Maddison Taylor
What I Learned This Week About Being Alone in the Sky

If the moon is directly overhead, you will weigh
slightly less. When the moon is full, the side
of the Earth closest to it expands, as if the planet
wants to touch its counterpart. In order to avoid
spreading a virus, you must resist contact
with surfaces, with clothes, with other people’s
hands. This week I learned that it’s hard
to be my mother during a quarantine.
Her fear expands, touches me with its spidery
reach, like the veins that stretch her skin,
making craters. She is scared of dying too
young, leaving the way my father did, before
he could form the words, I love you, before she
felt the pull of her daughter’s love. Still, I have
no calendar to plot the orbit of my mother.
Perhaps William James was right, time gets faster
as we get older. I am moving at the speed
of the light it takes to get from here to there.

Maddison Taylor is a student at Woodbury University in Burbank, Calif. Her interview with the poet Reuben Ellis appears in Athena. She has served as literature editor and social media manager for the student-produced literary magazine, MORIA. Maddison lives in Los Angeles.

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Ella Belvin
Evening Primrose

Does beauty only live in our eyes
and cease to exist without witness?
Does wisdom die with the wise
or hurt fade with forgiveness?

Does love perish in solitude,
dehydrating the heart?
Or does love continue to renew
and keep the broken from falling apart?

Is all hope of normality lost
when hell starts to seep
from every corner, to accost us?
Is death worth the power you seek?

No,
the flowers still bloom in the dark.

—Submitted on 03/23/2020

Ella Belvin is a senior at St. Mary’s Episcopal School in Memphis, Tennessee.

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Amanda Ngoho Reavey
Poem for the End of the World

after Czeław Milosz

When the world ends
people may pillage, hoard food
and water everywhere
except here
at the end of the world
where the sky meets the sea.

Here, when the world ends,
the sun will blaze and smile the way
my grandfather sat up straight
and asked for food the day
before he died.

Here, when the world ends,
the Badjao will sing canticles,
boys will drink Coke from glass bottles,
and bet on fighting cocks.

Here, when the world ends,
Trappist monks will exit seclusion
and walk the dirt road to Sibunag,
offering absolutions.

Here, when the world ends,
I’ll put on my sadok and guide the carabao
through oil-mud to prepare for rice fields,
hoping my son will burn the land and till
(until)
the world ends.

—Submitted on 03/23/20

Amanda Ngoho Reavey is the author of Marilyn (the Operating System, 2015), winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Award for poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in Construction, Anthropoid, Truck, and Evening Will Come, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies Women: Poetry: Migration (Theenk Books, 2017), edited by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa; and Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), edited by Michael Boughn and others. She is a PhD student in poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She blogs about mental health, disability rights, and accessibility at stereo-type.life.

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Caitlin Cacciatore
Brighter Days

winter brought little else save for sorrow—
and when it was over, we called
upon the Gods of sickness we’d all but abandoned in health;
we called one another vile names
and took the names of Jesus, Mary and Joseph in vain;
we fought in the street over petty things;
we abandoned our fires
and all the pretty things
that came along with them—
last I heard,
the nurses were swaying on their feet
against the tidal wave of the sick;
doctors were going out like matches;
(the forces of nature always seem to take us by surprise)
the dying said their wedding vows in makeshift chapels
far from the ones they loved;
the burial mounds grew mountainous,
but I can already see you on the other side of this—
a survivor picking your way across the fields
where the dead were piled in mass graves;
you will plant a flower for every life that was lost,
and I can see you, even now, planting the seeds of hope
and watering them with your tears.

—Submitted on March 23, 2020

Caitlin Cacciatore‘s work has appeared in The Roadrunner Review, Willawaw Literary Journal, and The Martian Chronicle, among journals. She is a Macaulay Honors Student studying artificial intelligence at Baruch College, pursuing a self-designed curriculum including physics, math, computer science, and philosophy.

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Hilary King
Breakfast Before, Breakfast Now

Before, breakfast was yogurt.
straight from the cup, eaten
over my laptop as I researched
camps for the kids or ordered
groceries online, trying to check
off another chore before work,
swearing when a thick white
sour smelling drop of my breakfast
hit the keyboard.
An hour later I wondered why
I was starving.

Breakfast now. One pandemic day
I read a recipe In the news
and make it right away, something
I’ve never done before.
Baked oats. One cup oats, three cups
Boiling water, cinnamon, salt, peanut butter.
Bake for an hour. Thirty minutes in, the kitchen
begins to smell delicious, nutty, spicy, and warm.
I am hungry. I ran 3 miles earlier, walked the dog twice,
unloaded the dishwasher but I’m patient.
I can wait.
I can wait.

—Submitted on 03/23/20

Hilary King is the author of the The Maid’s Car (Aldrich Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Fourth River, Belletrist, Gyroscope Review, The Cortland Review, PANK, Blue Fifth Review, Ki’n, SWIMM, Mom Egg Review, Sky Island Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other journals. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is quarantined with 2 kids, 1 husband, 1 dog, and 1 cat.

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Gloria Deckro
Nostalgia

I avoided doorknobs
stifled an itch
ducked as panic
ricocheted empty
shelves, stowed
one bunch of daffodils
bright as before
we knew something
could latch into us
and multiply,
before
we were scrambling
to claw back
anything familiar.

Now I grate carrots
beat eggs,
every plan curdled,
try to bake cake.
See the fine frosting
of snow
allude to a season
before
we were sheltered
in place.

—Submitted on 03/23/2020

Gloria Deckro is a physician with a background in family practice and the role of mindfulness in health and medicine. She founded the Silver River Institute in 2004 to foster an integrated approach to health skills training. Deckro lives and studies poetry in the  Greater Boston area.

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Lyndsey Kelly Weiner 
Coronavirus 1 and 2

my past-husband sits in the dark in a room I’ve never seen
on the futon that used to be in our living room
laid off after one day of farm work
texted me yesterday he saw snow geese while pruning

evictions are illegal now I say
not I love you or I’m crying
picturing our old blanket around his shoulders
catastrophe is accidental close contact multiplied

*

homeschool unit on 90s rap: podcast on Biggie & Tupac

this is white privilege
that is driving while black
this is why we don’t say the n-word

that is what you say when your friends at your school of confederate flags and maga hats say it

this is where I find the magic words to keep you from saying nothing

—Submitted on 03/23/2020

Lyndsey Kelly Weiner‘s poems have appeared in The Stonecoast Review and Tiny Seed. She holds an MFA from the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. She teaches writing at Syracuse University.

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Daisy Bassen
In Wales, They Are Singing in the Mountains

I’m very busy.
I’m waiting for my nightmare
And so I am watching the crows
On the grass, shadows and shadows,
I am stocking the pantry with inviolables.
You could see it all on my face
If you looked; there are no masks
To be had for all that we are
Garment-workers again in our kitchens,
Crowded together, breathing
The same tumbling air we fear.

I’m very busy, about to run
A one-room schoolhouse,
A clinic, a studio, a sanctuary
And I can’t hurry up or slow down;
Time is made of numbers
And you can’t eat them.

No one alive has ever lived in this world before.
Our advice comes only from the dead.
Descants from the grey hills.

—Submitted on March 23, 2020

Daisy Bassen  ‘s poems have appeared in Oberon, The Delmarva Review, The Sow’s Ear, and PANK, among other journals, as well as in The Dreamers Anthology: Writing Inspired by the Lives of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Anne Frank (Social Justice Anthologies, 2019), edited by by Janette Schafer, Cedric Rudolph, and Matthew Ussia. A practicing physician, Bassen lives in Rhode Island with her family.

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David McVey
Speakeasy

I memorised the instructions; wait until dark
turn right at the market cross, follow
a winding side-street and then at a door
opposite a sash-window with a light gleaming,
make the special knock.

Several times I had to hide in doorways
to avoid arrest for not practicing
‘Self-isolation’. I found the place
and knocked. I breathed the password
and the door was opened.

I did not know what to expect. Extreme
social contact, perhaps, license, libertinism.
Couples writhing amidst a miasma of alcohol
while talk roared and laughter filled a room
of hail-fellow-well-met heartiness.

Instead I found old friends meeting, grateful
for the precious gifts of talk and company.
Clubs and societies and churches had
arranged to gather, to catch up, to
re-forge the social currency of contact.

I ordered a coffee, and as I drank
I joined groups viewing immersive videos of
castles and country houses, parks and gardens,
mountains and moors, lochs and beaches.
Pleasures now forsworn and lost.

Time swept on and we left in ones and twos
to minimise the risk of arrest.
My turn came and I crept home. I heard
shouts and alarms and anger from my imprisoned
neighbours. They don’t know about the speakeasy.

David McVey‘s poems have appeared in The White Launch, Defenestration. His short stories and nonfiction have appeared in Crooked Holster, History Magazine, and other publications. McVey is a part-time lecturer in communications at New College Lanarkshire in Motherwell, Scotland. He lives in East Dunbartonshire.

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Andrew Zanazanian
Lonesome Scourge

Stand you now, our porcelain walls, bedecked with tidings
of ashes that creep through the day’s mortal brawl
with anguished sleep, to endure tomorrow’s hiding
that’s brought earthly motions to an infantile crawl

Keep you to your caverns, of imprisoned joy
To guard our little time, from nature’s ploy
With cloistered hearts and coarse vigilance
We play our parts, for all mankind’s dividends

Gather your wits, and staunch your despair
mete out the days through this baleful repose
as we begin our climb up countermeasure’s stair,
up delicate steps where hope like ivy grows

Steel your selves, come the mutative foe
It’s solitary war, but you are not alone;
though we all have heard the cawing of crows,
we are yet sentinels of life’s frail throne

—Submitted March 23, 2020

Andrew Zanazanian is a senior honors student majoring in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He self-describes as “a first generation American of Armenian heritage, born and raised in the Central Valley in California.”

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