Reni Roxas
Personal Grooming

This stay-home bullshit is getting to me.

My hair is growing!
Growing and showing
growing and showing
GRAY at the roots.

My nails are getting long—again.
My painted toe nails, chipped and overtaken by more nail matter,
remind me of the decayed ruins of Pompeii.

My eyebrows need tweezing.
Why is it so hard to pick up a pair of tweezers?
Why trim, why prune the endless unending,
for a world not watching?

All nail salons are closed.
The Governor has deemed them
non-essential. AS IF!

Day after day after day after day
the mirror is showing all the facets
of me I’ve been hiding.

I don’t feel like turning on the news

Outside
the grass
keeps

growing

—Submitted on 04/09/2020

Reni Roxas‘s work has appeared in Writer’s Digest, ParentMap, and Brain, Child. Originally from the Philippines, she lives in Washington State.

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Jen McConnell
Don’t Touch

I was a ghost before it became a verb.
Slipping out the door
a breath or two after arriving,
leaving a vapor trail of anxiety.

Sometimes I itch to make a scene.
Knock into a man on the sidewalk.
Poke a baby to make her cry.
Scream fire in an elevator.

Now we have permission not to engage.
Don’t touch your face.
Don’t touch my face.
They gave it a name
but I’ve been doing it all along.

—Submitted on 04/09/2020

Jen McConnell is the author of the short story collection Welcome, Anybody (Press 53, 2012). Her poetry has appeared in Buck Off Magazine, Mused Literary Review and Olentangy Review. Online at jenmcconnell.com.

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Terence Degnan
Praying for Snow

I keep looking up
for the first frog

peering around corners
with a mirror

for the proverbial cows
I’m having ghost pains

for the other shoe
or a missing leg

in a forthcoming war
never mind the shame

of having once thrown seeds
in the naked sky

just to see if burn marks
would materialize

like black stars
in her linoleum floor

this hour isn’t a pair
of red socks in the delicates

it’s not dead crops
in the bulge

it isn’t a rancid lake
or the stub of a summit

it is my daughter’s look
on a trip

home from Pennsylvania
it’s the detour we took

to see an abandoned tunnel
it’s the sound she made

halfway through a mountain
as her hands glimmered in the blackness

it’s the snow that fell
straight through the dogwoods

when we exited

—Submitted on 04/08/2020

Terence Degnan has published two full-length books of poetry. He is a co-director at the Camperdown Organization which was created to increase access to publication and education as well as promote agency for underrepresented writers.

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Guillermo Filice Castro
Ode to Discarded Gloves

Praise you, teal ones, 
		clear ones, 
			pink ones.

	Thin mediators between 
			us & the myriad of things 
		trying to kill us.

It’s always just one of you I spot, 
		
		unpaired 
		& impaired. 
	
	A mother’s abandoned
		slap. Hand without jazz.
	Condom 
without jizz
		deflated in
	the grass like a jettisoned
teenage memory,
	
	mourned by sneezeweed.

More endearing than face masks, your domed
	cousins 

from the country of Mouth & Nose.
	
	Ubiquitous jelly fish, 
		mangled 
			on 
		supermarket parking 
				lots, half

			of your tentacles 
		still stuck inside you. 

Haven’t 
we all felt this way—translucent, 
				cast aside?

Dressed in the latest latex or 
			vinyl (praise you!)
		
		for one final 
			
			wave.

—Submitted on 05/28/2020

Guillermo Filice Castro is the author of Mixtape for a War (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018) and Agua, Fuego (Finishing Line Press, 2015). His work appears in HIV Here and Now, The Normal School, Fugue, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, and other journals. He’s the recipient of an Emerge–Surface–Be Fellowship from the Poetry Project in New York. An immigrant from Argentina, Castro resides in New Jersey with his partner and two cats.

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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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