Frank Dullaghan
Holding On

You were only killing time and it’ll kill you right back
—Meat Loaf

If there’s much point in holding on
it’s in the hope that times will brighten.
It’s more desire then expectation.

When hope is scraped down to the bone,
when every promise has been broken,
what point is there in holding on?

Yet that longing to believe’s not gone
despite the facts, despite the notion
that it’s more desire than expectation.

So, I choose instead to live like one
who will survive these days, that darken
what hope I have in holding on.

I understand there’ll be no fortune
to ease my senior years, I’ll blossom
some other way—no expectation,

except to kill the time I’m given.
Too many who are ill will worsen;
too many good will lose their holding.

Yet soon enough it will be done:
this waiting, this sacrificial token.
This is the art of holding on.
It’s more desire than expectation.

Frank Dullaghan is an Irish writer living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is the author of four poetry collections, including Lifting the Latch (Cinnamon Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in Cyphers, London Magazine, Nimrod, Poetry Review, and Rattle, among other journals.

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Amber Anderson
News Live in Reel Time / Shelter in Place

I can’t stop reading the news I’ve been
obsessively refreshing the page for updates I
watch the death count climb like
waiting for the ball to drop on new years eve and
it feels fucking morbid.

Big Brother is towering and
whoever his shadow lands on
has to cower in place.

It’s like a game of red-light/green-light
that no one can stop playing—but in this
version if you don’t follow the rules you
die instead of just being out.

Amber Anderson is a single mother returning to college in her thirties. Her poetry has appeared in Pacific Wave.

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Jen Schneider
Haiku on Human Spirit, Resilience, and Creativity

Early bird specials
exchanged for senior-only
shopping times. Germ free.

Ultra-lux dining
replaced with white gloves
and curbside pick-up.

When Spring curtains close
on high school production crews
radio shows sing.

As supplies dwindle
and toilet paper runs low
barter days emerge.

A three-ply four pack
trades at a steep premium.
Basic needs come first.

City streets empty
as urban dwellers retreat to
high-rise balconies.

Spirit shops shutter
as governments scramble
to catch loose droplets.

Courtesy handshakes
cease as fingers curl and push
thermometer tabs.

Ethical debates…
Five packs of ramen remain.
Purchase one only.

Activists converge.
Go Green converts to Go Home. Now.
United we stand.

Get Out the Vote pleas
shift to cyberspace convos.
Door knobs turn deadly.

Chilling statistics
yield emergency measures
with long term impact.

Jen Schneider’s work has appeared in The Popular Culture Studies Journal, The New Verse News, Zingara Poetry Review, Streetlight Magazine, Chaleur Magazine, LSE Review of Books, and other literary and scholarly journals. An educator, attorney, and writer, Schneider lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Philadelphia.

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Amanda Held
Plague

The silence was too scary.
Not even the birds and crickets
sang. I became frustrated with
living in fear. Wrapped in a
blanket of sorrow, I began

to cry until my tears were gone.
The only sounds I heard were
my breathing and heartbeat.
I decided I made my own fate
then, but it was just impossible

to have enough energy to
laugh uncontrollably as I once
did, chest heaving up and
down heartily as my eyes
would form tears of joy. Rising

and fading as I was, I found
comfort in the air, in breaths,
in the fresh smell of rain as a
thunderstorm rolled in, the
first of this spring, powerful

and unyielding. Despite the
state of the world around it,
the storm carried on, knowing
the trees would bow, the sun
would set, and the people

would watch as they had, time
after time. And even so, the
constant of change was familiar.
I could still see the branches
on the trees swaying. I could
still feel the cool of the air in

my lungs. And as I sat in the
moment, mindful of my
surroundings, the fear of the
world no longer plagued me.

Amanda Held is a midwest native poet. She earned her BA in writing from Carroll University in 2014. Her poems have appeared in The Barefoot Review and Century Magazine. In her free time, Amanda enjoys playing board games, spending time in nature, and playing with her tiny cat son.

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Olivia Kingery
In quarantine

thousands of us, millions of us,
sing the same song with lips
partly parted, touching softly,
then tongue, to wet an appetite
we have no idea how to satiate.
It tastes like fear, in quarantine,
in a lockdown felt in the marrow
of our bones. It tastes like grief,
the loss of this and that and finding
time is a thing which does not pause.
Here, in the silence of my muscles
moving against each other, the sun
is still blazing and the birds still call,
maybe even louder, say hey, look
at the quiet, look at the quiet;
and the lips reply, the quiet, the quiet.

Olivia Kingery is a farmer of plants and words in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She is an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University where she reads for Passages North. When not writing, she is in the woods with her Chihuahua and Saint Bernard.

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Sarah Losner
Infection

the world is infected
even I am not immune
although I wash and
pray and nourish and
rest I feel in my heart
and in my head that
we are not safe and
my palms sweat and
my heart races and I
feel as though I am
going to combust into
a thousand tiny shards
of glass because I am
stuck inside and have
not seen another human
in five days and my
family won’t see me
and I can’t go into
work or take the train
or step outside without
fear of the unknown
and fear of judgement
and fear of infection

Sarah Losner received her MBA in accounting in 2017. Although she works in the business industry, she spends he free time writing short stories and poems. She is currently working on her first novel.

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Ronda Piszk Broatch
Sheltering in Place

Morning comes like an alarm, a phone call muffled
under covers, red flash hammering steel fire

pit, metal gutters, wrecked hemlock beyond
our bedroom windows. I admit to drinking

wreckage like desire, the way the moon comes
home like a bitten lover. Flicker signals his mate,

drumming solo, all wild stripe and bright
spot of him, his hyena song breaking sleep.

Today I hold tight to loss, the face in the mirror
only mine when I hold its gaze long

enough to realize I’m not the mother who slips
from my mind now, sometimes for hours at a time.

Somewhere there are boulevards, entire
flight paths abandoned today. Someone calls,

a solitary voice across this knife-edge of survival
to brush the fine bones of our ears with news,

somewhere a virus mutates, and still I protect
melancholia like a swallow in the eaves, each

new day widens into a silence broken into pieces,
each of us a tricked-out bird making music

in hope that someone else will hear.

Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Sycamore Review, Mid-American Review, Puerto del Sol, and other journals.

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Lynn McGee
Social Isolating, 1

Last night a cockroach walked toward me
on the counter. He paused, and lifted his willowy
antennae. They undulated in tandem
with each other. He seemed to make a decision
at that point, and high-stepped reluctantly
toward me, as if wading through something
sticky, and tilted his head to read the ripples
of heat and reek that emanated from my mass.
A roach can live a week without his head.
His vented torso sings. The pandemic
settles into our living rooms.

Lynn McGee is the author of Tracks (Broadstone Books, 2019) and Sober Cooking (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), as well as two  award-winning poetry chapbooks, Heirloom Bulldog (Bright Hill Press, 2015) and Bonanza (Slapering Hol Press, 1996). Here poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Ontario Review, Phoebe, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sun Magazine, and The New Guard, among other journals, as well as in the anthology Stonewall’s Legacy (Local Gems Press, 2019), edited by Rusty Rose and Marc Rosen. With José Pelauz, McGee wrote the children’s book Starting Over in Sunset Park (Tilbury House Publishers, 2020). She serves on the advisory board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and co-curates the Lunar Walk Poetry Series with Gerry LaFemina and Madeleine Barnes. Online at lynnmcgee.com.

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Abigail Welhouse
March

The melody of an ice cream truck on a near-empty street in Sunset Park.
The driver wears gloves and as he hands an ice cream cone to a customer,
I’m not sure if he’s a hero or a health risk. The people in line are too close
together, but maybe they’ve been together? My eyes are changing.

I take the dog for a run. I run now. I’m not a runner. I want
to be a fighter that never has to fight. My dog, Richie, stops
and stands on his hind legs. Across the street, a little girl
with a serious face. I wave. Her mom pulls her forward.

At the grocery store, my heart beats faster and over the loudspeaker,
a song: “We’re never gonna survive…unless…we get a little crazy.”

A week ago, the flute repair woman said she wasn’t panicking.
Still, she stepped outside when I started to play.

A week ago, at the cafe, the owner said she wasn’t panicking.
She said, “I can make soup from a stone.”

Abigail Welhouse is the author of the poetry chapbooks Bad Baby (dancing girl press, 2015), Too Many Humans of New York (Bottlecap Press, 2016), and, with graphic designer Evan Johnston, the graphic poem Memento Mori. Her poems have appeared in The Toast, Yes Poetry, Ghost Ocean Magazine, and elsewhere. Online at welhouse.nyc.

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Susana H. Case
That’s Not How It Was

The loneliness of not having a hand
to hold while dying did not exist,
and there were plenty of priests.
It was the prayers that were long,
not the military-like line of waxed wooden
coffins for corpses wrapped in plastic,
wheeled out at night, so many, it seemed
like a parade in a march to cremation.
Sure, burials and funerals happened,
as they unceasingly happen, but car horns
blared, those still fiercely alive
embraced in search of comfort, present
and crying. The laughter in town
of those lucky to savor their lives,
floated in the air, while they ate pesce spada,
drank vino alla spina, as did the cheers
over the latest soccer win; crowds
poured through the streets in team colors,
unworried about masking tape
marking the distance to stand apart.
And the church bells rang for each death,
not just once daily for all the deaths.
The coos of Turtle-doves didn’t seem
quite so loud. In Piazza Navonna,
the tourists jostled, posing for photos
in front of La Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi.
And at La Fontana dei Trevi, a drunken
fool was taking an illegal dip. How dirty
ones hands were–with sweat and gelato,
not busy typing #iostoacasa,
I stay at home, and it was easy to forget
to wash, instead walk to the park for a rest
in the sun, where the person on the bench
across did not listen for a cough.

Susana H. Case is the author of the poetry collections Body Falling, Sunday Morning (Milk and Cake Press, 2019); Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press, 2019); Erasure, Syria (Recto y Verso Editions, 2018); 4 Rms w Vu (Mayapple Press, 2014); Earth and Below (Anaphora Literary Press, 2013); Salem in Séance (WordTech Communications, 2013); and Elvis Presley’s Hips & Mick Jagger’s Lips (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012). Dead Shark on the N Train is forthcoming in 2020 from Broadstone Books. Case is also the author of the poetry chapbooks Manual of Practical Sexual Advice (Kattywompus Press, 2011), The Cost of Heat (Pecan Grove Press, 2010), Hiking the Desert in High Heels (RightHandPointing, 2005),  Anthropologist in Ohio (Main Street Rag, 2005), and The Scottish Café (Slapering Hol Press, 2002). Her poems have appeared in Calyx, The Cortland Review, Portland Review, Potomac Review, Rattle, RHINO, and many other journals. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City.

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