sun has whacked my feet, the mason jars, the journals, my E.E. Cummings collection, the remnants of last night’s habits.

2pm literally doesn’t matter. Just like his latest demonic tweet. I must remind myself.

6pm falls on the unfinished, bottlecap-infested roof where I practice handstands and wishing with my eyes open

10pm I lock the door again. Then hate myself for cleaning all the mirrors.

Somewhere near am, I stare blankly at a cabinet filled with goods that have followed me from my last two apartments. Unopened.

8:30am my sheets are still damp. The dryer sucks.

Midnight is when I listen to the same song fifteen times and sit in my window sill, watching nothing pass into the street lamps.

My mother is the only one who texts me back at any time, though I swear I am a good friend.

3:07am graces my warped ceiling harder than warm vodka or kissing in corners. And I am reminded that sleep feels just as unproductive.

—Submitted on 05/16/2020

Maeghan Mary Suzik’s poems have appeared in The Minetta Review, Oakland Arts Review, Catfish Creek, The Rational Creature Magazine, and October Hill Magazine. An actor, poet, and arts/mental health activist, she is a recent graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

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Patricia Carragon
Moonlight Serenade

Charlie was in bed,
tubes attached to his body,
listened to cartoons
on a nineteen-inch screen,
thought of Sophia,
his “Belle of Flatbush.”

When la luna was full,
Charlie used to sing
“Moonlight Serenade”
outside Sophia’s gate.
They’d slow-dance
to Glenn Miller’s rendition.
He’d relax his rhythm,
hold Sophia closer,
recall how safe she felt.
Her soft brown curls
would drape on his shoulder—
her smoky eyes—
stelle colorate, tinted stars
over a make-believe Brooklyn sky.

His protective hold couldn’t save her
from breast cancer twenty years ago,
their two sons from Viet Nam’s death call,
or their daughter from her husband’s fists.
A massive stroke took Sonny,
his last living friend.
His relatives were either dead
or couldn’t care less.

Charlie was in bed,
tubes attached to his body,
alone—except for routine visits from
the nursing home staff,
wondered if Sophia would be there for him
when he leaves for the morgue.
He hummed “Moonlight Serenade,”
but a dry cough cut his tune short.
Sadness, age, and high fever
drained his cognition and will to live.
His memory was of the past,
not the present.

He prayed for Death’s visit—
Death would wear a white coat,
walk past the rooms,
make decisions on who’s to come
and who’s to stay.
But Death forgot about him—
perhaps Death’s eyesight was fading
when he came by last week,
took Hector instead.
Tina, his favorite nurse,
no longer visited him—
was in critical condition
due to a new virus going around.

He closed his eyes,
saw Glenn Miller and his band
perform “Moonlight Serenade”
at the Waldorf Astoria.
Everything was in Technicolor.
Sophia,
radiant and youthful,
rose from her table.
She came closer,
her smoky eyes—
stelle colorate, tinted stars
over a make-believe Brooklyn sky.

By the entrance,
a man in a white coat
checked his clipboard,
greeted Charlie with a smile
and opened the gate.

—Submitted on 03/30/2020

Patricia Carragon is author most recently of Meowku (Poets Wear Prada, 2019), The Cupcake Chronicles (Poets Wear Prada, 2017), and Innocence (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her novel, Angel Fire, is forthcoming from Alien Buddha Press. Her poems have appeared in Al-Khemica Poetica, Bear Creek Haiku, Jerry Jazz Musician, Live Mag!, Narrative Northeast, and many other journals and anthologies. Based in Brooklyn, Carragon hosts Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology. She is an executive editor for Home Planet News Online.

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Diana Feiger
Bad Wrap

Corona
Tyrant King
Spiked crown 29 proteins
Ruthless Invader
Viral recipe maker
Copy machine
Encapsulating team
Hidden military regime
At the heart of the scene
Protein snapper
Bubble wrapper
Signal blocker
No cell doctor
Bubble maker
New parts shaper
Virus liberator
Signal proofreader
Cell saboteur
Protein scissor
RNA snipper
Escape artist
Pokes holes sharpest
Untagging and cutting
Loose bits to go working
Oily bubble wrap
Causes great mishap
Some have it unseen
“A virus is a piece of bad news wrapped in protein”
they wrote in 1977

—Submitted on 05/14/2020

Diana Feiger‘s poems have appeared in Forum Magazine and Poetry Expressed, as well as in the anthology From the Well of Living Waters: Voices of a 21st Century Synagogue (Kehilla Community Synagogue, 2011), edited by Lenore Weiss. Feiger grew up in Sandwich, UK, lives in Oakland, Calif., and is a retired teacher.

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Amy Parkes
Without Betterment

I.

I’ll say It’s Love in the Time of again without betterment
despite one hundred years; too numerous to name

each virus that came before this one. And this one. (And this
one you’re reading) pale to Gabriel García Marquez

because I am not even trying (not even a little). I have
a decadent old house but only one lover, winterdead

animals in the rafters. Gilt bone china behind age-
spotted glass. Untouched photographs. Brown negatives

tender for opening into light, the fat-armed babies in film
adults now. Discreet financier and toothy journalist—

but such isn’t their fault. They grew up in secreted hoards,
are habituated to unthreading closets without invitations.

II.

My lungs carefully cloistered with the rest of this house,
glassed and body-windowed I open for only

so long on chilled mornings. I want to let the dust out
of my teeth but fear I could be decay and softness

inside ribs. I should let nothing out, not this poem,
which could be a part of the pit orchestra’s symptoms.

The virus dewy from my mouth to your mouth to—

III.

My lover isn’t sick yet, his children not sick yet. Each
day I take more quickly than before. I know already

I’m dead on my feet. I want a last time to catch
the daffodils’ rising.

—Submitted on 03/29/2020

Amy Parkes is a queer Nova Scotia poet living with mental illness. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Bacopa Literary Review, Barrelhouse Magazine, North Carolina Literary Review, and other journals.

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Sam Barbee
Beatitude-19

Farewell to breathing easy

… happy hour specials

… bad fast-food

… elective surgeries

… grand premiers

… storybook wedding

… cap and gown

… little league world series

… home run trot

… ace, set, match

… first and goal

… what Lebron says… wrong place, right time

… the 99%

… to the plasma sellers

… indigenous peoples

… the second responders

… humane solution

… unnourished pain

… her only love

… his only love

—Submitted on 05/14/2020

Sam Barbee is the author of Changes of Venue (Mount Olive Press, 1997) and That Rain We Needed (Press 53, 2016). His poems have appeared Poetry South, The NC Literary Review, Crucible, Asheville Poetry Review, Pembroke Magazine, and other journals. A recipient of a Poet Laureate Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society, he lives in Winston-Salem.

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James Croal Jackson
Self-Isolation (March 17, 2020, 8:50 AM)

Sirens all day, every day.
And steady rain
out the window. I won’t
go out there. I’ll sit
in this gray room
with twin computer
lights. Some days
it’s either fog
or an ominous cloud.
Today it is both.

—Submitting on 03/29/2020

James Croal Jackson (he/him) has a chapbook, The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017), and poems in Pacifica, indefinite space, and Philosophical Idiot. He edits The Mantle. He works in the film industry in Pittsburgh, Pa. jimjakk.com

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Mary Nichols
Big Rona, in Boxes

Let us burn our skin together in the bonfires of our sinks
(They say the disease may recoil from throbbing flames of water; the lipids around the corona deliquesce into bio-obsolescence)
It lingers unseen in children, lungs and alveoli untouched by gasping
Unlike our grandmothers, who we bury to save evanescent molecules of Gross Domestic Product
Let us scrub and flay our hands, then the face
The enemy is incognito
It’s everyone you know, including you, and no one
(Paranoia seeps into consciousness like McCarthyism)
Let us scrape off our body
The opposite of newborn, soaked in industrial chemicals and bleeding from the obdurate teeth of fingernails

We can now sink into the concavity of the shower which is like a bowl, or a large, oblong contact lens
Please don’t let me pluck back the curtain to the side
Or draw the curtains on mannerisms of old routines, lovely and faded like my mother’s wedding dress
The house is a box
And its rooms are also boxes,
Ersatz boundaries of choice
They are not democratic nations; the rooms organize and structure my quarantine
I comb hair product in this quadrant and bathe my hippocampus in dreamy amnesia over here
Our restlessness is quadrilateral, folded and contained into domicile cubes
The virus’s breath tickles anxiety, and its teeth nibble on computer screens of empty funerals; only the corpses can attend
Its hands wrap bows of terror around the boxes, and I am the Lysol wipes, smothering lingering old testament pestilence
I am the cold austere metal
Cracked and bent in the check-out line,
I press my equal and opposite force into the anguished glove of
148 countries;
I am my hair, soaked from rinsing off sad eyes in grocery store aisles, dripping microscopic pools for covid-19 to bellyflop into;
I am the dead cells in my retina, blurs and inky sands mask plots of
Breathing air,
Doctors appointments recede beneath the short sightedness from governmental denial;
It could lead to my blindness.

I am Big Rona, the epithet my best friend devised
Personifying the coronavirus into a bumbling, scattered aunt
Transmogrifying the invisible into the visual
And fear into whiskey lips and tobacco-stained grins

—Submitted on 03/29/2020

Mary Nichols graduated in 2017 from the College of William and Mary with a double major in psychology and Hispanic studies, and currently works as a professional services engineer at a tech company. This is her first publication.

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Mariah Rose
Sweetwater

The dogwoods are flowering. Petals a snowdrift, tissue that sticks to my heels, trails across the living room floor. Pollen dust and mud smear. My hair smells like woodsmoke my mouth tastes like copper—cabernet in a mason jar. I pick lint from the laundry, curdled and grey and worming. I feel like I’m married (here is the church, here is the steeple) I’m growing soft in the middle, belly like putty. I draw myself, nude. Bury my nose in that freckled space between your shoulder blades, kneading the skin like dough. Fingers sticky with your honeydew.
Honey, do.

—Submitted on 05/06/2020

Mariah Rose publishes an annual zine called Boy Tears Mag. Her work has been featured in Apiary, Hyphen, Yikes, 5×5, Medusa’s Laugh Press, and other journals. Rose lives in Philadelphia, where she is a music journalist.

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Vernita Hall
Tanka Trilogy: Orchids in a Time of Siege

Jisei — A death poem

All the plants I’ve killed
you gift me frail white orchids
on my last birthday

*
Water zealot, I
baptize her dailysoon mourn
those first fallen blooms

*
Sheltering in place
this time—what blossoms between
us nowmight save one

—Submitted on 05/13/2020

Vernita Hall is the author of Where William Walked: Poems About Philadelphia and Its People of Color (Willow Books, 2019), winner of the Willow Books Grand Prize for Poetry and of the Robert Creeley Prize from Marsh Hawk Press; and The Hitchhiking Robot Learns About Philadelphians (Moonstone Press, 2017), winner of the Moonstone Chapbook Contest. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, African American Review, American Literary Review, Atlanta Review, and Mezzo Cammin, among other journals and anthologies. With fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and Ucross, Hall holds an MFA in creative writing from Rosemont College and serves on the poetry review board of Philadelphia Stories.

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