Jennifer Franklin
Antigone Realizes Why She Loves the Dead

The only ones who cannot betray me,
I can talk to them without judgment.
They have said every cruel thing
they will utter, stolen everything they will take.
Finished fighting their flawed battles,
they are as tired as I am, crumpled in the corner
of my bed—hiding my eyes under a silver sheet.
They are quiet; their closed mouths

stitched shut like the dolls I wanted
to smash against my bureau after my mother
lined them up around my room. I recite lines
to them when no one listens to prove I am not alone.
Sometimes, I hear them echo the same words back
while the moon watches with its rough, cold face.

—Submitted on 04/10/2020

Jennifer Franklin is the author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018) and Looming (Elixir Press, 2015). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Boston Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism (New York Quarterly Books, 2019), edited by Sean Thomas Dougherty. Living in New York City, Franklin teaches in the MFA program at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY, and serves as program director at the Hudson Valley Writers Center.

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Brooke Stanicki
For Breonna Taylor, A Fellow EMT

“There is no COVID-19”, a patient said.
As we rode, sirens blaring.
He grasped at my eyes
But found no wool for him to pull

How lucky am I,
I got to be his usher
Show him past the truck of bodies
Push his stretcher to the door.

Once full of blank certainty
His eyes were colored in,
Not with bright knowledge
But with the dark shade of the truth.

They got no such luxury.
No infinite morgue truck
Of lifeless black bodies
To bring the country to its knees.

They couldn’t argue any longer
So they spray-painted our eyes
And now we cannot avoid
The dark shade of the truth.

And now we cannot avoid the dark shade of the truth.

—Submitted on 06/07/2020

Brooke Stanicki is a pre-medical student at Johns Hopkins University. She works as an EMT in New Jersey. In her spare time, between studying and fencing as a varsity athlete for JHU, she writes fiction and poetry.

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Pamela Sumners
This Time Last Year

This time last year a neighbor who always lingers
to talk asked me if we’d noticed the silence of the
chimney swifts and the nighthawks lately. I had not.
This year, with no hum of traffic, with just the shrieks
of little girls in their speckled-egg Easter leggings
tramping the fenced back yard, I do breathe in the full
orchestral range of the birds: the grackles with their
puffed-out pipe whistle plunging so rapidly deep
into a guttural caw, the chimney swifts’ high-toned
chattering, able to call out while still on the wing,
foraging my deck for seeds, battling each other but
sharing with the sparrows. Their claws unfit for perching,
swifts lurch straightaway and bathe by doing a water glide
in flight, their pond in this case a blue plastic wading pool
we keep for the dogs. The swifts cling to the mortar joists
to roost overnight or for nesting, remembering the caves,
the sheer, creviced rock faces jutting over rivers,
the hollowed-out trees where their ancestors foraged. This
is a neighborhood of old trees, of houses with chimneys,
of Olmsted parks and meet-me-in-St. Louis wrought-iron
pickets, a perfect place for the little smudge-gray flyer,
with its cigar-shaped silhouette in flight and its fluid
sweep. They greet the surging dawn like fish singing
into the reef. Sometimes they’ve been seen in small flocks
funneling themselves into the flues like infinitesimal
tornados. They memory-hoard the dark, the cavernous
seclusion of primordial home, love their splendid isolation
in a way that the tenders of lawns, peddlers of provender,
the neighbor instinctually leaning over the fence to you, cannot.

They do not know that the chimney owners are living through
a goddamn featherstroke of history, now nesting with them, awake.

—Submitted on 04/17/2020

Pamela Sumners is the author of a chapbook, Finding Helen (forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press), and the full-length collection, Ragpicking Ezekiel’s Bones (forthcoming from UnCollected Press). Her work has appeared in Ucity Review, Mudlark Posters, Eunoia Review, Shot Glass Journal, Streetlight Magazine, and other journals, as well as in the 64 Best Poets anthology from Black Mountain Press for both 2018 and 2019, chosen by the editors of The Halcyone literary review. Sumners lives in St. Louis with her wife, son, and three rescue dogs, and works as a constitutional and civil rights lawyer.

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Marni Fogelson
Leave the Yeast

Leave the yeast
for those who have
no garden to tend
no lover’s body to tangle with for hours
no children whose hair needs braiding.

Leave the yeast
and the flour too
for them to scatter on the countertop
and knead
until the dough hugs their fingers,
for them to magic into loaves
hollow sounding when rapped with fists
and smelling like the heads of babies
just woken from a nap.

Leave the yeast and the flour
and the idea that these days mean anything more
than the time it takes for bread to
begin and breathe and rise and bake.

There is so much waiting involved
both in baking and in anticipating our uncertain futures.
But one will eat away at us, and the other will feed us.

—Submitted on 06/08/2020

Marni Fogelson is the author of A Cello Named Pablo (CTM Classics, 2017), illustrated by Avi Katz. Her work has appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Domino, Inhabitat, and other journals. Fogelson lives in Philadelphia with her husband, two children, and a beagle mix named Sparky.

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Richard Morrison
White Pelican Release

Illness is the cage
	Opening, the release
		A white pelican emerges
			Extending
				Its neck, its golden
			Bill to the longed-for sky
Hazel eyes dare us to bear witness
	Preening its feathers
Stretching
	Black-fringed wings
The sweet
			Deliberate steps
				To the water’s edge
			Like a pause between
		Each breath
	Catching in the chest

Is this like death? 

	A sudden
		Beating, a flurry
			Flapping then lifting
		Victory lap above our heads, over
	And around the sullen lake
Straight into a blind horizon

Beautiful
	Magnificent bird
How does it feel to leave this earth?

—Submitted on 04/16/2020

Richard Morrison’s poems have appeared  in Provincetown Arts and Christopher Street, among other publications. He holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University (1991) and currently serves as editorial director for Fordham University Press.

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Ronnie Sirmans
Dragons Were Already Here

Poor little baby alligators far from water.
That’s how they tricked us. The babies
were not our gators. They were invasive,
a South American lizard that grows
so large I don’t know why they don’t
call it a dragon. I believe in dragons.
Despite our control efforts, these tegus
have been spotted again where gators
have never feared to tread. But I know:

Dragons were already here even before
the wildlife rangers were keeping track.
Even when I was still in school, I heard
about tegus wearing their pointy white
hoods while drinking beer in the woods.
Back then, tegus with white collars, some
in healthy white coats, turned blind eyes
as desirable men with feared blood died
of an incurable new virus acronymized.

How the years fly by; we come to believe
that we are growing wiser, safer, stronger,
while scales, claws creep into the swamp
and even into our backyards. Were tegus
wearing badges when violence escalated?
Weren’t some tegus wearing flag lapel pins
when they told some of us to shut up? Threats
also can be invisible, so we distance ourselves.
That dry cough? The sound before tegus bite.

—Submitted on 06/08/2020

Ronnie Sirmans‘ poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, Sojourners, Jewish Currents, America, and other journals. An award-winning headline writer, Sirmans lives in metro Atlanta.

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Gina Sassano
Never A Miss

You were never a miss…they didn’t know. Rushed inside while they waited for more rows. Failing miserably on the account of all others. Your dignity and pride now tossed aside. Unable to speak as voices disappear. Pleading for breath but life was so unclear. Uncharted waters diseased by a plague. Spikes on a fawn appearing out of the brush knowing you deserved a better day.

You were never a miss…mind like no other. Stronger than most with hands of steel. You fought a battle never to be healed. Moving on is a thing of the passed. We are forced to live each day as if it has never passed. Angels replaced us to say goodbye. We had no closure and watch the world continue to spin but really never go bye.

You were never a miss…decisions had to be made. Rollercoaster halted as the ride spiraled to deep. Words from the unknown began to speak. Rocking back and forth hoping to kill the deceit. No doors could be entered as parking lots filled with grief. Heroes walk on bye as they were the only ones able to say goodbye.

—Submitted on 04/16/2020

Gina Sassano writes: My father passed from the virus 2 weeks ago in New York. I have never written anything before. My words describe the moment we had to leave him alone at the hospital to the time we had to say goodbye.

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Tim Tomlinson
Dream

Last night’s dream was like a Chagall.
In one corner, William Barr at a bus stop, smiling.

In another, screeching bats hanging
from the ceiling of a thatch hut.

Frantic, I look for transport
up the river that skirts the two.

This, and it’s weeks before things get really hot.

—Submitted on 06/07/2020

Tim Tomlinson is the author of Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire (Winter Goose Publishing (2016), and This Is Not Happening to You (Winter Goose Publishing, 2017). His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. Tomlinson holds a BA and an MFA from Columbia University. He co-founded New York Writers Workshop, and he teaches in the global liberal studies program at New York University.

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Angelica Esquivel
Moon Ceremony

Connected only by our thoughts
across the deserted city, one

on a balcony, another near
Hogback Road, we are setting fire

to our sacrifices—tobacco, sweet-
grass, sage—they flicker once,

twice, and catch the energy of this
collective, that which remains

when the collective’s been disjointed—a
skeleton with too much space

between its skull plates. The wind whips
at our long black hair while

we gaze up at the honey-dipped
moon and share this vision in our

disunion: the dark, tranquil nectar
of the lunar maria—our grandmothers

and their grandmothers. A silent
diaspora, ongoing.

—Submitted on 04/15/2020

Angelica Esquivel is a Xicana writer and artist. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, Gordon Square Review, Chestnut Review, The Coil, and other journals. She lives in Ann Arbor, Mich., with her husband and emotionally needy dog.

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Ryan Clinesmith
Three Poems

Meditation (On Bugs)

They get around, bugs,
dying all the time, upside down.
The worst is when they fly
right at eye level so
when walking down the stairs
one can see everything
only ground is meant to behold.

The worst are the ones that
get inside you like a bad idea.
Spreading and infiltrating deep
held beliefs that make me run
from a cough, or that make
a teacher shun a student.

Like the way a king is crowned
by taking our worst fears
and turning them upside down,
so that what should only be
dragged through dirt gets daylight.

Meditation (On the Garden)

None could walk along these hedges
and miss the smell of summertime
without wondering what’s behind
the design that keeps our one pledge
to smell the roses but hold time
in stasis like a preserved rind.

If profit could resolve the night,
would man miss the opening rose
or design that makes petals tight
like the single bud with many parts
cast off when I withdraw my nose
to claim pollen as my true heart.

Soon they’ll build a labyrinth of hedges
in the parks to keep us apart
when we realize we must go out,
and if I find myself alone
will I feel as though I’m outside
or will I need to scale green ledges?

When we are together, pollen
mills in noon air, the garden wakes
a treasure of jasmine, reddening
rings dimple and swell,
neighbors warn of neighbor’s traits,
“Be careful, someone’ll take those,

boy or rat, don’t leave ‘em!”
It just takes some time for growth,
like trees shed their leaves and yew
back into pasts, through youth
and long return, to grow too old.

Meditation (On Fear)

If the first full moon of quarantine hadn’t happened
just as grandma texted, “The cat’s strolled up
and down the street like a pack of middle schoolers,”
fearing the news tigers can get it too, I wouldn’t be thinking
of all the relevance in otherwise meaningless events;
the Tiger King, Joe Exotic, the old ladies outside
the nursing home holding back their cooped up Havanese,
an ouroboros muttering through masks.
The first full moon of quarantine like the crows
I’ve resorted to herding off the asphalt onto the sidewalk.
I’m struck by the families camped on their front lawns,
making up for lost time, making sure they’re ready
for the first full moon of the “apocalypse,” while crows scare
up into shadows over tents. I’m seeing fear
means nothing without all of this. If there was no love affair
with Cuomo, and Randy Rainbow, there would be no fear.
If we didn’t have anything to lose, would we fear anything?
Perhaps we would fear the loss of absence, which is odd.
I guess something meaningless can be unintentionally cruel,
like telling someone the udon noodles are in the freezer
when you’ve left them in aisle four, or how slowly, over time,
it becomes the running joke, the loss of food, or fear
of grocery stores. I do listen constantly to things
that have no meaning. Should I put on my mask
in the shower? Maybe I don’t need to
speak with grandma for the fourth time today,
and maybe instead I should sit and watch the neighbors’
white linens descend into smaller and smaller rectangles
on a clothesline with two red scarves at either end,
or maybe I should sit in the grass, turn away from the wind.

—Submitted on 06/02/2020

Ryan Clinesmith is the editor of The Poetry Distillery, as well as the poet and writer in residence at the Birch Wathen Lenox School in New York City. He graduated from Emerson College and is an MFA candidate at Hunter College. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Glint Literary Journal, First Literary Review-East, Gravel, The Merrimack Review, Blueline Literary Magazine, and other journals.

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