Jane Roe Jesus asks
is it even possible
for any woman
to enter either kingdom
without their thirty silver?
Cheese Cloth Mask Jesus Tanka
Cheese Cloth Mask Jesus
says it’s just a placebo.
No cloth mask out there
can stop a hammering nail,
so why wear any at all?
—Submitted on 05/21/2020
Chad Parenteau is the author of Patron Emeritus (FootHills Publishing, 2013). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tell-Tale Inklings, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, Molecule, and Résonance. He serves as associate editor of Oddball Magazine and hosts the venerable Stone Soup Poetry series in Boston. His second full-length collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, is forthcoming.
I’m separate from the world
and my hair is falling out.
My slippers are askance.
The Letters of Van Gogh in my hand.
His left eye in odd angles,
and so the socket. Other eye
smooth, like any human.
Face lined in random spots,
near-vertically, same stroking
as the strong, excitable brows.
The furrow between the brows,
the bump on the line of the nose.
Nothing easy for the man,
his body lit by electricity
but forced to sit, to wait,
for some sanity, some calm,
an effort, and this pandemic,
when we are all sitting,
doing a little work, watching a little
t.v., waiting
for something to approach.
—Submitted on 04/02/2020
Susan Stringfellow holds two MFAs in creative writing, one from Carlow University and another from Chatham University, both in Pittsburgh.
if it weren’t for you,
i’d never know
about the musk ox,
that it is one of
the longest surviving
creatures on earth,
and that over thousands
of years of evolution,
it has developed a method
for enduring winter
in the freezing tundra.
if it were not for you,
i would never know
that all the method is
is ‘hunker down and cope’,
that over thousands
of years of evolution,
that was the best
the musk oxen
came up with.
i know that what we are
experiencing is more than
just a seasonal rut,
but i can’t think of
better advice for us now.
if there is one thing
i do know, though,
it’s that this world
loves a come back
—Submitted on
Becky Wills is a member of the Poems While You Wait Collective. She has worked as an editorial intern for DiningOut Chicago. Her work has appeared in Gigantic Sequins.
Percussive silence
won’t leave me alone.
Loud in the pantry,
louder in the garage.
My solitude is enforced.
My solitude is a cloth
doused with bleach
and pressed to my mouth.
My solitude is crowded
with quiet.
The odor of loneliness
owns all my minutes.
Even when I leave
my empty house—
roam about the streets—
involuntary reclusiveness
claims my legs,
stains my clothing, my teeth,
my stretch of days
that are no longer mine
but belong to the hush
at the center of today.
—Submitted on
Austin Alexis is the author of Privacy Issues (Broadside Lotus Press, 2014), winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award; Lovers and Drag Queens (Poets Wear Prada, 2014) and For Lincoln & Other Poems, (Poets Wear Prada, 2010). His work has appeared in Barrow Street, The Pedestal Magazine, The Journal, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Rabbit Ears: TVPoems (NYQ Books, 2015), edited by Joel Allegretti; Suitcase of Chrysanthemums (Great Weather for Media, 2018), edited by Jane Ormerod, Thomas Fucaloro, and David Lawton. He received a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholarship, and teaches at New York City College of Technology.
Marilyn Johnston My Husband Talks About COVID-19 as If He’s Still on Patrol
Anytime going out from the base camp,
you take your chance with snipers.
You take a risk, even all suited up
with night gear, thick flak jacket
and combat boots, M16 at the ready.
It’s hard to tell the difference between
friend or foe without a scope.
How they can trick you and kill you,
even if you have your helmet in place;
even with masks and gloves, you take
a chance with the things you can’t see.
All suited up, you could take a shot
in the neck or an artery hit in the leg,
somewhere that’s vital. So you cover
and lay low, even on base, where
a rocket can zero in and find you—
fear of friendly fire. Triage will become
unreliable, once overwhelmed with
casualties. And, again, it’s a matter
of luck or fate, who lives or dies. Now,
the helicopters are circling the perimeter
and someone has to be in charge,
ready to drop the red smoke grenades
to mark the landing zone. He’s on duty
once again, waking us, as he prepares
for an enemy that refuses to show its face.
—Submitted on
Marilyn Johnston is the author of Before Igniting (Rippling Brook Press, 2020) and Red Dust Rising (The Habit of Rainy Nights Press, 2004). Her work has appeared in CALYX, Natural Bridge, Poetica, War, Verseweavers, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies including Terra Incognita: Oregon Poets Write for Ecological, Social, Political, and Economic Justice (Bob Hill Publishing, 2019). Johnston teaches in the Salem Art Association’s Artists in the Schools program serving Marion, Polk and Yamhill counties.
Johnston writes, “I wrote this for my husband who views this pandemic through the lens of the Vietnam War he fought and brought home with him…as well as for other men and women who have experienced trauma, their PTSD resurfacing during these surreal times.”
Deep into coronavirus’s sway, I drive through the rain to my childhood home— I am safe in my car with my husband and my son.
There was a man who joked about death and then he died of Alzheimer’s.
My mother died of Alzheimer’s and so there is no God.
That man joked for three years: jokes about fairies and kissing: things he believed made a man less of a man, things he believed made a man a woman.
My mother forgot everything but her fear and so there is no justice.
The new owners put a stone façade over part of the old house: tonal colors my mother would have liked. Big blocks of fake rock.
(Lentivirus: long incubation. Lent: long days. Lent: it shall be returned.)
I stay awake until first pearl light. The whole world has been cancelled and so there is no time.
—Submitted on
Jennifer Martelli is the author of In the Year of Ferraro (Nixes Mate Books, 2020), My Tarantella (Bordighera Press, 2018), After Bird (Grey Book Press, 2017), and The Uncanny Valley (Big Table Publishing Company, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Rise Up Review, Superstition Review, Grimoire, Glass, and other journals. Martelli is poetry co-editor of Mom Egg Review. She co-curates the Italian-American Writers Association Boston Literary Series. Online at jennmartelli.com
Nature is pissed off!
We failed to honor the earth.
Now we pay the price.
II
Skin dry from washing,
face chaffed by the mask I wear,
heart heavy from loss.
III
No shared gatherings.
Goodbye to hugs and handshakes.
Now is all we have..
IV
Inside—fear, outside
robins nesting in the spruce
remind me—it’s spring.
—Submitted on
Diane Englert is a writer and theater artist. Her work has appeared in We’ll Never Have Paris, Ovation, Nanoism, and other journals. Englert is sheltering in place with her husband and daughter in Portland, Oregon.
It’s not as though life is perfect
and everything is shining and smooth.
No, there’s a lot I’m unsatisfied with.
Many cluttered things, undone, in dust.
So why is there this precious feeling
like an ache in my heart
when the birds sing?
They sing, and fly together,
in the breeze
and the branches
and my heart cracks open
like the ice cliffs calving.
And the thought that life may end
is an unbearable thing.
Coronavirus Diary IV 3/23/2020
The odor of yeast bubbling
in warm honey sweetness
as my husband starts his bread.
It sits in a large ceramic bowl, covered
with damp thin cotton tea-towel,
waiting to get punched down
at the appropriate time.
Meanwhile, we do our qigong exercises
in front of the desk-top, as a white clad
practitioner we have stored in the cloud
does his slow moves with names tagging
crane, lion, bear. “Expand the chest
to cleanse the body.” Eagle spreads its wings
and bear swims across the water.
Our son, sequestered in a bedroom
of his childhood, has been robbed
of the experience, new for him last fall,
of being on a college campus, learning
about life, with his peers.
Instead, they must practice “social distancing,”
and attend “virtual leaning” classes
on Zoom.
—Submitted on
Marjorie Moorhead is the author of Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books, 2020). Recent poems have appeared in Verse-Virtual, Amethyst Journal, and Sheila-Na-Gig, among other journals. Her poems have also appeared in several anthologies, including Planet in Peril (Fly on the Wall, 2019), edited by Isabelle Kenyon, and From The Ashes (Animal Heart, 2019), edited by Amanda McLeod and Mela Blust. Moorhead practices tai chi, a daily walk, and poetry on the NH/VT border.
I reached thinking with emotion and no rational thought.
I reached the point of peak anger levels,
and it felt so horribly wrong.
This isn’t who I am,
I can’t even recognize myself in the mirror,
and so, I sat.
I sat with my anger, until I realized it’s mask.
I reached over to disassemble the appearance,
and then,
I drank with my disappointment
I smoked with my frustrations
I yelled at my failures
I cried into my embarrassment
I lashed out with my shame
I sobbed with my stress until it poured down the drain
I broke down with my trauma
I sang with my regrets
I struggled to breathe as my anger dismantled
and crushed me with the sheer size of the iceberg I had front of me
and then,
I shook hands with what was left of my “anger” and realized I was completely overwhelmed.
I picked myself up.
I held onto those dear to me.
I asked for help.
I reached out to my therapist.
I committed to getting better.
I let go of the emotions I let build up.
I said thank you, and goodbye, to the remains of the iceberg that had melted in my bathtub.
—Submitted on
Aurora Anderson is a mixed Métis woman. Living on Treaty 7 land in Calgary, her indigenous roots are from Québec. She holds a BA from the University of Calgary with a major in English literature and a minor in psychology.
Even my beloved bees set upon me today when I numbly knocked aside their sugar feeder, and I am all over stings….
—Sylvia Plath, in a letter to her mother, October 1962
One week into lockdown
the dogwoods flowering
look more foam than flower.
Flowers at the ground and in branches
a white at the lips like a first symptom.
A stillness, as in post-seizure.
Maybe a first symptom, noticing.
Like losing smell, shedding the taste buds, the tongue’s
scant flowers. How many of us
flowering now insignificantly, not noticeably?
Faces in boxes on the phone
and faces beaming through screens in Lombardy.
And still it’s spring like the sum of many previous
springs. The outside what you remember,
not the hours at home.
The beloved bees you can’t see in the rain.
All along building and dismantling the flowers.
The sirens and the mourning doves
like the mask and the rubber gloves.
Like the sum of springs, like noticing.
Like, I am all over stings.
I go outside.
I put each of them on.
Against all sense
wanting skin against skin again.
More than the words and the masks
and the gloves.
For someone in the world,
to topple me, take them off me—
to have to touch me, talk to me
to have them.
—Submitted on
Michael Tyrell is the author of Phantom Laundry (Backlash Press, 2017) and The Wanted (National Poetry Review Press, 2012). With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2007). His poems have appeared in Agni, Iowa Review, New England Review, The New Republic, The New York Times, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other journals, as well as in The Best American Poetry2015 (Simon and Schuster, 2015; series editor David Lehman, guest editor Sherman Alexie). Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, Tyrell holds a BA from New York University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Chad Parenteau is the author of Patron Emeritus (FootHills Publishing, 2013). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tell-Tale Inklings, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, Molecule, and Résonance. He serves as associate editor of Oddball Magazine and hosts the venerable Stone Soup Poetry series in Boston. His second full-length collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, is forthcoming.