Barbara Westwood Diehl
COVID-19 Abecedarian

After we were allowed to leave our houses, we
blinked at the unfamiliar sunlight like
children carried from a car in their sleep and waking somewhere
distant, a sandy beach with gulls crying overhead, or stars suddenly
everywhere in the sky and not a cotton sheet but grass below, or snow
falling on the ash of campfires, and all the parents
gone, leaving their children alone. We could not
help feeling lost on our own porches, helpless
in the mound of delivery boxes
just outside the door, flattened,
kept safely away for hours, still damp with
Lysol. We had forgotten what our neighbors looked like without
masks. We had learned to enjoy making and wearing the masks.
No need to smile, to engage, to observe or be
observed. We had been unfailingly
polite. We could not be otherwise. We became accustomed to extended
quiet. Accustomed to the crackle of computer speech, without
resonance, without the gut
sense of one body responding
to the touch of another body, no blood and bones
under our words, the muscle of our
voices gagged with bandanas.
We blinked like newborns and learned again, over time, the unbound
exuberance of children waking under stars, to crashing waves, campfires,
young again for as long as we could be young, no
zenith we could see.

—Submitted on 04/06/2020

Barbara Westwood Diehl‘s poetry and fiction have appeared in Quiddity, Potomac Review, Measure, Little Patuxent Review, Gargoyle, and other journals. She is founding editor of the Baltimore Review.

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Meira Kerr-Jarrett
The Porch

The plants on my porch grow toward the light,
which pours into the window over a cityscape
of stone. We turn them to create a sense
of balance in the way their stems and leaves
are structured. Bless the green one
my daughter calls “Planty,” the orange
and red one my son reaches into again
and again, pulling fistfuls of dirt straight
into his widening mouth. In the early days
of coronavirus, in the early hours
of the morning, my husband prays on the porch,
wrapped in his tallis, black and white, and the long arm
of the spider plant keeps hitting him
in the face as he sways, barely missing the fern
that almost died when left in the sun
without much water. Bless all this life
that’s looking and looking for light, bless
this glass porch that lets us see a city at standstill.
From here it still looks the same as always.

—Submitted on 05/28/2020

Meira Kerr-Jarrett‘s poems have appeared in Apricity Press, Lumina, Rio Grande Review, and other journals. She lives in Jerusalem with her husband and children.

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Ann Marie Glenn
March 2020 Who Knew

The sun glazes the rough bark
shimmering in the slide of sun
slipping below the horizon. It’s March
an unusual day, with petty breezes
as citrine light turns into amber
obediently floods the curves and drift
as sun’s corona abashes the streets
numb, where few knew…the day.

—Submitted on 04/05/2020

Ann Marie Glenn belongs to a small poetry group in Lexington, Mass. She lives in Billerica, Mass., with her dogs Gizmo and Bella.

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Beth Dulin
My Dreams Are Full of Dead Men

For Joe O’Connor 1941 – 2020

And I feel like I’ve had my fair share of staring
into expensive wooden boxes at well-dressed bodies
with waxy faces, just rubber masks of those
I once knew and loved.
And you’re quarantined in a hospital bed
in a city that used to be my home
And there’s nothing I can do
but pray, set spells, and try
to reach you to say,
You can’t go now.
You have more to give us.
You survived Vietnam for God’s sake.
When you were asked at your poetry reading
if you kept a journal of the time you were there,
you said, No.
I had one thing on my mind
and that was to live.

—Submitted on 05/27/2020

Beth Dulin‘s poems have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry and in the anthology Bay to Ocean 2019: The Year’s Best Writing from the Eastern Shore Writers Association (Eastern Shore Writers Association, 2019), edited by Gregg Wilhelm. A graduate of Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School, Dulin lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Online at bethdulin.com.

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Claressinka Anderson
On the Consumption of Rare Animals

When this is over,
when the bats lay down
their crowns,
when human mouths,
unlearning, uncover
themselves again—
take me somewhere
in your car. Anywhere.
Hold me. Breathe
on me.

—Submitted on 04/20/2020

Claressinka Anderson‘s work has appeared in Autre Magazine, Carla, The Los Angeles Press, Artillery Magazine and The Chiron Review, as well as in the anthology Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books, 2020), edited by Annie Finch. Born and raised in London, Anderson is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the low-residency Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in Los Angeles.

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Trish Hopkinson
I want to order room service

I want to go jogging down the bicycle lane on the street near my house / gently glide down its slope away from Mount Timpanogos avoid the large fallen pods from locust trees & the sadness of a clump of decomposed bird’s feathers pressed flat by a pickup truck tire / the sadness of statistics of pandemics of children caged of women missing of men lying where they ought not to lie & then turn one-hundred-eighty degrees at the stop sign by the church back toward the mountain filling the sky blocking the horizon / where other sadness must exist between me & earth’s edge where it too turns / curves into ocean & dissolves into space / the sun wrapping it in a fiery blanket of soon-to-be ash & think if only the climb toward home was less steep until I reach my cul-de-sac, slow / to a walk to reach my doorstep & stretch off the intensity / taste the salt of my upper lip / feel the trickle from beneath my breast / step inside into the shower stall / rinse perspiration & pollen & pollution from my hair / finish just in time for that loud knock at the door

—Submitted on 04/05/2020

Trish Hopkinson is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Footnote (Lithic Press, 2017) and Almost Famous (Yavanika Press, 2019). Her poetry has appeared in Tinderbox, Glass Poetry Press, and The Penn Review, among other journals. Hopkinson lives in Provo, Utah. Online at SelfishPoet.com.

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Al Bright
Quarantine Haze

—Submitted on 05/26/2020

Al Bright hails from the hills of West Virginia, and now lives in Los Angeles. Bright’s work has appeared in Right Hand Pointing, Elephant Journal, Wild Roof Journal, and other publications.

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Monica Raymond
Waiting for the Surge

This is what you need
to do to help—lie low
and let bright sun
burn through your window

burnishing you, no need
to jump up, blazing stars
take to this or that cause
with scimitars.

No, just as you were
in the first days
hearing quarrels you could neither
quench or appease,

your heart a field of grief.
Only now you know
as ambulance sirens
keen past your window

it was never yours to stop them.
And so, as packages of pandemic
tumble, hooded patients
chuff and cough, and heroic

nurses leave for work
in the early morning,
know yours is the path
of sitting, waiting, watching,

your heart a field
turned tawny by the sun.
“May all be well,
may what is done be done

in peace, may everyone
be safe” the field of gold
the sun makes possible.
Lay low and hold

the jagged earth, pebble, squabble,
in its fading glow.
It’s still morning. There’s a day, a world
left to come through. Lay low.

—Submitted on 05/26/2020

Monica Raymond has received awards and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in both poetry and playwriting, as well as from the Jerome Foundation and the MacDowell Colony. She held an 18-month residency at Central Square Theatre as one of the PlayPen Playwrights. Her play, The Owl Girl, won the PeaceWriting Award (granted jointly by the Peace and Justice Studies Association and the OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology), as well as the Castillo Theater prize in political playwriting, and a Clauder Competition Gold Medal. An artist and teacher as well as a writer, Raymond lives in Cambridge, Mass.

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Elizabeth Kate Switaj
Our Assorted Quarantines

But the idea of smallness is relative; it depends on what is included and excluded in any calculation of size.
—Epeli Hau’ofa

I’m running thirty miles of quarantine with wandering pigs and semi
-feral dogs. Beach and coral and islets complete
the two-lane road’s atoll. You said that you were strangely proud
to know someone surrounded
by so much Pacific, and now your quarantine
is just your flat. Mine never exceeds an Olympic
pool’s length from oceanside or lagoon. The Olympics were meant
this year for the city where we met.
You’re teaching online. I’m preparing my college in case confirmed
cases hit the island. Flights have gone from eight per week to two
in April. May is unconfirmed.

But mostly we’re waiting to know
who that we know will die.
The closest I have ever come to weightlessness
is diving, and I can still descend
among the unicorn fish, eels, rays, and reef sharks of assorted tips.

—Submitted on 04/05/2020

Elizabeth Kate Switaj is the poetry collection Magdalene & the Mermaids (Paper Kite Press, 2009) and the critical monograph James Joyce’s Teaching Life and Methods: Language and Pedagogy in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Recent poems have appeared in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Rougarou, and The Inflectionist Review. She works at the College of the Marshall Islands.

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Jean Prokott
Empathy Is a Pre-Existing Condition

we can neither insure or assure you & others,
this is the system by design. a doctor died

by suicide. we say keep your composure. we say
it’s not that bad. your empathy is a cold egg,

hold it in your hands, place it in warm water,
crack it open, get rid of it, and start over. send

yourself to rehab for kindness and hope insurance
covers it. the cure is close the door and turn off

the light so no one knows you’re home. post your
empathy online #nofilter. learn to respond:

Am I My Brother’s Keeper? this is not sustainable.
one day, there will be a word for this, a national

diagnosis. some say it’s over-reactive. others say it’s
normal. we say it’s empathy, and only some of us had it.

—Submitted on 05/19/2020

Jean Prokott‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Anomaly, RHINO, and Red Wheelbarrow, among other journals.  She lives in Rochester, Minn. Online at jeanprokott.com.

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