I am tired of prose.
Times like these with so many sudden absences, certain deaths require poetry, whose natural form
of erasure lends itself to our understanding of whyif not why, how
how will we survive?and if not, how will we survive the loss of those who do not
“it’s the end of society,” my father says, frightened as he watches his livelihood disappear, the stocks plummet
the directive to “wash your hands” feels sorely lacking all of our hands devoid by now of palm prints
poetry will not save us, science willbut first it will be poetry
that gets us through
the way it can move through a line with silence, how it’s been preparing us our whole lives to know how it feels to be without
—Submitted on 03/20/2020
Jeanine Walker‘s full-length poetry collection, Painter Dreams a Woman, is forthcoming from Groundhog Poetry Press. Her poems have appeared in Chattahoochee Review, Prairie Schooner, Third Coast, and other journals. She holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston. Living in Seattle, she teaches public school students through the Writers in the Schools program and adults at Hugo House.
Rikki Santer Camus Schools A President: A Cento with Passages from The Plague
We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.
A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.
We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment—five—and those people are all recuperating successfully. But we’re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for us…that I can assure you.
There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.
You know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in…in April, when it gets warm—historically, that has been able to kill the virus.
Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days…like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.
The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done…especially with the fact that we’re going down, not up…We’re going very substantially down, not up…It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.
People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question…the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything…and there is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness.
Well, I think the 3.4% is really a false number.
It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth—in other words, to silence.
No, I’m not concerned at all. No, we’ve done a great job with it. And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.
I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.
Rikki Santer is the author of Drop Draw (NightBallet Press, 2020), In Pearl Broth (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), and six previous poetry collections. Her work has appeared in Ms. Magazine, Poetry East, Slab, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Grimm, Hotel Amerika, and Main Street Rag.
My Love shall linger
Long after the pandemonium is over.
This shift is real.
Prevalent over the whole.
Chains of transmission take on the characteristics
Of hero or antihero.
A touch. A handshake. A kiss.
There isn’t a form of manipulation they don’t love
The first wave is a chorus of voices
And then the Germ is here to stay
It is almost a universal rite of passage
To want to eliminate death.
For if we are dead, there will be no burials.
We couldn’t be happier to find you a cure!
1% of people think of others.
What could go right if that distribution changes?
Think about the view of Earth from space today
“Capitalism. Closed for Business”
A repeated wave
—Submitted on 03/19/2020
Nebu La is a cosmic love poet based in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Nebula spent her formative years in England before making her debut in the New York art scene where she reads poetry and plays theremin together, under the name Nebula and the Velvet Queen. She is the founder of the Ladyjams Collective, which organizes a monthly poetry salon at CultPartyNYC, a witches’ coven in Bushwick. She is a member of the Brooklyn Wildlife Collective in Greenpoint, and last year performed poetry extensively on the indie scene including the Brooklyn Wildlife Summer Festival and Bushwick Open Studios. She also performs poetry as part of the Unruly Collective and the DigiAna Collective. The focus of her work is to end capitalism and bring about peace on earth.
I stifle a cough—
hand flies to my mouth like a hasty surgical mask but
it’s too late;
your accusing eyes turn on me and widen, sink to the depths
of your cloth-bound frown. Heat
rushes to my cheeks mistaken for three degrees above normal
and it’s time to quarantine—
they say.
Too bad my allergies are terrible this year;
eyes wet, inflamed, nose dew in a slow drip
to the top of my lip like tankers in the street but I’ll not
wipe it away. I’ll suck it all
up and gulp down
my mucusy pride. I’ll stare off into the distance
toward some invisible enemy casually adrift, lounging
on a droplet in air—
I’ll finger
my cuts and scrapes from last night’s toilet roll rumble
that made this pain
worthwhile.
But from behind a frenzied laptop my friend,
I long for your touch, the
feel of your smile,
the nestling heat of your body and sound of your undigitized voice—
a tap of a stainless steel knife against a crystal glass
calling us to attention, a remembered
past when we were way too drowsy to see
what might have been.
Natasha Deonarain is the author of the chapbook 50 etudes for piano (Assure Press, forthcoming). Her work has appeared in The Inflectionist Review, Rogue Agent Journal, The RavensPerch, Door Is Ajar, and other journals, as well as in the Little Red Tree International Poetry Prize: 2012 Anthology, and was selected by NELLE magazine for this year’s Three Sisters Award for poetry. Deonarain divides her time between Colorado and Arizona.
Crisp morning glories
Line the pathway on my walk
Beside withered trees
2
Ghost buses rumble
Past an empty bus shelter
While finches build nests.
3
Outside our Publix
Homeless men who searched for butts
Fidget on a bench
4
The Goodwill’s doors closed,
The homeless man who reads books
Finds newfound treasures
5
A murder of crows
Taunts a schizophrenic girl
By stealing her bread
6
In the parking lot
Pouis burn a bright yellow–
Sentinels of hope
Geoffrey Philp is the author of five books of poetry, two novels, two collections of short stories, and three children’s books. His work is represented in nearly every major anthology of Caribbean literature, and his work appears in both the Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories and the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. Philp’s work is featured on The Betsy Poetry Rail in an homage to twelve writers that shaped Miami culture (along with the work of Muhammad Ali, Richard Blanco, Adrian Castro, Chenjerai Hove, Langston Hughes, Donald Justice, Campbell McGrath, Carlos Pintado, Hyam Plutzik, Gerald Stern, and Julie Marie Wade). Philp lives in Miami.
Let’s meet somewhere outside time and space
where panic cannot grab a toehold, in the crevice
between the president and the antiperspirant ad.
Observe as the sun gradually opens
the cymbidium’s curved purple sepals
to its gold labellum, it’s top like a tooth.
Let’s hunker down,
explore our fear of opening, turn
toward the page, the screen,
the one who shares our food,
our bed, our worries.
Let’s unfurl beyond terror
to be touched
by bird or bee or human finger,
wave our delicate fringe
unique, tremulous, perishable.
Meryl Natchez is the author of Jade Suit (Hit & Run Press, 2001) and Catwalk (Longship Press, 2020). She is the translator of Poems From the Stray Dog Café: Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Gumilev (Hit & run Press, 2013), a bilingual edition in Russian and English; and with Tadeusz Pióro and Larry Rafferty, she co-translated Tadeusz Borowski: Selected Poems (Hit & run Press, 1990). Natchez’s work has appeared in The Hudson Review, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, ZYZZYVA, The Pinch Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Lyric, The Moth, Comstock Review, and other journals. She blogs at merylnatchez.com.
cough into your elbow and cleanse yourself
so this pandemic may magically pass us by
there’s something soothing in the imperative
of lockdown and quarantine
imagine the decline
of each neon advertisement
crayoned through the haze
of Detroit and Chicago—suddenly erased—
the engines and turbines
buzzing to the anticipation
of a thousand conspiracy theorists and angel-eyed
internet commentators with bioweapon
origin stories promenading through their minds—
this mythology is someone’s survival and refuge
from the sun-soaked outdoors
grant us refuge
grant us endless apologias and solar flares
the likes of which have never before burnt
the surface of the human race
someone’s watching us
someone’s ignoring us—
this too may pass us by
Lane Chasek is a writer and editor in eastern Nebraska whose work has appeared in Broke Bohemian, Contrast, Jokes Review, Lincoln Underground, Paragon, Plainsongs, Sheila-Na-Gig, and other journals. A featured essayist in the anthology Voices of Nebraska: Diverse Landscapes, Diverse Peoples (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), Chasek was the 2016 and 2017 winner of the Laurus Award for poetry from the English department of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Hallie Chametzky On the day the world closed up shop, a pair of Ugg boots on the sidewalk
After “First Do No Harm” by Bob Hicok
turned on their side and stacked one on top of the other the angle just so,
so that the image comes to mind of their wearer stopping in her tracks
frozen—maybe suddenly or maybe a gradual decrescendo, as if stepping into molasses—
and realizing in that moment, standing (for now) at the corner of 120th and Pleasant,
that rather than give up the now literally sickening sweetness of cupping her hands underneath those of her bodega man
to accept the change from her late afternoon indulgence, nestling her rounded index fingers beneath his outstretched ones,
then extending a high-five to his daughter, backpack still on, in for her late afternoon ritual
of somewhat strangers thrilled to see what she drew at school (it’s her cat, head too big, matchstick legs, purple fur, perfect cat),
rather than being a person who does not do this she will simply topple over and cease to be.
A fly lands on the top boot and I think of a poem hanging on my wall
which I believe is about the souls of bugs and people and the ways we do them harm.
Now the stuff of our joy shelf is looking oddly like harm,
like when in line for the grocery store you give the crying kid a lollipop only to have it snatched away
by the mom who knows his allergies. Sorry, I was only trying to help.
I was only trying to touch and be touched, to feel myself the hero of the everyday nuisance.
There were always ways we burned each other with kindness.
Let’s not have this kind of talk here, in this poem, though. I am building a house, next to it another, soon enough a village.
What is the point of making a home with all the fear and mistrust of the one you left?
I am hammering the nails into the floorboards of a room with doors on all four sides
so that I can walk in at the same time as you and you and you
and we can all meet in the middle and stand firmly reaching out.
I hope the girl with the boots shows up to the party I still feel new to the neighborhood, I’d like to be introduced.
Is there any truth in this whole crowded, quiet universe not arrived at sideways,
squinting, groping in the dark expanse? Alarming, after colliding with nothing for so long,
to find a miracle on the other side of your little, hopeful hand.
That something is a village bathed in light, in the village a house,
in the house a window, through the window a room,
on the floor a fly, in the fly’s hand
my own.
—Submitted on
Poems by Hallie Chametzky have appeared in The Underground, Amendment, and Pwatem, as well as in the anthologies America’s Emerging Poets 2018: Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas (Z Publishing House, 2018), Virginia’s Best Emerging Poets (Z Publishing House, 2017), and Writing South Carolina: Selections from the First High School Writing Contest (University of South Carolina Press, 2015). Based in New York City, Chametzky works as a dancer, choreographer, and archivist.
rain thuds upon six-panel windows
a brush of leaf against the outer wall
we sit huddled separately
in the dim lit ‘living’ room
quarantined
fear of sickness
waiting for test results
not talking
social distancing
apart
huddled in sweat-soiled blankets
in awkward silence
worried if we will make it
checking the internet
death counts climbing
pundits with meaningless advice
will we be a number
or will we live
life on covid-hold
rain thuds upon six-panel windows
—Submitted 03/22/2020
Dale Hensarling is an MFA candidate at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo. He lives in Greenwood, S.C., with his wife, seven dogs, and a parrot named Pongo.
Sohrab Mosahebi On the Third Day of Announcing COVID-19 Epidemic in Iran
We come to being by a droplet
We slide on the musical tenderness of existence
We go to nothingness by a particle
We are dependent on soap and water
Our vitality dependent on the presence of latex
Our morbidity dependent on the width of nanometer!
We turn to smoke, not as a message, but as a passage
We turn to smoke while smoking kills!
We’re doomed to rely on a little ascorbic acid
We are the naked body of David trapped in the stone
Nipples of Leda longing for the swan,
Venus’s arms with no hands
We are the artless outbreak of unalive beings holding an artful outplay!
The tragicomic of disinfection and alcohol
The epic of pandemic
And you are gone
Tumours escorting you
You can’t see here
Particles have learnt the art of devastating
But we still haven’t learnt the art of loving
White pus become white swan in Leda’s vulva
While we still cannot become divinity with our nobility
With a sight to the music of our existence we turn to smoke
But we still haven’t learnt inexistence
—Submitted on 03/22/2020
Sohrab Mosahebi is an English literature student in Iran. His poems in Persian have appeared in print and online in journals in Iran. His research focuses on English Romanticism.
Jeanine Walker‘s full-length poetry collection, Painter Dreams a Woman, is forthcoming from Groundhog Poetry Press. Her poems have appeared in Chattahoochee Review, Prairie Schooner, Third Coast, and other journals. She holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston. Living in Seattle, she teaches public school students through the Writers in the Schools program and adults at Hugo House.