Kris Beaver
In the Costco Parking Lot Kirkland, WA

I’m 65. Wearing nitrile gloves
the same color as the blue placard
hanging from my rear-view mirror,

still sitting in my gray Corolla, trying to
decide if I should risk going inside,
when a young employee rolls out

a huge whiteboard listing
no more toilet paper, sanitizer,
disinfectant wipes or fresh chicken.

Limits on other in-demand items.
Please keep 6 feet apart.
I open the car door and notice

a horse chestnut beside my wheel.
It is round, studded with firm spikes
like naval mines I’d seen floating

in black and white WWII movies
or the thistles imbedded in my
tube socks and yellow lab’s fur

after we’d rambled in the woods
when I was an immortal kid.
It is just another prickly traveler,

cocklebur designed to survive,
perhaps puncture some unlucky
shopper’s tire. So, I pick it up.

Put it in my pocket, carry it
around with me like an amulet,
some red-hot virus I can contain.

—Submitted on 03/27/2020

Kris Beaver‘s poems have appeared in Ergo!, Spindrift, Rattle, Visual Verse, Tuck Magazine, and other journals. She began writing poetry in college, then took a writing hiatus to focus on a 39-year elementary teaching career. She returned to writing poetry in 2017, after retiring. Beaver lives outside Seattle.

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Thomas Higgins
Plaiting

It has been so long
since the hour the sun
of spring
or summer
caught the grass just so
where youths were sitting
cross-legged, hands
busy to the tips of each finger
plaiting
daisies into crowns
garlands
wristlets
things so slight
in the light falling
perfectly
loving the hands
at play in life
beyond touch
or time
even now
I am never among them.

—Submitted on 03/26/2020

Thomas Higgins‘s poems have appeared in Bookends Review, Hyphen, River River Journal, minnesota review, and New Southerner. Living in Philadelphia, he writes about promotional marketing for an industry magazine.

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Brittney Corrigan
Social Distancing

There are animals who can pass their bodies
through openings we cannot even dream

of putting an eye to. We lock the doors,
forget what sifts through keyholes

like smoke. A rat will determine if it can fit
its cylindrical body through a tunnel or hole

by using its whiskers as a guide. An octopus
has no bones. Can pour its tentacled form

into most anything, its beak being the one
solid gauge. If I hold up a yardstick and you

take the other end, we are half the appropriate
distance apart. Your body will not transfer

anything to my body. Our hands will not
become either weapons or balms. I send

my voice to you like an octopus escaping
its captivity. I sniff the air like a rodent,

like anything could catch me. Like I could
find a burrow where nobody’s home.

—Submitted on 03/26/2020

Brittney Corrigan is the author of Navigation (The Habit of Rainy Nights Press, 2012) and 40 Weeks (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Daughters is forthcoming from Airlie Press in 2021. Her poems have appeared in Split Rock Review, The Poeming Pigeon, Rattle, MockingHeart Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and other journals and anthologies. Raised in Colorado, Corrigan has lived in Portland, Ore., since 1990. She holds a BA from Reed College, where she manages special events. Online at brittneycorrigan.com.

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Plamena Mihaylova
Somewhere Else

Empty streets
Messy sheets

Cold hands
Cancelled plans

Smell of cigarettes
Blurry silhouettes

The warmth of a fireplace
A longing gaze

I’m not here
I’m somewhere else

—Submitted on 03/26/2020

Plamena Mihaylova is a young Bulgarian writer and video editor.

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Julia Knowlton
Coronavirus Ars Poetica

Spring season, honey melody suckling
at the seams. By the time all birdsong

blossoms, its own echoes drown it out.
Today the pestilence bred destruction

from coast to coast. My sister in LA texts to say
she cannot sleep, always crying. Nothing I can do.

(Writing might be something of the nothing I can do.)

What is a poem now, what is a word’s space?

It is how language distances itself, builds a nest,

shelters in place.

—Submitted on 03/26/2020

Julia Knowlton is the author of four books, including One Clean Feather (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and The Café of Unintelligible Desire (Alice Greene & Co., 2018), which won a Georgia Author of the Year Award chapbook prize. Her poems have appeared Raw Art Review, Roanoke Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and other journals. The recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Prize, Knowlton is a professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. She holds an MFA in poetry from Antioch University in Los Angeles, and a PhD in French literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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C. Kubasta
Days of Fevers, Chills, Breathlessness

Since I saw the video, every time someone mentions giraffes, I show them—it
cannot be unseen. Those highly specialized necks evolved to reach canopy trees, but
sometimes purposeful rubbing—necking—becomes a wild swinging, and there’s a body
flung to the dust. Mostly

they bounce up, hold their heads
a little lower, signaling
lesson learned, ears twitched back. Sometimes broken vertebrae. Of course they can die,
anything can. Our stories are so small, or so large, or maybe

exactly the same size they’ve always been, but we’re noticing now. If I had
a 3D printer, I could make a mask, or a model of the virus (and if this were a different
genre, that would mean something; maybe it could become animate, and these words
would be dangerous), or I could make you. My colleague asks

if he can be designated “essential” so he can visit under cover of night and feed
the fish & turtles & tarantula, other assorted things, although the Madagascar cockroaches
will probably be okay. If he isn’t designated “essential,” he warns, we’ll all

walk back into death. There are different rules for the varied contexts

of virtual meeting—show your face or not—but basic etiquette persists: mute the mic,
don’t interrupt, be gentle
with each other.

—Submitted on 03/26/2020

C. Kubasta is the author of This Business of the Flesh (Apprentice House, 2018), Girling (Brain Mill Press, 2017), and Of Covenants (Whitepoint Press, 2017). Abjectification: Stories & Truths is forthcoming (Apprentice House, 2020). An assistant poetry editor with Brain Mill Press, Kubasta lives in Oshkosh, Wis. On the Web at ckubasta.com, and on Twitter and Instagram @CKubastathePoet.

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Yvette Green
What Remains

When traffic signs read stay home
as states exercise their sovereignty,
what remains—
hazy green drenches Maryland
visitors ignore mandates and swarm
the tidal basin to breathe in cherry blossoms.

When my aunt is on a ventilator in ICU,
what remains—
the tilt of the earth
spring equinox
white buds on branches
that request an opening to usher in rebirth.

When my uncle can’t visit her
what remains—
lyrics and lies
loss and hope
the abstract
the concrete.

When I hear him choke back tears,
when people tell him to stay strong,
what remains—
a gravelly voice aware that saying “stay strong”
is easy and foolish;
a voice that knows;
a heart that appeals to God.

What remains,
when nothing is the same
when worlds are rocked,
shaken by a microscopic riptide;
when we burrow into fear and loneliness;
what remains—
trite reminders
this, too, shall pass;
time, this moment, life
will always pass.

—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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Julia C. Alter
Toilet Paper Panic

We clear out the shelves
when we’re forced to face ourselves
as human. We are now reminded
that our death waits inside us,
that our bodies make waste,
and what would happen
if we couldn’t wipe it clean.
In town I pass street art—a circle
of beasts and birds, and the words
we are not superior. It was there before
the virus. It feels subversive to be out
walking in the sun, like I should bolt
the doors around myself in the dark.
What if we eliminate it, and it doesn’t disappear?
We’ve forgotten we can dig a ditch and bury it.
We can use leaves, already fallen.
We’re so scared of holes, of our own
ancient dirt, of burials. Unprepared
to digest what we’re taking in. We say scat
and we mean feces, jazz—the tiny line
between chaos and order—or we mean
go away. Night soil, manure without moonlight.
Extruded from an animal, like we were.
No pasta, beans or paper products are coming
to our rescue. We’re kings and queens
on our lonely thrones, behind locked doors.
We flush it down into porcelain—
then the rivers, then the oceans.
This shit will break your heart.

—Submitted on 03/25/2020

Julia C. Alter‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Foundry, Yemassee, Crab Orchard Review, Jet Fuel, the The Boiler, and other journals. She lives and writes in Burlington, Vt. Online at alterpoetry.com.

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Andrew K. Peterson
Astatke

The sense of a city skipping backwards
Through dark tracks & a silhouette
You glimpse yourself
Among a vein of rain drug streets
Tear-shaped buildings,
the solitary traveler out of fashion

The shape of loneliness:
A lunar guard
Pause within
Words make up
The broken lock
A crumpled horn
The broken open gate
Tossed aside

The meaning of life is
To pass through
As something like love settles
Close—

Someone else’s hair
On the lip of your tea cup

—Submitted on 03/25/2020

Andrew K. Peterson is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Good Game (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2020). In 2017, he co-organized the Boston Poetry Marathon. He is a co-founding editor of the online literary journal summer stock, and lives in Boston.

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Daisy Bassen
Dated

There is still homework to be done, my dears.
I have also reminded you to wash your hands
At least a dozen times, and you must spend
The time it takes to sing Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts”
Without the flute solo an angel envies enough
To consider hell. Otherwise, you’ll touch your face
And risk everything. It wasn’t a super Tuesday.
It rained heavily just as we needed to go out,
Too warm for a winter coat in a snowless winter;
She was too much, too little, too scary, too risky;
You wouldn’t take a chance and they ran out
Of spring rolls and dumplings too soon, before
Virginia was even called. How will they go on,
The young women? My friend, whom I only know
As words on a screen, wants to know because she saw you
Text-banking and the returns aren’t looking good
For anyone other than an old loud white man.
You’re all renegades and you laugh at me every time I ask,
A black swan in leggings and your dark eyes unwilling
To believe we could actually be this stupid. This.
Stupid. It’s the truth though, we’re capable
Of enormous ignorance; we keep touching our faces
To know we’re alive, we’re real and we’re ripe
For infection. There is someone at the door, not a neighbor.

—Submitted on March 23, 2020

Daisy Bassen  ‘s poems have appeared in Oberon, The Delmarva Review, The Sow’s Ear, and PANK, among other journals, as well as in The Dreamers Anthology: Writing Inspired by the Lives of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Anne Frank (Social Justice Anthologies, 2019), edited by by Janette Schafer, Cedric Rudolph, and Matthew Ussia. A practicing physician, Bassen lives in Rhode Island with her family.

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