Martha McCollough
Plague Diary

I’m living by owl’s hours
nowhere to be but
this bed my workshop

who can think in the dark
or love a morning grey
with threat of late snow

still the peepers are about
their frantic business
as in other springs

outside the back door
a disheveled garden springs
up of its own sweet will

—Submitted on 03/28/2020

Martha McCollough‘s a poems and videopoems have appeared or are forthcoming in Radar, Tammy, Pangyrus, Barrelhouse, Salamander, Triquarterly, Datableed, Atticus Review, and other journals. She holds an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute, and lives in Amherst, Mass.

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Celia Forno
Phantom Spring

The season of hushed flowers has come.
Earth blossoms quietly
beneath a crisp, oracle moon sky;
Seeds murmur into roots,
howl wet life to world.

Verdant rain breathes
its thick, moist song,
deep in the black river,
fish sleep sweetly.

Night insects listen as the ground stirs,
their faces small and sacred,
peering raptly into the dark.
They hear the edict.

Dawn nudges
open a sly black sky eye as
light spills
thick and honeyed,
extricating a furtive green
dandelion morning.

Only a few months ago,
the autumn forested mountain
shone its brilliant gold harvest;
Soon summer thunder
would journey above
oceans, as crabs shiver
like blue petals
in the cool, evening tides.

But now we are upon our only season.

The newly tendrilled
honey-suckle vines curious,
investigating a dusk;
fragrant and shrouded.
The sun melting a cobalt road
through cryptic,
lonely ice streams.

This will happen but once.

Come follow the wild path with me,
the dark blossom of a summer night
that may never come,
petals pressed closed,
like a silent mouth.

The dead whisper above us,
their eyes bright and ravenous like
newly hatched owls:
“Rise! Rise!”
“This is all you may ever have.”

Celia Forno writes: “I haven’t published anything. I’m a nurse practitioner and a gardener. I also do fiber arts. I love open water swimming, kayaking, and biking. I’m a native Floridian and love the natural world here, the swamps, the forests, the birds and reptiles.”

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Yvette Green
A Cardinal

A single cardinal
on a stone grey day
among trees that await spring
on a tattered fence.

He shows up

unaware,
or maybe very aware
that I need him.

He reminds me there is a season for everything
and today is the season to stare at him—

to follow his wings as he ascends to the highest branch
to wait for him to return before me.

He never returns my gaze.
He doesn’t break the fourth wall,
though he knows I’m there.
He understands my need to participate behind glass.

He shows me how to be mindful.
He sings a praise song.

This is the season to need
a single cardinal
in a single frame.

—Submitted on 03/25/2020

Yvette Green‘s essay “Parting Ways” appears in Seasons of Our Lives: Winter (Knowledge Access Books, 2014), edited by by Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett. Born in Nashville, she lived in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, and is the mother of two sons, 11 and 16. Green holds an MA in English from University of Maryland.

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Cheryl Caesar
Fishing From a Truck

Why did I agree
to go fishing from a truck? I hate
the agonized twist of the fish,
the squirm of the worm.
I went because my colleagues were going.

And why did I assume
that the truck would stay on a dock
or a boat? Instead it plunged
from dark air into dark water. Only
the silt plumed lighter around us, like clouds.

And why did I open the windows, try
to pull everyone out? They were fine; they were calm.
They were starting to breathe underwater.
After a while I could too, if not well.
The water felt thick and particulate.

Still, I could pull out the oxygen. I floated up
and swam around. On the banks I could see
the lights of small settlements. Humans
were growing gills, going amphibious. The sea,
I thought, the thing beyond our control. When it ebbs,
we think ourselves on solid ground. It returns,
at random, like the plague; it is always there.

—Submitted on 05/10/2020

Cheryl Caesar is the author of the chapbook Flatman: Poems of Protest in the Trump Era (Thurston Howl Publications, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Writers Resist, The Mark Literary Review, Cream and Crimson, Agony Opera, Winedrunk Sidewalk, and The Stay Project, as well as in the anthology Nationalism: (Mis)Understanding Donald Trump’s Capitalism, Racism, Global Politics, International Trade and Media Wars, Africa VS North America Vol 2 (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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Pamela Sumners
Joker

For the artistic and educational purposes of you look sad,
I have arguably violated our nation’s copyright laws to post
for you a song about the pompitous of love when I don’t
know what a pompitous is but I may sort of just a little
know what love is and I know that it’s not Christ throwing
the little old ladies with diabetes into the Hunger Games so
the money-changers can run amock in the Temple of Commerce

And I just read the state health department telling us, against
the inclinations of the Governor of this the Show-Me bone-
headed literalist state, in terms as stark as they are metaphorical,
“It’s not even the tip of the iceberg of what we can see. It’s like
the tip of Jupiter.” I read that the captain of the unsinkable ship,
the Titanic, and then Our Captain of the ship of state, struck the tip,
just the tip of the metaphorical and actual Jupiter iceberg before
they even saw it.

—Submitted 03/28/2020

Originally appeared in Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus (2020), edited and published independently by G.A. Cuddy.

Pamela Sumners is the author of a chapbook, Finding Helen (forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press), and the full-length collection, Ragpicking Ezekiel’s Bones (forthcoming from UnCollected Press). Her work has appeared in Ucity Review, Mudlark Posters, Eunoia Review, Shot Glass Journal, Streetlight Magazine, and other journals, as well as in the 64 Best Poets anthology from Black Mountain Press for both 2018 and 2019, chosen by the editors of The Halcyone literary review. Sumners lives in St. Louis with her wife, son, and three rescue dogs, and works as a constitutional and civil rights lawyer.

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Carmeilina Fernandes-Kock
Distance Learning

Be it your TED talks or your film directors´ speeches, viewed on WhatsApp during lockdown, which
tomorrow ceases—your bodies brought up close, cradled in the intimacy of my phone. Your English,
ranging from foreign sounding to assertive, in near native tone, penetrating my study. Voices of
youth playing god. I delighted in each one of your three to six-minute orchestrations. How you
blindly jumped into the lap of my gaze, pure souls hoping to have attained the bar set by my
standards, many of you hoisting yourselves higher by the grace of method meeting substance, order,
that Cartesian water-tight solidity of demonstration becoming a thing of sheer beauty—my breath
walking the tightrope of each line of thought. The absence of classroom gave you wings to strut your
stuff to no other than myself. A privilege. Yet throughout

I found myself the student, abruptly made alert, learning to read the signs, breaking the mould,
diving into vulnerability; disarming gestures that emulated your ideas of a pro. Unaware, you let me
step into your worlds, poster corners edging your frame, your backgrounds ranging from antique
wardrobes to Ikea shelves set up by your parents on which dolls still rested or trophies stood, those
won at an even earlier age. Behind one of you I could detect a washing stand, its hanging row of pegs.
My heart sank as I listened to you speak of Jackie O. and Eleanor Roosevelt in control of their image,
only to discover you shared a bed with your ailing mother. Courageous youth unfailingly forwarding
assignments prone to betray the secrets of home, weighing down on me now, as I comprehend the
fragility of the enterprise whereby distance teaching becomes the prying eye. Confinement takes us
places we keep to ourselves yet the treasures of your minds, wrapped up in lives unfolding, your
windows casually thrust open, the blind trust you’ve shown, these are memories to behold.

Tomorrow, bearing masks, we’ll face each other once again, on that levelling ground called
The classroom. We’ll resume rethinking the world, in that little bit of paradise.
Our eyes will meet first discreetly then feed on each other’s gaze while together we zoom in on the
very heart of matters.

—Submitted on 05/10/2020

Carmeilina Fernandes-Kock am Brink is of German-Indian background, grew up in Canada, and teaches English in Toulouse, France.

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Irene Cooper
Breakfast Tarot

it seems the stuff of parlor games,
fantasy and velveteen against the cold:

fashion your fortune from vapor
impale your lonely vision on a hatpin

i jump caffeinated to battle,
steel my butter knife for an epic

staged in a William Morris spoon
who will witness this twist of fate?

William Blake! i see you naked
in your garden with your wife,

a dribble of ink on a mottled thigh,
biscuit in your beard like fairy dust

the five of cups is laid:
sepia stain in the linen, set

—Submitted on 3/28/2020

Irene Cooper is the author of the novel Committal, forthcoming from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in September, 2020. Her poems, reviews, and essays appear in The Feminist Wire, Utterance, VoiceCatcher, The Rumpus, and other journals. She is a freelance copywriter and editor, facilitates creative writing workshops in Central Oregon, and co-edits The Stay Project.

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Jacky T
Combination Lock-down

—Submitted on 05/09/2020

Jacky T is a country boy at heart, wearing city life like an itchy woollen sweater. He battles chronic illness, so currently feels at home with the world’s preoccupations.

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Stephen Kingsnorth
A Winter Tale

What wondrous world is this,
where touch is gone,
that greeting lost?
I’m moved as single piece on board,
new site, where all see black and white;
a pawn, one step at a time,
every square delineate.
The castle is now grown my home,
the bishops kept in oblique line,
the monarchy’s protection, sign—
a posture for these straightened times.

The days become as night is long,
long pauses mark slow gong of dial,
unwinding for the highlight wind,
when turning key seems magical;
for nothing is as something now –
of no report, significant,
each plan subjected eroteme,
an interrogative become
relationships and daily course.
Shake or hug with smile and kiss
without a click and distant mist,
till lost connections be restored;
when will again I meet and greet,
Perdita find new Florizel?

—Submitted on 03/27/2020

Stephen Kingsnorth‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gold Dust, The Seventh Quarry, The Dawntreader, and Foxtrot Uniform Poetry Magazines, and Identity, as well as in the anthology Pain & Renewal: A Poetry Anthology (Vita Brevis Press, 2019), edited by Brian Geiger. He is retired from ministry in the Methodist Church and lives in Wales. Online at Poetry Kingsnorth.

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Lilyanne Kane
Radiance in the End Times

Six-string instruments serenade her respiratory illness.
She squints behind an analog camera as the voice on
the loudspeaker repeats: “You are safe / so long as you
cooperate. Stay indoors / and wait / for further instruction.”

Beyond us, outside, somewhere, there’s spools of stupendous
sunshine unwinding itself, gossamers stretching across verdant
mushrooms. There are California poppy trees heavy with blossoms
and fat-veined poppy-cock. Blissful bees collect clandestine pollen.

Inscrutably, indubitably, irrefutably— the world goes on. Nature
purrs in this pause of humanity, phallic florals and yonic fauna
perpetuating life in spite of the virus that gnaws away at the
humans most vulnerable and least responsible for this bullshit.

—Submitted on 03/27/2020

Lilyanne Kane is a non-binary lesbian poet and educator based in San Francisco. They hold an MFA in poetry from the Mississippi University for Women. Their work has appeared most recently in Mojave He[Art] Review and Sonder Midwest. They can be found on Twitter @PluralFloral.

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