Theresa Yorker
The Virus

How is this America
The Land of the Free,
When so much we do now
We do remotely?

Weddings without family,
Birthdays without guests,
Funerals without loved ones,
Who would have guessed?

Every day gets longer
As shelterings persist.
Pantries grow emptier
As work days are missed.

Students miss their teachers
As they struggle to learn.
Memories are lost forever;
Graduates lose their turn.

Politicians squabble incessantly
With ever-shifting blame,
While nurses provide comfort
With dedication that does not wane.

Even in these dark times
There is still a lot of good:
Neighbors caring for neighbors,
Helping others like we should.

This virus isn’t magic;
It won’t just disappear.
Unless to the guidelines
All of us adhere.

We pray for each other;
We pray for a cure;
We pray that we stay healthy.
We pray to know for sure

That one day this will end,
And the sun again will shine.
We can have people around us
And no more Covid one-nine.

—Submitted on 05/08/2020

Theresa Yorker is a self-described “amateur, unpublished poet.” She writes, “By day I am a business intelligence data engineer who has been working from home since early March listening to too much of the daily news cycle. I was inspired to write this poem observing the vast disconnect between the decision makers and every day Americans struggling to survive.”

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Pasquale Trozzolo
Thoughts of Social UnDistancing

Nice to meet you

What if we met in a bar
What if we drank bourbon
What if it was 10:00 p.m.
What if there was a dark corner?

What if we met on a train
What if I asked what you’re reading
What if you read poems
What if I knew all the lines?

We if we met in a gallery
What if we loved the same art
What if you asked me to hold your hand
What if we didn’t stop there?

What if we met on the dance floor
What if I saw your red dress
What if I knew how to Tango
What if you liked my embrace?

So nice to meet you too.

—Submitted on on 03/27/2020

Pasquale Trozzolo is retired from a career in advertising and public relations. His poems have appeared in The St. Thomas Source. Trozzolo has also been a race car driver, grad school professor, and magazine publisher. He lives in Kansas.

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Maggie Mosher
Collective Conversations

—Submitted on 05/07/2020

Editor’s Note: This poem appears to be related to an article that appeared on Reuters on April 14, 2020, which reads, in part, “Fearing for the lives of elders who carry the Navajo language and traditions, 19-year-old Matthew Duncan put up signs on the highway from Shiprock to Farmington urging Navajos to ‘KEEP YR Tt’AA’ AT HOME.’ Tt’AA’ means ‘butt’ in Navajo.

Maggie Mosher is the author of Because of Love, which she published herself in 2011 to raise funds for the Metropolitan Organization to Counter Sexual Assault. A recipient of a William E. Simon Fellowship for Noble Purpose, Mosher holds a MS in educational administration from Baker University in Baldwin City, Kans., and is pursuing a PhD in curriculum and instruction at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kans.

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Deborah Turner
Wipe Out

“Sandy shores don’t bind us,”
paddling out over fish and sea-
weeds, rising high, crashing down—
sun and wind mined.
“Boards keep us afloat.

Try it out, the water’s fine.”
America said to its niggers who
made music, championed sports, rendered literature colorful. “Pleasing,
so delightful to eyes, ears.”
Until we upset the balance, ventured
in too deep—uncharted space,
ivory heights, think tanks, the front office
and that oval one.

The next wave, choppy, reigned:
“You don’t belong here.
Maneuver the Board so the curl covers corporal entities.” Not unlike
when sheriffs once paused, shifting power
to hooded masses
with eye holes too small to question.

“You don’t belong here.
So we’ll melt caps, ride resulting swells—
down Wall street, main street,
shaded campus walks—
wipe out the peppered panorama
(meant purely for us).”

Long has history, with its last word,
extended the Board, only
to take it back from curious jetsam
in every fishy tale.
Will time forget our names,
or hook them up on lines (long as trees tall)
from which to hang, if we—
remembering Tuskegee all too well—
rise with the next tide,
ask the question.
Did you do this
on purpose?

—Submitted on 03/27/2020

Deborah Turner is the author of Sweating It Out (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Lavender Reader, Philadelphia Stories, and the anthologies Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity (Beacon Press, 1995), edited by Natasha Tarpley, and The Body Eclectic (Henry Holt, 2002), edited by Patrice Vecchione. Online at deborahturner.online.

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Mori Thomson
If I Were

If I were to suspend my sympathies and forget humanity, what would I feel?
If I were to submerge myself in selfish thought and leave all this cruelty to the concern of others, what would I feel?
If I were to live this life as life is now, what would I feel?

I would feel the clouds of stress regress.
And I’d feel the weight of each dawn’s struggles lift as the lashing challenges of their days evaporate.
I would feel the fear of the unknown dissipate,
And the superficial worries becoming as superfluous as a mask on a mannequin.
I would feel angry journeys people melting away unthreateningly, clapping respectfully at their doors.
I would rediscover idleness and sink into the softness, slipping away silently into her arms.
And I would feel content in that comfort, not fighting for money for power for praise.
I would feel a peace condensed,
And a tapestry of helping hands blossoming, reaching over and round and through, supporting, but with space.
And I would feel closer to these closest people, like great pine trees standing together in the darkness of the forest.
I would feel and see and know the tangible edges of this forest and I would feel bigger in it.
And with each certain step I’d feel I was I.

That is how I would feel, but that could not be and should not be me—
I need you and we and they and us, I need he that I do not know.
Not the safety that comes with knowing tomorrow, but the fight,
The undiscovered light and all life’s frightening lies.

—Submitted 05/07/2020

Mori Thomson lives in London and works in the advertising industry, where she is a writer, producer, and director.

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Madison H. Walker
Within the Days of Covid 19

The quiet creeps into my room
As I try to type away
The clicking of the keyboard
Is the only routine I know of
As time moves on
And yet stays still
On the digital clock
I peer at every hour
I have all the time in the world
In this lilac colored bedroom
Where day and night have no difference
And I start to forget what day of the week I’m in
At first, it was a blur
But now an untamed mess.

Loneliness tiptoeing in
As I fulfill a task
An attempt at normalcy
But my mind has been in a fog
Since day one
Surreal is how I feel
As I stare at the paper in front
I have all the energy in the world
And yet I have none at all
I could conquer mountains
But my feet don’t want to move an inch
As I lay silently on my bed
Staring at a ceiling
I can hear my family murmur from time to time
But I must be cautious even with them.

When my eyes gaze above
At the stars
Loneliness sits to my right
As quiet joins to my left
The stars twinkle with sorrow
As the winds kiss my cheeks
From the bugs, animals, people, and even the creek
All was silent
From the bugs, animals, people, and even the creek
All were asleep
And somehow life was just as still
I wonder how long
As I lay on my back
But for now, it was just me and the stars
An acceptable distance apart.

—Submitted on 03/27/2020

Madison H. Walker is an interdisciplinary studies student concentrating in film and English.

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Mariah Rose
Dispatches From Quarantine

we take long drives to nowhere
smoke a cigarette for John Prine
you (former boy scout) always know which way is west,
how to make fire (you bearded caveman)
we search the brushwood for shed antlers
whitetail / cottontail / cattail / cat-o-nine-tail
flat yellow stretches of Jersey wheat fields
fisherman in their muddy yellow boots, wading
the trout-stocked Wissahickon Creek
magpie / mud pie / cow pie / bovine
go play your war games, chase after wood nymphs
“there’s whiskey in the peaches,” you say,
words drowned by the whine of winter-stripped trees

—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.

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Mary Ellen Talley
Gravity

One wants to say give up
as Sisyphus keeps pushing the boulder,
leaning torso into stone, straining,
straining the backs of their calves,
bruising the nipples of their chest, scraping
their left cheek and feeling
each small bone of their nose
fracture from the pressure of the uphill climb.

But we don’t say it
and they won’t listen anyway
as now hearing the thrum
of their heart in their ears,
a small bird
that refuses to stop singing.

—Submitted on 03/27/2020

Mary Ellen Talley’s poems and reviews have appeared in Raven Chronicles, Flatbush Review, Banshee, MORIA, Compulsive Reader, Crab Creek Review, Sugar House Review, Colorado Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies including All We Can Hold: Poems of Motherhood (Sage Hill Press, 2016), edited by Elise Gregory, Emily Gwinn, Kaleen McCandless, Kate Maude, and Laura Walker; and Ice Cream Poems: Reflections on Life with Ice Cream (World Enough Writers, 2017), edited by Patricia Fargnoli.

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Karen Hildebrand
Marathon

Yesterday has lost
its solid footfall

to a set of new rules
each nested inside

an ever smaller set.
I say yes to the starfish,

the way she regenerates
her damaged parts.

Yes, to a graying beauty
who wears her hair

in a single braid, shotgun
over her shoulder.

Yes, to a slender slice
of chocolate cake.

With every birdsong
comes a shiver. A smile

can flatten time—
that flapping magpie.

I can’t look
into the bright eyes

of a puppy, without
seeing loss ahead.

Would that I comb my hair
with finer teeth, polish

my toes with steel,
gaze beyond a sea

of bobbing white heads
as they cross the finish.

—Submitted on 03/27/2020

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.

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Nicole Calivo
Precautionary

The rickshaw driver
can’t claim unemployment when
India shuts down

No one in the streets—
all shops and food stalls closed—and
cops keep you at home

His family’s meal
once made from the day’s wages
now goes uneaten

And so they hunger
as the virus ravages
and threatens to near

Even then doctors
are ousted: treating the sick,
they might have it too

Wary India
Who’s left to drive the rickshaws
when fear has starved us

—Submitted on 03/27/2020

Nicole Calivo lives in Washington State and scribbles haiku.

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