Cassandra Welch
To Hell With It

I dream of the mountain’s dew on a truck windshield collecting
I dream of the colours of the dawning sky: pinks and purples changing into blue
I dream of the surge of excitement an oil girl feels as helicopters come in in seismic to meet me
At the ground, while I sit, “coolly, indifferently” waiting for them to come
As though I never made a misturn, as though I never feared bad things
Like wolves, Hydrogen Sulfide, bears, injury or Rapid Body Transport.
I dream of the longevity of an industry that government has sanctioned as an essential service
In the face of calamity called a virus
I dream of the world diving in at me in Northern BC, Canada,
While I work the front lines of Health Care as a Social Service Worker and Social Worker
Helping the men of my old industry push themselves further than most can push when they fall
To get there I have two choices: let the other health care workers fight Covid-19 or join in
So I will fight the lions, as a front-line worker, to get it all back
Until I can dream for more, even if I go down
Because sitting in a chair, while my friends might contract it, while we all might carry it already
I would rather be the front-line between hell and forever
I would rather take on a demons of this world, letting my fire burn out this twilight.
There are those who feel empowered on the frontlines,
No matter their height, this time, this fight, this fight, is not a flight for me
It is the fight I fought in the northern bush, and the fight I fight to get it all back
The men, the bush, the Field, the hell found in drills on a lease-floor, which cools and waits
For the front-line workers, the world over, to take over
While the men wait, wait out this new fight
And when it ends, whether I go and join in
When the dusk cools out the gloom of this fever
The men chomp down, restless to do what they are want to do: fight
Work their asses off, to deliver the product that takes their youth
Takes their souls, uses their spirit despite the larger world’s stifled scorn.

—Submitted on 03/24/2020

Cassandra Welch was selected for the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship in 2020 (which she declined to attend university). She holds a personal support worker certificate from St. Clair College in Windsor, Ontario, and attended Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. Welch will begin Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, in the fall of 2020 to pursue a social service worker diploma, and plans to head to Western Canada afterward.

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Laura Ingrid
Home

It provides protection from an uncertain world;
a security blanket made of smooth
stucco and cozy objects to rest tired bodies on.
A place to seek shelter from drizzle or heat, unkind faces
or loud noises, any unpleasant entity existing beyond
the confines of its warm and inviting element.

I’ve lived here for a while, never considering the element
of change. It would be difficult to leave this world
I’ve constructed. It might even prove to be beyond
my capabilities. So instead, I choose to smooth
out wrinkles that exist, as though the rooms are faces
that need work. Sometimes it’s good to get worked on.

The more time I spend here, watching tv and laying on
the couch, the more I realize that the element
of outside space is something that I miss. Strange faces
and random repartee, the socializing that the world
needs in order to thrive. This experience hasn’t been smooth
nor has it been easy. I often think of what lies beyond.

If I let my mind wander, it drifts far beyond
its comfortable boundary. All that is light fades, even on
a sunny day. I’m left with darkness and I’ll have to smooth
talk my way out of despair. It’s days like these when an element
like rain brings hope. I feel it cleanse the air, my home, my world
as it dampens flowers and windows and faces.

It’s not that I don’t like this place, I just want to see faces
other than my own. I want to know what exists beyond
these walls I’ve hidden behind for so long. There’s an entire world
out there and I want to be a part of it. Time keeps moving on
and I’m stuck in this box. Life has become boring, there is no element
of surprise anymore. I want to be where things are rough, not smooth.

I want to leave this place. These walls, they are no longer smooth
columns of comfort. They are barricades separating me from faces
I know and ones I’ve yet to meet. I am completely out of my element
here. There’s nothing for me to do but bitch about being bored beyond
belief. Time drags on and on and on
while I wait for the okay to join the new world.

I pray everything goes smooth and there’s good beyond
this, that it’s filled with faces who wish to carry on
as we had before, and eradicate the element that tried to ruin the world.

—Submitted on 03/24/2020

Laura Ingrid is a freelance writer and MFA candidate living in Los Angeles.

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Arleen Williams
Wild Rabbit

A wild rabbit nibbles tender grass
Then hops across the hazelnut
Shells beneath the garden table
To settle under the unruly brambles
To rest to think as rabbits do
Silent world in fearful lull

Watchful, the rabbit twitches her ears
Her nose—does she sense my eyes upon her
A gift of Buddha calm and nature’s glory
Quarantined in a silent world

Deep in the bamboo thicket
Along the southern fence line
My rabbit disappears to her burrow
She will return—I know—one day
Hopeful world in silent wait

Arleen Williams is the author, with Pamela Hobart Carter, of twelve short books in easy English, published on the imprint they founded, No Talking Dogs Press. Williams is also the author of of three memoirs and three novels, most recently The Ex-Mexican Wives Club (Independently published, 2019), and Walking Home (CreateSpace, 2015). Her poetry appears in the Chrysanthemum 2020 Literary Anthology (Goldfish Press Seattle, 2020). Williams lives in Seattle, where she teaches at South Seattle College.

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Sylvia Hillo
Covid-19 and the Five-Year-Old

He hated germs long before you arrived
Stripping him of mud
Of social fun during a time
Social developing is so important

Mothers at their wit’s end
Sharing sad stories of personal disappointment.
I’m not a teacher
I go to school to be a teacher

Cold and flu season
Tis’ the reason
Cough’s nonstop but so is the preschool snot
Potatoes bought in bulk now sit and rot

Sanity hangs by a thread
Chickens reside in an old tenant’s shed
Bed sounds so good, but
when will it end?

—Submitted on 03/23/2020

Sylvia Hillo self-describes as “a mother and full-time student.” She writes, “like so many others, I have found myself in a situation I was blindsided by. I reside in Los Angeles, Calif., and am a student at California State University Northridge.”

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Maddison Taylor
What I Learned This Week About Being Alone in the Sky

If the moon is directly overhead, you will weigh
slightly less. When the moon is full, the side
of the Earth closest to it expands, as if the planet
wants to touch its counterpart. In order to avoid
spreading a virus, you must resist contact
with surfaces, with clothes, with other people’s
hands. This week I learned that it’s hard
to be my mother during a quarantine.
Her fear expands, touches me with its spidery
reach, like the veins that stretch her skin,
making craters. She is scared of dying too
young, leaving the way my father did, before
he could form the words, I love you, before she
felt the pull of her daughter’s love. Still, I have
no calendar to plot the orbit of my mother.
Perhaps William James was right, time gets faster
as we get older. I am moving at the speed
of the light it takes to get from here to there.

Maddison Taylor is a student at Woodbury University in Burbank, Calif. Her interview with the poet Reuben Ellis appears in Athena. She has served as literature editor and social media manager for the student-produced literary magazine, MORIA. Maddison lives in Los Angeles.

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Ella Belvin
Evening Primrose

Does beauty only live in our eyes
and cease to exist without witness?
Does wisdom die with the wise
or hurt fade with forgiveness?

Does love perish in solitude,
dehydrating the heart?
Or does love continue to renew
and keep the broken from falling apart?

Is all hope of normality lost
when hell starts to seep
from every corner, to accost us?
Is death worth the power you seek?

No,
the flowers still bloom in the dark.

—Submitted on 03/23/2020

Ella Belvin is a senior at St. Mary’s Episcopal School in Memphis, Tennessee.

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Amanda Ngoho Reavey
Poem for the End of the World

after Czeław Milosz

When the world ends
people may pillage, hoard food
and water everywhere
except here
at the end of the world
where the sky meets the sea.

Here, when the world ends,
the sun will blaze and smile the way
my grandfather sat up straight
and asked for food the day
before he died.

Here, when the world ends,
the Badjao will sing canticles,
boys will drink Coke from glass bottles,
and bet on fighting cocks.

Here, when the world ends,
Trappist monks will exit seclusion
and walk the dirt road to Sibunag,
offering absolutions.

Here, when the world ends,
I’ll put on my sadok and guide the carabao
through oil-mud to prepare for rice fields,
hoping my son will burn the land and till
(until)
the world ends.

—Submitted on 03/23/20

Amanda Ngoho Reavey is the author of Marilyn (the Operating System, 2015), winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Award for poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in Construction, Anthropoid, Truck, and Evening Will Come, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies Women: Poetry: Migration (Theenk Books, 2017), edited by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa; and Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), edited by Michael Boughn and others. She is a PhD student in poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She blogs about mental health, disability rights, and accessibility at stereo-type.life.

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Caitlin Cacciatore
Brighter Days

winter brought little else save for sorrow—
and when it was over, we called
upon the Gods of sickness we’d all but abandoned in health;
we called one another vile names
and took the names of Jesus, Mary and Joseph in vain;
we fought in the street over petty things;
we abandoned our fires
and all the pretty things
that came along with them—
last I heard,
the nurses were swaying on their feet
against the tidal wave of the sick;
doctors were going out like matches;
(the forces of nature always seem to take us by surprise)
the dying said their wedding vows in makeshift chapels
far from the ones they loved;
the burial mounds grew mountainous,
but I can already see you on the other side of this—
a survivor picking your way across the fields
where the dead were piled in mass graves;
you will plant a flower for every life that was lost,
and I can see you, even now, planting the seeds of hope
and watering them with your tears.

—Submitted on March 23, 2020

Caitlin Cacciatore‘s work has appeared in The Roadrunner Review, Willawaw Literary Journal, and The Martian Chronicle, among journals. She is a Macaulay Honors Student studying artificial intelligence at Baruch College, pursuing a self-designed curriculum including physics, math, computer science, and philosophy.

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Hilary King
Breakfast Before, Breakfast Now

Before, breakfast was yogurt.
straight from the cup, eaten
over my laptop as I researched
camps for the kids or ordered
groceries online, trying to check
off another chore before work,
swearing when a thick white
sour smelling drop of my breakfast
hit the keyboard.
An hour later I wondered why
I was starving.

Breakfast now. One pandemic day
I read a recipe In the news
and make it right away, something
I’ve never done before.
Baked oats. One cup oats, three cups
Boiling water, cinnamon, salt, peanut butter.
Bake for an hour. Thirty minutes in, the kitchen
begins to smell delicious, nutty, spicy, and warm.
I am hungry. I ran 3 miles earlier, walked the dog twice,
unloaded the dishwasher but I’m patient.
I can wait.
I can wait.

—Submitted on 03/23/20

Hilary King is the author of the The Maid’s Car (Aldrich Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Fourth River, Belletrist, Gyroscope Review, The Cortland Review, PANK, Blue Fifth Review, Ki’n, SWIMM, Mom Egg Review, Sky Island Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other journals. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is quarantined with 2 kids, 1 husband, 1 dog, and 1 cat.

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Gloria Deckro
Nostalgia

I avoided doorknobs
stifled an itch
ducked as panic
ricocheted empty
shelves, stowed
one bunch of daffodils
bright as before
we knew something
could latch into us
and multiply,
before
we were scrambling
to claw back
anything familiar.

Now I grate carrots
beat eggs,
every plan curdled,
try to bake cake.
See the fine frosting
of snow
allude to a season
before
we were sheltered
in place.

—Submitted on 03/23/2020

Gloria Deckro is a physician with a background in family practice and the role of mindfulness in health and medicine. She founded the Silver River Institute in 2004 to foster an integrated approach to health skills training. Deckro lives and studies poetry in the  Greater Boston area.

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