Milton P. Ehrlich
Quarantined

Buried underground
in my sarcophagus
wrapped in stone
I worry about 1,089
poems I’ve left behind
that needed revisions.
It wasn’t my intention
to reveal all the faults
of every friend I ever had
or ridicule the hypocrisies
of wise men I got to know.
Clutching a bag of diamonds,
Catherine de Medici knocks
on my stone overcoat, and
invites me to join her in an
escape plan that might allow us
to fix the anarchy of the world.

—Submitted on 05/04/2020

Milton P. Ehrlich is a psychologist and a veteran of the Korean War. His poems have appeared in The Antigonish Review, London Grip, Arc Poetry Magazine, Descant Literary Magazine, Wisconsin Review, and other journals.

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Hasnain Ali Syed
Reputation

It’ll be nice to
Walk in a room
And not have
To fight with
An army of
Preconceived
Opinions
Not look at
An entire gallery
Of my distorted pictures
Painted by someone
Else’s paintbrush
Not be judged before
Even saying anything
It’ll be nice to
Someday outrun
That report on me
And
Enter the room first
Shutting the door close
From the inside
On the reputation
That otherwise always
Precedes me

—Submitted on 06/28/2020

Hasnain Ali Syed was born in Sialkot, Pakistan, and moved to Lahore to study medicine, graduating with a medical degree from Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed al Nahyan Medical College. He lives in Lahore with his family.

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Cheryl Caesar
Sheltering Places

after Jobim

A box. A bed.
A house. A home.
It’s the shelter that waits
when you’re living alone.

A coat. A bag.
A phone. A Mac.
It’s your coffeeshop space
with the wall at your back.

It’s a carrel that’s lined
with graffiti you know.
It’s the stall where you hide
when there’s nowhere to go.

It’s the wind in your hair.
It’s the sun in your face.
It’s a nest in the bush.
It’s a sheltering place.

A skin. A cell.
A tent. A tarp.
It’s a chamber to hold
every beat of your heart.

A here. A there.
A me, a you.
At the end of the day
we are all passing through.

—Submitted on 05/13/2020

Cheryl Caesar is the author of Flatman: Poems of Protest in the Trump Era (Thurston Howl Publications, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The Blue Nib, Prachya Review, Panoply, Light, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Nationalism: (Mis)Understanding Donald Trump’s Capitalism, Racism, Global Politics, International Trade and Media Wars (Mwanaka Media and Publishing, 2019), edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka. Caesar holds a PhD in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She teaches writing at Michigan State University.

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Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon
I miss the way

for Robert

your chin rests on my head,
when we hug, say hello—
sixteen years ago
I welcomed you, a tiny bairn
snug in my daughter’s arms.

I miss your sharp, enquiring mind
with question after question,
your accounts of the many books you’ve read
and your hunger for more. Far more.

I miss your crinkled smiled-up eyes
and your shy-delivered jokes,
your kitchen disco with your sister
when washing dishes, iPod full blast.

I miss your pantomimes with George,
your daemon ginger cat. Robert,
I miss all that—

but it will all be there again,
one day we’ll laugh out loud
as it all comes back.

—Submitted on 05/04/2020

Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon is the author of Cerddi Bach (Hedgehog Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in Porridge, The Blue Nib, Mookychick, Poethead, The Galway Review, and other journals. Ceinwen holds an MA in creative writing from Newcastle University, and lives near Newcastle upon Tyne.

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Margot Wizansky
Sheltered

by tupelos, their multiple trunks reaching up like long fingers,
and beyond them, the harbor dazzling

and by the long and empty road
where the highest branches of pines draw a canopy over me

by early spring’s vernal pools, new life hidden in blackness

by herring and indulgent gorgonzola stocked in the fridge

thirty-two cabbage plates on the wall, exactly as my daughter arranged them
and the bead board wall, the steady yellow of it

and the Southwest I painted at twilight, working quickly to record
the sky’s impossible pink

the amaryllis, about to burst after two months’ nearly imperceptible growth

kindness crisscrossing the space between us
and time stretching out silvery with no borders or requirements

your body, like a warm rock, and the constellations of your eyes,
sometimes clear, sometimes foggy.

—Submitted on 05/03/2020

Margot Wizansky edited two anthologies: Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House (Salt Marsh Pottery Press, 2003), and Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains (Salt Marsh Pottery Press, 2005). Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, Moon City Review, Salamander, and The Maine Review.  Recently retired, Wizansky lives in Massachusetts.

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Koss
Space Changes

Dear Max,

Space forever changed when you fled Earth.
Stars once scattered promise, even in their glittery deaths.
Now a frigid constellation arrests the black sky static,
though Luna reflects a light, not yours, nor hers.
In their faux-spring gala, the dead pretend to live again.
“Cosmic” lights flicker / trick the eyes of hangers-on.
The golden gauze between the worlds is gone.
Space on earth has also changed for worse.
When you died, grocery stores devoured me, sucked me in,
as dreams of meals and joy bled dim.
I hollowed in their empty excess,
further voided by pandemic.
Shelves are now bone-bare.
Frantic, scared, the hoarders scrape them clean.
You boarded just in time, Max.
Things are dire here.
They say it started with a single bat.

—Submitted on 06/25/2020

Koss, a writer and visual artist, holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Hobart, Spillway, Exquisite Corpse, Diode Poetry, and other journals. Twitter @Koss51209969 and Instagram @koss_singular.

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Hasnain Ali Syed
Toxic Gallantry

You are Chivalrous
In your mind
You stand tall
So upright
Smoking cigarettes
Without a count
You’re only concerned
With having a good time
You fabricate stories
Based on chronicles
Of your Gallantry
Just to amuse them
Or maybe amuse yourself
Who knows
Everything is about yourself
You play with girls first
And then, their repute
You talk about the encounters
With your girlfriends.
So openly, repeatedly
You’re proud of yourself
For fooling half a dozen girls
At one time
With none knowing the truth
In your circle of men,
Your apprentices
And acquaintances
You gloat about it
But I noticed
I noticed the frown
On your face
The choking
The lowering of the tone
Of your otherwise undaunted voice
When you were asked a question
About your wife
You tried to avoid it
You tried to avert taking her name
Because it makes you vulnerable
You judge all men to think
As polluted as you do and so
You don’t mention her
In any of your stories
You talk about your son,

Sometimes
And how he plays with your gadgets
But never a thing about
Your daughter who had her
First day at school today
You don’t talk about her
You won’t talk about her
Because you are scared
That even though they
Pretend to respect you
The men around you
Will not spare the women
In your life
They will imagine things
All too vile
You know this for sure
Only because
You would too
About another’s daughter
Another’s wife

—Submitted on 06/28/2020

Hasnain Ali Syed was born in Sialkot, Pakistan, and moved to Lahore to study medicine, graduating with a medical degree from Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed al Nahyan Medical College. He lives in Lahore with his family.

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J.D. Isip
Southern Comfort

Los Angeles does not prepare you for how white the world is outside
of barrios, mangling your Spanish to cashiers in Santa Ana or Hawaiian Gardens,
ghettos, real ghettos where it’s always summer and a Guatemalan baby races
in and out of the cascade of hose water being held by his sister screeching
with delight, both of them in their underwear, both stopping to wave
at a pick up weighed in the back by six sunburnt men coming from or going to
a half-built high rise in downtown Long Beach or some lawn too big
for the Filipino couple in Anaheim Hills who eye them suspiciously
and talk their selves out of the foolishness of tipping gardeners.

The South gets black, they might let a “son” slip out but usually not in the cities,
not in Atlanta or Houston. If you’re black and you’re from the South, you get
the South, even laud the way the food still reminds you of an old auntie who
remembers someone who remembers slavery, praise God for good church folk
who separate like it’s the 50s into the loud black churches and the giant
white churches with big screens and slick Southern sons preaching the good news
and everyone’s “real nice” when they meet you and let you sit on their bench
and, “Heck, just have the whole thing” since it seems they saw a friend
who might confirm whether or not you are, in fact, Iraqi, or Mexican, or a terrorist.

Out here it’s like you see Rome falling and white people losing their damn minds,
literally burning them up on meth or antidepressants because everyone
has bipolar disorder or cracked just a little when the uppity black “Hussein”
brought back the sting of “northern aggression”—they see more and more of us,
the horde of brown, feel ignorant and angry for fumbling the Indian names, Latino
names, names that sound like the Terrorist Watch List, all horseshit names
anyway, some people even ask, “But don’t you have, you know, an American name?”
Thing is, you do. You live here long enough, and you do. You’ll be Charlie or Joe
because it gives them comfort, and you see the guns, and you don’t want no trouble.

—Submitted on 04/30/2020

J.D. Isip is the author of Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His work in all genres has appeared in The Rainbow Journal, Elsewhere, Dual Coast Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Rogue Agent, and other journals. Isip is an English professor in Plano, Texas.

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Hasnain Ali Syed
Set in Stone

You read my name on a piece of paper
And you made a judgment about me
You judged my origin, my religion
The color of my skin
My mannerism, my personality
Just by reading my name
Have heard that reputations precede people
But I never knew that only the name
Of a person could lead to
An opinion so staunch
So absolute
That it will be written in stone
And I
And my kind
Would spend a lifetime to change it
But still fail

I didn’t know that my name
Comes with a baggage so big
That I would have to prove
Through everything that I do
That I am not just my name
I am so much beyond it
I didn’t know that my entire life
Would have to be a battle
Against the stereotypes
That you so conveniently hold
About me

—Submitted on 06/28/2020

Hasnain Ali Syed was born in Sialkot, Pakistan, and moved to Lahore to study medicine, graduating with a medical degree from Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed al Nahyan Medical College. He lives in Lahore with his family.

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Clio David
Inside, upstairs (London in lockdown)

Seagulls fly up the Thames estuary, over container crates,
old shipping yards,
the City Airport runway
of retired planes
new housing developments flashing gold
in the early morning sun.
London sleeps
no, it hides.
For the first time since the war
the toy-town streets are ghostly
odd cars, lone ants
who’ve lost their way
shops boarded up
restaurant chairs and tables, still lives
playgrounds mute
office blocks, cliffs of sculpted glass
their insect-like eyes glinting and deserted

everyone is inside
with their families,
or single, alone
fearful, loving, fighting, dying
all the engines of the city have broken down
and in this strange early morning,
our bodies are reborn,
soft and undefended, like molluscs

masked people drive in cars around the city
inside we are still, but everything around us is moving fast
towards an unspecified disaster
or so the news on our phones tells us
we all have the same news and it spells disaster
masked people ward the streets shouting
2 meters apart!
the ceilings cannot hold us
panic swells in the blossom-scented air
sunshine warms us,
hazy, eternal mornings shield us
from this ill wind
fanned by bats wings
the whole world brought together
friends and foes
we cannot hold each other,
we are all dangerous now

sudden rain, a brief release
a rainbow
arches over the city
its colours vibrating with sublime portent
roofs black with wetness
blossom crumpled
sweet smelling on the pavements
like remembered loves
time passing with fisted arrows
of sunlight
in the wet grass

remembered beaches, sand in the creases
of old lives
glimpsed blinding and golden
from our dark urban caves
on satellite coordinates
marked in cyberspace.

the lockdown is political
it reaches into our silence
spies on us
through our phones
the photographs we choose to share
the people we choose to share them with
we are watched, especially now
Police patrol the streets
and people in masks
‘two meters apart!’
‘no gatherings’
‘do not leave your house
except for food and exercise’

food dominates thought and conversation
like the time before
women were confined to houses, extensions of furniture
and other people,
cooking their families three meals a day
three meals a day!
there is no time for anything else
there is no escape
except out to buy more food

runners run, cyclists cycle,
trying not to breath the same air
we cannot get too close or we will get ill, be cautioned
or fined.
hospitals are full, NHS staff are working around the clock
to save us.
every Thursday at 8pm we gather on our doorsteps and balconies
to clap for our nhs
new churches of gratitude
we clap, sing, play instruments, bang cooking pots
we give thanks for our wonderful NHS
and hope the government won’t forget when this is all over
who saved Boris,
and remember to save the NHS

children’s bike rides and Easter egg hunts
in public gardens
beds of tulips burning in the early morning sunlight
blossom melting like candles
on the edges of vision
the BT tower looks on with its all-seeing electronic eye
taxis glide by empty
cars drive in circles around the city

inside houses,
flats and high-rises
women are in more danger from their husbands,
fathers, sons,
than they were before,
holding up bruised arms, melting shields
against fists and kitchen knives
smashed like glass against the edges of tables
landing crumpled on the floor
looked on by children
the pillars of their temples collapse
as hell is let loose on the living
a family of geese ravaged by passing dogs
an ill wind that destroys everything it touches
especially petals,
nothing will go back to how it was

huddled together like penguins against a cold history
stalked by passion, duty, judgment, objectification,
victims of our own accidental beauty.
soft, raging, accomplished, we have given birth to the human race
the birthrate will double in lockdown, as will the number of women killed
at home, in their beds
inside, upstairs

food delivery vans, rubbish trucks
and ambulances wheel about the quiet streets
while we sleep in long, hot afternoons
healing the city with our dreams
next door, in the block of flat at the end of the road,
a man with tourettes shouts from his balcony,
a song washes through the air from a radio
we hum along because we know the tune, but not the words
those who have gardens are thankful
and pray for those who don’t
while praying they won’t catch their misfortune
or the virus funneling us into a caged spring

every day the death toll rises, in the care homes and hospitals where
nurses and doctors have become victims too
the virus does not observe boundaries.
it sweeps through cities, countries, continents
soft and unseen
not even the sun seems to slow it down
scientists are researching vaccines,
like hands building walls in blue dust
as we wait for new temples to emerge,
new ways of living

there is no way back
and we don’t want to go back.
only 9% of people do, according to a recent news poll
we don’t know where we are going but we don’t want to go back
to a time we blinded ourselves with Netflix and bad news
so we didn’t have to think
drugs and religion don’t work anymore
only live streaming,
the anesthetic against long dark nights
listening to freight trains rolling over the tracks
4am owls, until the dawn chorus calls in new light
a new day—always hopeful, never the same

Elderflower bushes blossom on urban paths,
cracked by the earth’s heat
people start tweeting recipes for elderflower cordial,
we collect leaves and find names for them online
home-schooling starts again after the Easter holidays
morning pencils sharpened
we have rituals, routine, hope
we know what we’re doing

life is basic but simple
there is no fomo,
only porridge and time to read,
play scrabble, boggle, monopoly,
think, sit, cook,
time for flowers, the scent of hedgerows
time for everything there was never time for before,
when we were worshipping the wrong gods
all our windows are open

dusty afternoons
falling off pavements,
walking down the middle of the road,
to avoid other people
who are more toxic now than cars
I look at my feet, the same feet, but even they are different
now the seagulls sleep
I’m inside, upstairs
a hot bath is waiting for me

April, 2020

—Submitted on 05/03/2020

Clio David a documentary filmmaker for the BBC.

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