Stuart Gunter
The Big STOP

Checking in with my 85-year-old meditation
teacher during the early stages of the pandemic
I appreciate her response: I am loving this STOP.
Thanks for the offer. I cannot think of a single
want right now. If I can think of a single want
right now it is to love this big STOP and find
the silver linings in slowing down, stopping.
The earth healing from our slowing down,
pollution declining in Italy. I leave my car
in the driveway and walk the dogs, cook beans
and rice over fire. A baseball sits on the back
porch, waiting for the delayed season, robins
and cardinals calling from the redbuds and dogwoods.

—Submitted on 03/25/2020

Stuart Gunter‘s poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Hiram Poetry Review, Appalachian Journal, The Chattahoochee Review, and Into the Void, among other journals. Gunter is working toward a master’s degree in mental health counseling at Longwood University in Farmville, Va. He was recently accepted into the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University. He and lives in Schuyler, Va.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Julianne Chua
Instructions for Cooking Elbow Macaroni

11 minutes

Use the crook of your elbow to support her neck and bring her closer to you.
Hands on waist, extend your elbows until they are taut, no chicken wings.
Relax, keep your elbows straight as you dive in, arms at 12 o’clock.
Lean over, elbows touching knees, hands on top of your head.
Hook your elbows, slightly bent, and slowly sip that champagne.
Elbows on the table, where I can see them. No holding hands.
Move your elbows forward, slide your body up an inch or two.
Lift arms, bend elbows, chest against the metal surface, hold your breath.
Without locking your elbows, bump the elbow of a person that you meet.
For al dente, firmly press your elbow against the traffic light to cross the street.

—Submitted on 03/24/2020

Julianne Chua is an editor of Artsy: Fun with Southeast Asian Art (National Gallery Singapore, 2017), an activity book for children aged 4 to 7. Her work has appeared in the journal Afterglobe, as well as in the anthologies Petua: Reminiscing Grandmother Tales & Superstitions (Basheer Graphics, 2013), a collaborative project between Visual Inconsideration and The HeartThrob Project; Kepulauan: A Collection of Poems (Ethos Books, 2014), edited by Zhang Jieqiang, Hidhir Razak, and Marcus Tan Yi-hern; and Inheritance: An Anthology (Math Paper Press, 2017), edited by Marie Ee and Joy Chee. Chua holds a BA in with honors from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She grew up between Bukit Batok (Singapore), Boston, and Berlin, and lives in Istanbul.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Parker Jamieson
A Panic-Attacked World After COVID-19 Encases Buffalo, New York

The metro is a cesspool
For bacteria. It always was
A host of particulate phantoms
That rarely show their faces
Unless you tinker through telescopes—
Now there is more rise over run,
And the parabola regains its slope.
I can’t make it anywhere these days,
And I have no money to refill
My prescription for buspirone.
I think about how this all started
For me: Rob Halpern reading
Poems in the WNYBAC. Outside, the
City a corpse corrugated like candlelight.
Candles that I had the night before
In a dream of servitude and
My lungs calling, without sound, to the
Woman that I carry on my finger.
The morning before that dream
I had taken my Zoloft. My pilled mind
A landscape of tumult eased
from the broken sticks of youth,
Not the fear of contagion, and
Not the contagion of fear.
The landscape fails to move me
Back to my youth completely
And I can’t take the bus away
From my mother’s house.
Maybe I can go pick up bottles.
Maybe I can build a hut of sticks,
I’ll patch a roof from littered plastic.

—Submitted on 03/24/2020

Parker Jamieson‘s poems have appeared in Poets Reading The News, The Wild Word, Outlaw Poetry, Passaic / Völuspá, and Anti-Heroin Chic, at a minimum. They hail from Woodlawn, NY, and work at Marilla Cemetery.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Adam Oyster-Sands
Mary Oliver wrote that she was worried

Adam Oyster-Sands is a high school English teacher in Portland, Ore. He holds a BA from Dallas Baptist University and MA in humanities from the University of Dallas.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Lucie Barrios
It’s Only Monday

We are posting our goodbyes
And writing eulogies to those with feeble breath in their lungs
And begging, pray
Begging, light a candle

The masks squeeze so tight they leave scars
On the faces
Of blue plastic alien angels
Behind closed doors

The children are opening their schoolbooks at home
Their parents struggling
To explain

Calculate how far behind on rent we are

Ponder whether Mommy’s getting her job back
Write a persuasive letter to her boss

Wash your hands when you get up in the morning
Wash your hands before you go to bed at night

Sneeze into your elbow

Stay at home
Shut the door

Laugh until you cry
Really cry

Count your blessings
And pray that death passes over

—Submitted on 03/24/2020

Lucie Barrios holds a BA from Webster University in St. Louis, where she majored in English.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Leah Metcalf
Hearts Beat

My shower is blue
When I bend down to wash my feet
My heart, fallen
Lowered close to the ground

I am reminded of my female body
My female heart is beating
Because it loves me
Because it loves itself

A nurse cries as she pleads for the chance
The chance—She says
Chance—A word from the Old French “cheance”
To Fall
To keep her family safe from COVID-19

Win—win
Win—win—
Later, she says she was not able to afford to isolate
And horrors befell her family

Her heart beats
My heart beats
Because she loves me
Because she loves herself

How long can she love me?
How long can I love myself?
It is too soon to fall in the spring
Our hearts beat
They will beat—

—Submitted on 03/24/2020

Leah Metcalf is a PhD student in learning sciences and psychological studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before beginning her doctoral studies, she spent two years as an eighth-grade special education teacher for the New York City Department of Education. She has written about time and what it means to children in educational journals.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Cassandra Welch
To Hell With It

I dream of the mountain’s dew on a truck windshield collecting
I dream of the colours of the dawning sky: pinks and purples changing into blue
I dream of the surge of excitement an oil girl feels as helicopters come in in seismic to meet me
At the ground, while I sit, “coolly, indifferently” waiting for them to come
As though I never made a misturn, as though I never feared bad things
Like wolves, Hydrogen Sulfide, bears, injury or Rapid Body Transport.
I dream of the longevity of an industry that government has sanctioned as an essential service
In the face of calamity called a virus
I dream of the world diving in at me in Northern BC, Canada,
While I work the front lines of Health Care as a Social Service Worker and Social Worker
Helping the men of my old industry push themselves further than most can push when they fall
To get there I have two choices: let the other health care workers fight Covid-19 or join in
So I will fight the lions, as a front-line worker, to get it all back
Until I can dream for more, even if I go down
Because sitting in a chair, while my friends might contract it, while we all might carry it already
I would rather be the front-line between hell and forever
I would rather take on a demons of this world, letting my fire burn out this twilight.
There are those who feel empowered on the frontlines,
No matter their height, this time, this fight, this fight, is not a flight for me
It is the fight I fought in the northern bush, and the fight I fight to get it all back
The men, the bush, the Field, the hell found in drills on a lease-floor, which cools and waits
For the front-line workers, the world over, to take over
While the men wait, wait out this new fight
And when it ends, whether I go and join in
When the dusk cools out the gloom of this fever
The men chomp down, restless to do what they are want to do: fight
Work their asses off, to deliver the product that takes their youth
Takes their souls, uses their spirit despite the larger world’s stifled scorn.

—Submitted on 03/24/2020

Cassandra Welch was selected for the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship in 2020 (which she declined to attend university). She holds a personal support worker certificate from St. Clair College in Windsor, Ontario, and attended Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. Welch will begin Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, in the fall of 2020 to pursue a social service worker diploma, and plans to head to Western Canada afterward.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Laura Ingrid
Home

It provides protection from an uncertain world;
a security blanket made of smooth
stucco and cozy objects to rest tired bodies on.
A place to seek shelter from drizzle or heat, unkind faces
or loud noises, any unpleasant entity existing beyond
the confines of its warm and inviting element.

I’ve lived here for a while, never considering the element
of change. It would be difficult to leave this world
I’ve constructed. It might even prove to be beyond
my capabilities. So instead, I choose to smooth
out wrinkles that exist, as though the rooms are faces
that need work. Sometimes it’s good to get worked on.

The more time I spend here, watching tv and laying on
the couch, the more I realize that the element
of outside space is something that I miss. Strange faces
and random repartee, the socializing that the world
needs in order to thrive. This experience hasn’t been smooth
nor has it been easy. I often think of what lies beyond.

If I let my mind wander, it drifts far beyond
its comfortable boundary. All that is light fades, even on
a sunny day. I’m left with darkness and I’ll have to smooth
talk my way out of despair. It’s days like these when an element
like rain brings hope. I feel it cleanse the air, my home, my world
as it dampens flowers and windows and faces.

It’s not that I don’t like this place, I just want to see faces
other than my own. I want to know what exists beyond
these walls I’ve hidden behind for so long. There’s an entire world
out there and I want to be a part of it. Time keeps moving on
and I’m stuck in this box. Life has become boring, there is no element
of surprise anymore. I want to be where things are rough, not smooth.

I want to leave this place. These walls, they are no longer smooth
columns of comfort. They are barricades separating me from faces
I know and ones I’ve yet to meet. I am completely out of my element
here. There’s nothing for me to do but bitch about being bored beyond
belief. Time drags on and on and on
while I wait for the okay to join the new world.

I pray everything goes smooth and there’s good beyond
this, that it’s filled with faces who wish to carry on
as we had before, and eradicate the element that tried to ruin the world.

—Submitted on 03/24/2020

Laura Ingrid is a freelance writer and MFA candidate living in Los Angeles.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Arleen Williams
Wild Rabbit

A wild rabbit nibbles tender grass
Then hops across the hazelnut
Shells beneath the garden table
To settle under the unruly brambles
To rest to think as rabbits do
Silent world in fearful lull

Watchful, the rabbit twitches her ears
Her nose—does she sense my eyes upon her
A gift of Buddha calm and nature’s glory
Quarantined in a silent world

Deep in the bamboo thicket
Along the southern fence line
My rabbit disappears to her burrow
She will return—I know—one day
Hopeful world in silent wait

Arleen Williams is the author, with Pamela Hobart Carter, of twelve short books in easy English, published on the imprint they founded, No Talking Dogs Press. Williams is also the author of of three memoirs and three novels, most recently The Ex-Mexican Wives Club (Independently published, 2019), and Walking Home (CreateSpace, 2015). Her poetry appears in the Chrysanthemum 2020 Literary Anthology (Goldfish Press Seattle, 2020). Williams lives in Seattle, where she teaches at South Seattle College.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Sylvia Hillo
Covid-19 and the Five-Year-Old

He hated germs long before you arrived
Stripping him of mud
Of social fun during a time
Social developing is so important

Mothers at their wit’s end
Sharing sad stories of personal disappointment.
I’m not a teacher
I go to school to be a teacher

Cold and flu season
Tis’ the reason
Cough’s nonstop but so is the preschool snot
Potatoes bought in bulk now sit and rot

Sanity hangs by a thread
Chickens reside in an old tenant’s shed
Bed sounds so good, but
when will it end?

—Submitted on 03/23/2020

Sylvia Hillo self-describes as “a mother and full-time student.” She writes, “like so many others, I have found myself in a situation I was blindsided by. I reside in Los Angeles, Calif., and am a student at California State University Northridge.”

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.