A poem-a-day series. While the series was motivated by the presidential election of 2016, these poems are more often lyric than overtly political, and the resistance to our current white nationalist administration lies in the persistence of poetry to create a space for freedom. Submit poems via our Submittable site.
James Croal Jackson Self-Isolation (March 17, 2020, 8:50 AM)
Sirens all day, every day.
And steady rain
out the window. I won’t
go out there. I’ll sit
in this gray room
with twin computer
lights. Some days
it’s either fog
or an ominous cloud.
Today it is both.
—Submitting on 03/29/2020
James Croal Jackson (he/him) has a chapbook, The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017), and poems in Pacifica, indefinite space, and Philosophical Idiot. He edits The Mantle. He works in the film industry in Pittsburgh, Pa. jimjakk.com
Let us burn our skin together in the bonfires of our sinks
(They say the disease may recoil from throbbing flames of water; the lipids around the corona deliquesce into bio-obsolescence)
It lingers unseen in children, lungs and alveoli untouched by gasping
Unlike our grandmothers, who we bury to save evanescent molecules of Gross Domestic Product
Let us scrub and flay our hands, then the face
The enemy is incognito
It’s everyone you know, including you, and no one
(Paranoia seeps into consciousness like McCarthyism)
Let us scrape off our body
The opposite of newborn, soaked in industrial chemicals and bleeding from the obdurate teeth of fingernails
We can now sink into the concavity of the shower which is like a bowl, or a large, oblong contact lens
Please don’t let me pluck back the curtain to the side
Or draw the curtains on mannerisms of old routines, lovely and faded like my mother’s wedding dress
The house is a box
And its rooms are also boxes,
Ersatz boundaries of choice
They are not democratic nations; the rooms organize and structure my quarantine
I comb hair product in this quadrant and bathe my hippocampus in dreamy amnesia over here
Our restlessness is quadrilateral, folded and contained into domicile cubes
The virus’s breath tickles anxiety, and its teeth nibble on computer screens of empty funerals; only the corpses can attend
Its hands wrap bows of terror around the boxes, and I am the Lysol wipes, smothering lingering old testament pestilence
I am the cold austere metal
Cracked and bent in the check-out line,
I press my equal and opposite force into the anguished glove of
148 countries;
I am my hair, soaked from rinsing off sad eyes in grocery store aisles, dripping microscopic pools for covid-19 to bellyflop into;
I am the dead cells in my retina, blurs and inky sands mask plots of
Breathing air,
Doctors appointments recede beneath the short sightedness from governmental denial;
It could lead to my blindness.
I am Big Rona, the epithet my best friend devised
Personifying the coronavirus into a bumbling, scattered aunt
Transmogrifying the invisible into the visual
And fear into whiskey lips and tobacco-stained grins
—Submitted on 03/29/2020
Mary Nichols graduated in 2017 from the College of William and Mary with a double major in psychology and Hispanic studies, and currently works as a professional services engineer at a tech company. This is her first publication.
The dogwoods are flowering. Petals a snowdrift, tissue that sticks to my heels, trails across the living room floor. Pollen dust and mud smear. My hair smells like woodsmoke my mouth tastes like copper—cabernet in a mason jar. I pick lint from the laundry, curdled and grey and worming. I feel like I’m married (here is the church, here is the steeple) I’m growing soft in the middle, belly like putty. I draw myself, nude. Bury my nose in that freckled space between your shoulder blades, kneading the skin like dough. Fingers sticky with your honeydew.
Honey, do.
—Submitted on 05/06/2020
Mariah Rose publishes an annual zine called Boy Tears Mag. Her work has been featured in Apiary, Hyphen, Yikes, 5×5, Medusa’s Laugh Press, and other journals. Rose lives in Philadelphia, where she is a music journalist.
Vernita Hall Tanka Trilogy: Orchids in a Time of Siege
Jisei — A death poem
All the plants I’ve killed
you gift me frail white orchids
on my last birthday
*
Water zealot, I
baptize her dailysoon mourn
those first fallen blooms
*
Sheltering in place
this time—what blossoms between
us nowmight save one
—Submitted on 05/13/2020
Vernita Hall is the author of Where William Walked: Poems About Philadelphia and Its People of Color (Willow Books, 2019), winner of the Willow Books Grand Prize for Poetry and of the Robert Creeley Prize from Marsh Hawk Press; and The Hitchhiking Robot Learns About Philadelphians (Moonstone Press, 2017), winner of the Moonstone Chapbook Contest. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, African American Review, American Literary Review, Atlanta Review, and Mezzo Cammin, among other journals and anthologies. With fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and Ucross, Hall holds an MFA in creative writing from Rosemont College and serves on the poetry review board of Philadelphia Stories.
voters, the radio says— and this spring is Next up:
a Bay Area chef who lives in a camper
with two kids because she can’t afford rent,
and this spring is the near- dead fig tree turning
new leaves toward the sun in a gesture
of forgiveness, which is in no way an answer, but
still, I stop driving and look up for a while.
—Submitted on
Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of the poetry collections Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes (2016) and In Praise of Falling (2009), both from the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is the author of the memoir Love Song for Baby X (Ig Publishing, 2013). Dumesnil is a co-author of the anthologies We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Grit, Heart, and Humor (SheWrites Press, 2019) and Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos (Warner Books, 2002). She lives in Northern California with her two children and her wife, Sarah. Dumesnil blogs at thecrisisdiaries.com. Her website is cheryldumesnil.com.
Put down your Nathan’s, your slice of Famous Ray’s—
the beach is a dangerous place in a hurricane.
Today we can’t hail a beer from a man
with a cooler to sip as we consider the way
the sand washes out. Here at the Lone Star Western,
it’s time to admit we are drawn to the brink.
Whether standing at the edge of cliff or coast,
we persist in contradicting the evidence. We can
no longer look down at our feet as the sludge
seeps between our toes. Don’t you understand?
The journey is complete from where we began:
the cement slab we called summer, tangled
garden hose, dish of water left out for the dog.
—Submitted on
Karen Hildebrand is the author of Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Blue Mesa Review, 14 Hills, A Gathering of the Tribes, and other journals, as well as in It’s Animal But Merciful (great weather for MEDIA, 2012), edited by de Jane Ormerod, George Wallace, Thomas Fucaloro, and other anthologies. Hildebrand lives in Brooklyn.
My kids won’t load the dishwasher
It’s driving me insane
And so I smash the plates instead
And walk out in the rain
The air is sweet and heady
If I could survive out here I would
A feral, lonely woman
Doing what she should
I’d build a camp from things I find
And make a little fire
And I’d sit there for a long, long time
Until the world expires
My bones will sink much deeper
Than the mulch and wood and peat
I’ll funnel down into the depth
And try and plant a seed
And after a long silence
When the awful time has passed
I’ll emerge victorious
Like a crocus, a blade of grass
The darkness will still shroud me
The fear of what has been
But when I walk back into the house
The dishes will be clean.
—Submitted on
Emma Gibson a British playwright living in Philadelphia, Pa. Her most recent play, When We Fall, is a finalist for PlayPenn 2020, a semi-finalist for The Eugene O’Neill Conference, and a semi-finalist for Premiere Stages at Keane. She is also a teacher, a mother and an actor.
Sit and know you are sitting
at the kitchen table
on your doorstep
on a city peak
under a blaze
of shimmering trees
Walk and know you are walking
with a friend
the poignant space between
or alone
your own
precious interior
See and know you are seeing
a man who jumps rope
on a deserted
schoolyard
wild onions and dandelions
between sidewalk cracks
Listen and know you are listening
sparrow
chickadee
dove
two violinists 6 feet apart
serenading the sidewalk
Grieve and know you are grieving
each empty storefront
each untended goodbye
Give and know you are giving
food money poems
for those who don’t have enough
Breathe
and know you are breathing
belly heart lungs
belly heart lungs
belly heart lungs
for all those who can’t
—Submitted on 05/12/2020
Susan Dambroff is the author of Conversations with Trees (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Memory in Bone (Black Oyster Press, 1984). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she works as a teacher.
Peter Shaheen On the Seventh Day of Self Isolation
It appears we are not God,
yet.
Our mortality: a finitude—
at least for now.
Cast from the heavens
Fallenangels.
northsoutheastorwest—
which direction totravel toorfrom?
The employed mind is baffled
business at hand rinsed clean.
The idled spirit caged
humbled by mortality.
The finitude of fleeting time—
Mayflies all short lived. Restinpeace.
Stacks of empty carcasses
Piled high under sickly lights.
Like Oedipus, it is in our blindness
that we finally see.
—Submitted on
Peter Shaheen is the co-editor, with Anne Ruggles Gere, of Making American Literatures in High School and College (National Council of Teachers, 2001). His poems have appeared in Rue Scribe and The Write Launch. Shaheen is an educator in Michigan.
When the gloves come off
The latex stink lingers
My hands are sweaty and saturated
With a white powder residue
My hands look ghoulish
Fingers like long raisins
Nails are dull and without shine
The lines inside my palms
Remind me of roots
It is all unappealing
Those lines remind me
Why I wear those gloves in the first place
I stop complaining
I am relieved for the moment
And do it all over again
Tomorrow
—Submitted on
Karina G-Lopez is a co-author of the play Live Big Girl. Her poems have appeared in Stuck in the Library, Acentos Review, Epopeya Magazine, and other journals, as well as in The Abuela Stories Project (Robles-Alvarado, 2016), edited by Peggy Robles-Alvarado, and other anthologies. Online at kglopez.com.
James Croal Jackson (he/him) has a chapbook, The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017), and poems in Pacifica, indefinite space, and Philosophical Idiot. He edits The Mantle. He works in the film industry in Pittsburgh, Pa. jimjakk.com