Elisabeth Ampthor
Shelter in Place

Her mother always told her:
when it feels like too much,
take life one day at a time.
She leans in, holds her own gaze in the mirror.
I’m leaving you, she whispers,
practices saying it over
and over again
until the words no longer clog her throat,
until her heartbeat quiets in her ears,
until she believes herself.

Practice. Tomorrow will finally be the day.

Tonight will be their last nice night together,
the last night she keeps her mouth shut so she doesn’t
ruin the evening,
the last night she will allow him to forget the things
she was brave enough to say
once
but not repeat.

One day at a time, but
days become so many years,
and one more day is unbearable.

Promise. Tomorrow the day will have arrived.

Then: residents ordered to shelter in place
through April 7, at least.
Stay home as much as possible,
and only leave for essential activities.
Prevent the situation from getting much worse.
Every hour counts.

The lock turns, the door opens,
the dog bounds in ahead of him, a sweet,
sloppy greeting.

One day at a time.

—Submitted on March 23, 2020

Elisabeth Ampthor graduated magna cum laude from the University of Cincinnati with a major in international affairs and minors in Spanish and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

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Jill Crainshaw
Dear Midnight,

Who do you talk to
when the wrens and robins
go quiet in a storm?
You know, when lightning
strikes every city in every land
and ignites down deep darkness?

The tiny terrier and I
cock our heads—
She growls down deep
in her belly suspicious
at not hearing electricity
scurry through the house.

Rain tiptoes toward us
then chases us home,
silken hair flying out behind her.
She slips in with us as the
door slams with a sonic boom
and a single metallic flash of light—

Silence sidles in too,
scampers off into corners
and down deep into crevices
and we all peer out the window
at a sky homesick for stars.

Dear Midnight,

Can you tell us what it all means?
You, who wander fields and forests
seeking the fierce feeble embers
of once-fiery mornings—

The tiny terrier and I cock our heads.
Out there—
in the dripping down deep darkness
a train whistle melts
into the rain-slick trees
and a barn owl queries the night.

Jill Crainshaw is the author of the poetry collection Cedars in Snowy Places (Library Partners Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared Tuck, The New Verse News, Star 82 Review, and Panoplyzine, among other journals.A professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, she is the author of several theological books, including When I in Awesome Wonder: Liturgy Distilled from Daily Life (Liturgical Press, 2017). She blogs atdrdeacondog.wordpress.com.

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Bianca Singelstad
An Unconscious Ending

The only life I’ve ever known,
Rests dead.
As I lay in bed
I imagine
The last hug,
Last laugh,
And last
Goodbye
I said.

Teachers say not to fear.
Pastors remind us
That Jesus is here.
Parents shake their heads,
Not knowing when the end
Will come near.

Lights went out.
For the last time.
We closed our math books,
Shut our computers,
And left our friends,
With no consciousness
Of the months ahead.
We didn’t spend enough time
Saying goodbye.
Nobody closed their locker,
Thinking it’d be the last time.
Nobody thought this was the end.

Hope seems distant.
As friends start to respond
Less
And less.
Love seems strained
As fists are raised
Again
And again.
The protesters
Have been silenced,
And now the streets lay dead.
Hope seems lost
And today
Feels like the end.

Bianca Singelstad is a 16-year-old writer from Lake Mills, Iowa. She enjoys being involved in her school, church, and community. This appears to be her first publication, although something else is forthcoming in For Women Who Roar.

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Susan Craig
Water

My husband’s soaking his summer sneakers
the ones we both thought were terribly cool
he’s weighted them down with the super-sized bottle of Lysol
from Sam’s I’d left sitting for years in the back
of the lowest laundry cabinet—O, I find this a hopeful thing
tan canvas turned dark as tannin, sunken and
surrendered in faint clinging bubbles like two willing hands—O
where once the brown plastic tub perched unabashed
on the Corian counter would have galled me—what
a glory I find now in this clutter
of thick sinking laces, insoles yellowed, bend of the soles
to accommodate the mercy
of water.

—Submitted on March 19, 2020

Susan Craig is a graphic designer in Columbia, S.C. Her poems have appeared in Kakalak, Mom Egg Review, The Collective I, Fall Lines, and Jasper, among other publications.

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Adam Oyster-Sands
Banana Bread and Weeping Willows

Hamlet said
all life is suffering controlled by the whims and wills
of luck and the mysterious force of fate—slings and arrows.
I want to feel that Ophelia was wronged
and the true tragedy of the play lies with her flowers
floating on the water under the willows and moonlit winter sky—native and indued.
Her madness comes too quick though,
consumed entirely by the larger than life figure worthy of the title—
his name in everyone’s mouth.
The petulant child screaming for attention
the melodramatic teenager crying for unrequited love
the white man speaking too loudly on his cell phone in the store
the drunk at the bar reciting the same nonsensical story to strangers—
all assaults on our peace.
Before the end though, we understand—come what may.

Some believe our ancestors watch over us long after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil.
They say we can pray to them and they will guide us
offer us aid, direction, comfort, wisdom.
I grew up with my grandmother—banana bread and lukewarm milk.
For the first nineteen years of my life she was a permanent fixture
a never changing north star—bear hugs and back scratches.
Then cancer ate the parts that made her a woman and now,
now I’ve spent more years of my life without her.

Last night in winter air I swear I saw her float across the deck with my breath—a ghost.
And I remembered what Hamlet rightly said
—The readiness is all—
and my ancestors watch and wait
for the reward of their life bequeathed to a future predicated on
luck and
fate and
the loudest voice in the room.
And Ophelia weeps still for her father but more for her own loss—
innocence stolen for the sake of a hero’s journey.
My grandmother baked banana bread and held my head in her lap
as the willows outside the window swayed in the winter wind
weeping with a child unable to give a voice to his pain.

Adam Oyster-Sands is a high school English teacher in Portland, Ore. He holds an MA in humanities. This may very well be his first publication. It will likely not be his last.

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Jed Myers
Seclusion Math

Let us count, but not number,

the embraces before.

Count the imagined

kisses, let them speed through the clouds to reach
just those lips, cheeks, brows

they were sent for.

Let us count now,

with no accounting, the moments our arms will fly
round one another in August,

though we can’t
be sure.

And count, without tally,

those quick subtle starts of the hand
toward love’s faces across towns, ranges,

even across the edge of breath.

Let’s count each

touch between hearts, whether or not
we can sense it, every spark or harmonic,

flicker, hint in the air,

like a small bird’s dark

flash across vision’s border. Count all our care.

Jed Myers is the author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center, 2014), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press, 2019), and four chapbooks. Recent poems appear in Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Southern Poetry Review, Ruminate, and other journals. His work appears in the anthologies For Love of Orcas (Wandering Aengus Press, 2019), edited by Andrew Shattuck McBride and Jill McCabe Johnson; and Take a Stand: Art Against Hate (Raven Chronicles Press, 2020), edited by Anna Balint, Phoebe Bosche, and Thomas Hubbard. Myers is poetry editor of the journal Bracken, and lives in Seattle.

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Tanya Azari
Falling in Love Under COVID-19

he has a sore throat so he asks if he can move in;
his parents are older and
if i have it, you have it. romantic.
of course i say yes.
of course he gets better.

he still comes over and stays,
makes my bed and washes the dishes
in the morning, as slowly as he possibly can.

there is nothing to do with time but waste it.
there is nothing to do with time but spend it
with each other. but

i am drowning in unemployment and isolation
and we both worry i am reaching for him
like a red buoy;
like a lifesaving device.

sometimes he is sitting right next to me
but his mind is six feet away.

on the day
the governor orders us to stay at home,
we sit at the kitchen table and watch
the storm clouds gathering
above the skyscrapers downtown

like shoppers waiting outside the grocery store;
like trash bins filled with disinfectant wipes.

i fall asleep that night, waking in starts and fits,
pressing my face to his neck and asking myself
can we survive this?

—Submitted March 22, 2020

Tanya Azari‘s work has appeared in Drunk in a Midnight Choir, Words Dance, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among other journals. They live in Los Angeles, where they are writing, reading, and FaceTiming their way through the pandemic. Online at azarinotsorry.com.

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Daniel Flosi
Correspondence from Home

I admit when word got out that companies were sending
employees home, to work from home, I was pretty jealous.
While most of the world seems to be testing the technology—
stretching the limits of communication.

Because that’s what it comes down to with technology,
levels of communication.
I mean talking with grandparents, with mom and dad,
can be spotty even in the same room, let alone with
technology thrown in the mix.

Lately I’ve seen my bandwidth stretched so thin
at times I can hardly watch a show. Or share photos, or video chat.
Companies are trying to adapt with us and it’s making me
ask what’s necessary: what things are still worth putting on
a platform. My health? my eating habits? quality of my food?
Or is it my technology? My entertainment, my gaming,
my sports, my gazillion monthly subscriptions to apps,

I’m thinking about how much I need
from grocery stores and wondering if I’m not putting all my
eggs in one basket, which I’ve been warned against.
We all have for some time now.

Look outside, look to nature and see all the variety,
it doesn’t take long to realize that
the variety is what is making each and every thing work
nothing is dependent on one source,

everything depending on each and every other thing
yet I am pretty dependent on this one source: the grocery store.
I’m pretty dependent on the few global corporations like Amazon,
or Google for my information, which have made it their aim for
us to depend on their one source, and now what?

I need to be able to depend on myself a little more.
Though I’m not sure if I have the authority to change this.
To be a source of variety, to dig my hands in the earth
and pull up root vegetables, potatoes, and onions and bring
them to the dining table, the family table.

I’m lucky, though, to still have the chance to bring home
the bacon, I suppose. My wife, on the front-line, a grocery-store worker
is also being stretched thin with early mornings and sleepless nights.
Here is an opportunity to appreciate those that we do depend on
regardless of the social hierarchy—They aren’t teachers,
or police, or fire, or doctors,
they aren’t scientists, or academics, or public officials,
or even Iron Man, or Spiderman,
but they are first responders. Our grocery store workers are
first responders.

While the world is testing the limits of communication
with technology, I’m testing the limits of my communication
through poetry, through living a life for my loved ones—
to work for them and spend time with them in a more direct way
while the whole thing comes crumbling down around us.

Dan Flosi’s work has appeared in Vita Brevis and Prometheus Dreaming. A husband and dad, Flosi lives in the greater Seattle metro area. Online at entertainedamerican.com.

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Shannon Lippert
In Between Endings

The first time the world ended, I was almost 12
and later, my dad would tell me, it was the day I learned
that adults lie.

I think that was a more formative lesson, and now that I am grown
how will he know that I am telling the truth
when I say I worry about him?

The truth is that I lie a lot. I omit parts of me from public life: I smoke
to keep a panic in, call myself quirky instead
of disabled, and scared.

In between endings there is no quiet, but there is an understanding,
and as we wait for the next one, we learn how to live
with the leftovers, and hope they last.

Today I was asked what my role in the apocalypse might be.
that first time, it was “girl who watches the news,” over
and over, and over.

It was an unusual day. Like a Monday out of turn, right after Friday.
The kind of shift that seems seismic in hindsight.
The kind of shit you only see once.

This is the second time the world has ended in two decades.
Endings are not beginnings, that’s a lie. They are
wreckage, they are dust, too bright.

I don’t want a role. I’m no good at this. I make egg sandwiches,
I knock on my neighbor’s door. I say hello.
Over, and over, and over.

Shannon Lippert is a poet, playwright, and performing artist. Her poetry was featured in GlitterShip episode 55, and has appeared in The Practical Handbook of Bee Culture. 

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Linda Suzu Kawano
What Do You Believe?

Do you believe that which you cannot see
is likely to encounter you or me?
Do you dare share hand or hug?
Are you defiant or downright smug?
Do you agree with those who said
Virus is Asian,
Not Caucasian?
Does the idea make you choke?
Or is the label merely a joke?
A stand up comedy?
A pathogenic parody?
Are you heeding the advice of many
or just ready to jetty
all warnings and go about your daily routine
out in the open where you can be seen
Cavorting,
While retorting…
Hand sanitizing,
social distancing,
mucosal misting?
If your habits are the latter,
it can, for some folks really matter.
For you may be assisting in the spread
of the dead.

Linda Suzu Kawano is primarily a business and science writer. Her work appears in the volume Gender, Science and Innovation: New Perspectives (Edgar Elgar Publishing, 2020), edited by Helen Lawton Smith, Colette Henry, Henry Etzkowitz, Alexandra Poulovassilis. She self-describes as “an Asian American woman, a Baby Boomer with a doctorate in biology who resides in Chicago.”

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