Lucie Barrios
Dystopia

Reflect upon your sins,
Said the archbishop
I thought of people dying
And mothers who can’t afford diapers but even if they could the shelves are empty

And a garage filled with 99.99% effectiveness
Stolen from the hands of people who could afford to pay

The coming of Christ is at hand
But this year there is no church service
No family gatherings

My mother cries as we pray the rosary
I am afraid my grandmother will die and we will not know

We sing and make jokes and use too much bandwidth to keep from going crazy
Imagine houses with horses and tennis courts and wine cellars
Acres of freedom away from everyone

We’ve been told to sew our own masks

Spring break is cancelled
Offices closed down for who knows how long
Everyone left unpaid
And yet the line snakes a poisonous coil round the grocery store

In the leafy green fields of California
A squirt bottle of hand sanitizer burns clear paths
Across an hombre’s hands as he pauses in his strawberry picking for lunch
There’s nothing wrong here, says the boss, business as usual

I thought today about running
My finger down the page in the book
Of Revelation
In search of answers

Hellfire and disease and earthquakes
And now too, the rockets of war?

I hold you in my heart
And remember love

Lucie Barrios is a 2019 graduate of Webster University, in St. Louis, with a degree in English. Since childhood she has felt a deep kinship to a wide variety of poets and she has been a voracious reader of fiction. She believes that letter writing should be revived and that sharing food is the sixth language of love.

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Rachel Finston
A Poem for COVID-19

We stay home from work,
you sniffly, me achy.
We sleep for ten hours.
There is an element of risk in our work
I push books, you push fluids.

I cry watching a comedy,
my family is on the other side of the ocean.
I don’t know
if it’s just my medication
or if I’m really afraid.

Our cat purrs beside me
He, at least, is safe.
You sleep in our bed
I can hear your uneven breath,
your body trying to remember
how much it loves to live.

Rachel Finston lives and works in Washington, DC. She won first prize in the Fredericksburg Coalition of Reason 2017 Religious Freedom Essay Contest. Her favorite pastimes include gardening, reading, and arguing about politics.

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John C. Krieg
Coronavirus Has Nothing on Retirement

1. This Thing is Getting Serious

In all seriousness, I know this is a
legitimate National Emergency
And I must do what I can to protect
my family, and myself from it

But there are some things that smack of panic
Hoarding, runs on toilet paper, and sanitizer(s)
And some things that smack of despicable greed
Price gouging, and offering fake testing products

This is like The Book of Revelation
In real time, and in Technicolor
Great good and great evil are on high display
I’m praying that good will triumph in the end

But coronavirus has nothing on retirement
For nobody knows where I am
Or what I have been doing
Or if I’m dead or alive

A six-foot safety radius?
Try the circumference of the globe
Social distancing?
Try 5 acres removed from my closest neighbor

Containment zones
Mine starts at my property line
Chill out? I’m like a block of ice
Get a grip? I’ve never lost it

We’re always stocked up on food, anyway
Have email and satellite TV
Bank and pay bills over the internet
Have well water and 500 gallons of propane

So as long as the electricity stays on
Our lives go on as usual
We are the lucky ones, I know, and I
Feel remorse for my less fortunate brethren

And my grandchildren living at home
With the school closed, they are
going to go bonkers with boredom, and
Demand attention keeping me from my writing

Circle the wagons
Us versus them
Pray that some Americans
don’t turn on other Americans

“We are all in this together,” is the
current rallying cry, but I wonder why
It took this pandemic for the nation
to actually believe it

CFS: Coronavirus Fatigue Syndrome
It’s coming, if it isn’t here already
People will let down their guard
Paying for that with their lives

I’m paying for my retirement with my life
My golden years are taking years off my life
I blame myself first, and the system second
The truth being that when you retire—you’re forgotten

In retirement, many are under
Self-inflicted house arrest
Spending as little as possible
And never going anywhere

So retirees are at least a leg up
On the rest of the country
In knowing how to deal with
Isolation and loneliness

Coronavirus has nothing on retirement
Except the speed at which sufferers will die
A sad truth, for death is death, but now
We may not get to choose our time

2. A Few Days Later

It’s Saint Patrick’s Day!
And nobody’s throwing a party
It’s raining again in Southern Cali
So I watch the news that’s saying:

Coronavirus! Coronavirus!! Coronavirus!!!
Coronavirus! Coronavirus!! Coronavirus!!!
Coronavirus! Coronavirus!! Coronavirus!!!
Coronavirus! Coronavirus!! Coronavirus!!!

Say; have you heard about the Coronavirus?

This thing is like the grayscale
On Game of Thrones
Where’s John Brady when you need him?
To research our salvation in a dusty old tomb

And even the Mad King
Seems to finally get it
He can’t laugh and lie
His way out of this one

He’s no longer mocking all of us with:

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!! The sky is falling!!!
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!! The sky is falling!!!
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!! The sky is falling!!!
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!! The sky is falling!!!

Hey Mr. President: The sky is falling!

Dr. Edward O. Wilson tried to warn us humans
That as the apex species, we weren’t so special, because
All those little creepy crawlies at the bottom of the pyramid
Were looking up at us, and plotting our demise

And Now a Constructive Suggestion
Build the necessary facilities to house
the poor, the sick, the huddled masses
Wasn’t that the point of the Statue of Liberty?
After the plague, use them to house the CCC

Bring back the CCC!
Hasn’t this thing taught us the need for preparation?
Let the youth have an alternative to national service
That doesn’t require toting a gun or killing someone

With a standing peaceful army on our own soil
We won’t get caught with our pants down again
Those creepy crawleys aren’t going to give up, and the
New normal is to assume that pandemics are normal

3. Examining the Arc of a Lifetime

This thing is like a giant meteor
Heading straight at geezers
With preexisting conditions that most
Gave to themselves
Those with Type II diabetes (me)
And COPD (she)
We have never seen anything like this in our lifetimes
Or we would have paid closer attention to our health

That’s the worst of retirement
You have the time to ponder
The things you should have done
Not that it makes a bit of difference now

Coronavirus has nothing on retirement
Except the speed at which suffers will die
A sad truth, for death is death, but now
We may not get to choose our time

John C. Krieg is a retired landscape architect and land planner who formerly practiced in Arizona, California, and Nevada. He has written a college textbook entitled Desert Landscape Architecture (CRC Press, 1998). His work has appeared in A Gathering of the Tribes, Alternating Current, Blue Mountain Review, Clark Street Review, Conceit, Homestead Review, Line Rider Press, Lucky Jefferson, Oddball Magazine, Palm Springs Life, Pegasus, Pen and Pendulum, Saint Ann’s Review, Squawk Back, The Courtship of Winds, The Mindful Word, The Writing Disorder, and Wilderness House Literary Review.

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M Zaman
An Ode to COVID-19

Sly and stealthy, like your other brethren
you too have jumped from host to human;

(an animal, rogue with a wrathful ruse,
and pillager of habitats—all non-human).

A befitting response, a tiny strand of RNA;
a life; with a limitless capacity to mutate,

morph and live; gargantuan in gangly;
you let man know the limits of human

indigence; and of all those Anthropocene
Sins, a brilliant riposte to limitless insult.

This Earth is but a blue dot; precious and a
verdant ball, living and suspended; it is to be

shared; and thank you for reminding me that
you too, minuscule though, exist.

A poet and an accidental physician, M Zaman lives with his lovely wife on the Raquette River in a quaint college town on the foothills of the majestic Adirondacks, enchantingly irenic with rivulets full of toothsome water, and hills rarely trodden. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in High Shelf, Stardust Review, Black Horse Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Ulalume Lighthouse La Piccioletta Barca. He has recently published a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh into Bengla, his native language.

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August Luna
I’m Losing Who I Am

Losing who I am
Marooned on this island
Covered in blankets
Can’t go home yet

Days blend together
TV shows blend together
All my feelings blend together
Into feeling alone

Fear keeps us apart
The unchanging and unfamiliar
Wreaking havoc on me
Losing who I am

Homework sits
Unfinished and unnecessary
I have all the time in the world
To feel trapped
To feel helpless
To feel lazy and useless
I fear I’m losing who I am

This is August Luna‘s first publication.

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Raj Tawney
The Business End of COVID-19

My wife was laid off on Friday
Her bosses chickened out
Blame the virus, yeah, sure
She’s just a figure, a stat on a spreadsheet, a dollar in the bank
Who lets a valued employee go during a pandemic?
Cowards, that’s who
“It’s business, it’s not personal,” they say
Bullshit. It’s always personal
No remorse, no sympathy
Dumped her via Zoom
Couldn’t even look my wife in her digital eye
Maybe the distance helped them feel nothing,
But I feel my wife’s pain, her sadness, her loss, her fear
Our mortgage is due soon, who’s paying it?
If she gets sick, who’s covering it?
Blame the virus, yeah, sure
Blame each other, too easy
I’m not giving up on her, on us
We’ll get through this tunnel
and come out the other end
Brighter, stronger, wiser, less trustful
More hopeful, I hope
I hope, I hope, I hope

Raj Tawney is an American poet, essayist and journalist. Recent contributions include New York Magazine, The Boston Globe and O, the Oprah Magazine.

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Patricia Nellene Deal
Mid-March 2020 Revision

Last week we called it the coronacation.
Memory’s distancing in magnitude
of need not known before the breadth
of a collective sigh could exhale. Disbelief
mute in living rooms watching new cases
climb charts daily like ladder rungs leading
to anxiety. Death falls from the ladders
held standing by hospital workers forced
to make protective gear with two sided tape
In hospital conference rooms across America.

Patricia Nellene Deal is a writer in McLean, Va. Her current writing focuses on the exploration and challenges to the ideas of a single story, memory, and the resilience of the female spirit. Here poems appeared in the Clerestory Press Quarterly, a journal formerly published by the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta.

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Timothy Kelly
More of the Same

A year ago—The alarm bells go off on the cardiac monitor
I run my hands under the hand sanitizer
Scrub for 20 seconds
To keep from bringing harm to others
The monitor broadcasts its anxieties
To the entire Emergency Department
The bedridden woman, with her husband by her side
Worried about its tone, the smell of fear on the horizon
My reply, as always, “When I look concerned
Is when you need to be worried”
As I gesture to my rock hard face, the shadow hiding
The year of practice to remain motionless

Today the winds gust in and out of your lungs
Asking me if you are going to get sick
During our therapy session
If your Omma and Oppa will be safe
From the Germ. The silent invaders
Destroying the family, you finally have settled into
“Does this face look worried to you?”
The same rock face, weathered slightly from the storms
A cough comes from the other rooms
And the bells go off once again

Timothy Kelly‘s poems are forthcoming in The Emerson Review, The Weekly Write and an anthology from Riza Press. An introvert trained to appear extroverted, Kelly is a self-described healing artist, social worker and volunteer firefighter (emergency medical technician).

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Cassie Doubleday
The Kleenex Is a Landmine

The kleenex on the street has become a landmine: my surrender is social distance,
innocence lost among thy neighbor, we are all suspects in Virusland.
My sanity is forgotten to sanitation
and latex gloves,
and cotton masks.
Don’t look at me.
The Free World was coughed on, Under His Eye the documents read in red,
sneezing twice on the revolutions, lungs collapsed; we’re going to need Joan of Arc’s soap.
Thoughts and prayers are finally not an answer. The microscope has become
the cross
and the lab
a church.
Grant us the serenity to escape the hands we’ve held. Science, Thy Will Be Done.
The media machine is lovin’ it, they’ve supersized fear. Panic is a profitable stock,
rising chaos and downing supplies. “It’s crazy, it’s a zoo.” We need an Oprah giveaway:
toilet paper for you!
And you!
And you!
I’m rectangle living, a hostage to my home, suggested to find connection on my screen,
the same screen they said confined me. Show me your corona dance. What are you wearing?
Sing it for me from your balcony, “Don’t act like you forgot…
I call the
shots,
shots,
shots.”
There’s a kleenex laying on the floor in the hall of my apartment, it guards my freedom.
A potential death sentence, a tissue is now my enemy: this is a viral war,
and you do not have enough aloe vera to soothe my mental mucus. This soap will cut you.
Welcome to the Sick Free World, please stand two meters away from me.

Cassie Doubleday is a Canadian poet, writer, and journalist currently living in France. She has a graduate diploma in journalism from Concordia University. Her work has appeared in Subversions Magazine, The Canadian University Press, Cult MTL, ForgetTheBox.net, The Link, and others.

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Libby Foster
Love in the Time of Coronavirus

It appears the kids are safe to this
Indecisive on life
Invest in something disaster proof
Coming back home to cozy ruins
Has your heart stopped fluttering
for the things you felt in freedom
See me for the first time
since graduation
scream
DO I NEED TO REMIND YOU
OF THE FINITE NATURE OF LIFE
from six feet away
Feeling a little feverish
The small of my back
curves
as you step closer
Know I’m not your patient zero
We fight over test kits
to prove we’re both positive
Can’t use strangers as defense mechanisms
in this time of social distancing
Fantasies of forced quarantine
Forgot how time stops between four walls
We dry cough in the darkness
Holding each other through cold sweats
Wake up with sore throats
Is this the kind of sickness
We can’t forget about in the morning
Severe cases are starting to appear in the youth
Once every hundred years
a pandemic forces us to feel something

Libby Foster is a freshman at the University of Alabama studying English on a National Merit Scholarship. Her poems are forthcoming in The Blount Truth, a University of Alabama literary journal.

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