Lyndsey Kelly Weiner 
Coronavirus 1 and 2

my past-husband sits in the dark in a room I’ve never seen
on the futon that used to be in our living room
laid off after one day of farm work
texted me yesterday he saw snow geese while pruning

evictions are illegal now I say
not I love you or I’m crying
picturing our old blanket around his shoulders
catastrophe is accidental close contact multiplied

*

homeschool unit on 90s rap: podcast on Biggie & Tupac

this is white privilege
that is driving while black
this is why we don’t say the n-word

that is what you say when your friends at your school of confederate flags and maga hats say it

this is where I find the magic words to keep you from saying nothing

—Submitted on 03/23/2020

Lyndsey Kelly Weiner‘s poems have appeared in The Stonecoast Review and Tiny Seed. She holds an MFA from the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. She teaches writing at Syracuse University.

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Daisy Bassen
In Wales, They Are Singing in the Mountains

I’m very busy.
I’m waiting for my nightmare
And so I am watching the crows
On the grass, shadows and shadows,
I am stocking the pantry with inviolables.
You could see it all on my face
If you looked; there are no masks
To be had for all that we are
Garment-workers again in our kitchens,
Crowded together, breathing
The same tumbling air we fear.

I’m very busy, about to run
A one-room schoolhouse,
A clinic, a studio, a sanctuary
And I can’t hurry up or slow down;
Time is made of numbers
And you can’t eat them.

No one alive has ever lived in this world before.
Our advice comes only from the dead.
Descants from the grey hills.

—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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David McVey
Speakeasy

I memorised the instructions; wait until dark
turn right at the market cross, follow
a winding side-street and then at a door
opposite a sash-window with a light gleaming,
make the special knock.

Several times I had to hide in doorways
to avoid arrest for not practicing
‘Self-isolation’. I found the place
and knocked. I breathed the password
and the door was opened.

I did not know what to expect. Extreme
social contact, perhaps, license, libertinism.
Couples writhing amidst a miasma of alcohol
while talk roared and laughter filled a room
of hail-fellow-well-met heartiness.

Instead I found old friends meeting, grateful
for the precious gifts of talk and company.
Clubs and societies and churches had
arranged to gather, to catch up, to
re-forge the social currency of contact.

I ordered a coffee, and as I drank
I joined groups viewing immersive videos of
castles and country houses, parks and gardens,
mountains and moors, lochs and beaches.
Pleasures now forsworn and lost.

Time swept on and we left in ones and twos
to minimise the risk of arrest.
My turn came and I crept home. I heard
shouts and alarms and anger from my imprisoned
neighbours. They don’t know about the speakeasy.

David McVey‘s poems have appeared in The White Launch, Defenestration. His short stories and nonfiction have appeared in Crooked Holster, History Magazine, and other publications. McVey is a part-time lecturer in communications at New College Lanarkshire in Motherwell, Scotland. He lives in East Dunbartonshire.

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Andrew Zanazanian
Lonesome Scourge

Stand you now, our porcelain walls, bedecked with tidings
of ashes that creep through the day’s mortal brawl
with anguished sleep, to endure tomorrow’s hiding
that’s brought earthly motions to an infantile crawl

Keep you to your caverns, of imprisoned joy
To guard our little time, from nature’s ploy
With cloistered hearts and coarse vigilance
We play our parts, for all mankind’s dividends

Gather your wits, and staunch your despair
mete out the days through this baleful repose
as we begin our climb up countermeasure’s stair,
up delicate steps where hope like ivy grows

Steel your selves, come the mutative foe
It’s solitary war, but you are not alone;
though we all have heard the cawing of crows,
we are yet sentinels of life’s frail throne

—Submitted March 23, 2020

Andrew Zanazanian is a senior honors student majoring in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He self-describes as “a first generation American of Armenian heritage, born and raised in the Central Valley in California.”

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Elisabeth Ampthor
Shelter in Place

Her mother always told her:
when it feels like too much,
take life one day at a time.
She leans in, holds her own gaze in the mirror.
I’m leaving you, she whispers,
practices saying it over
and over again
until the words no longer clog her throat,
until her heartbeat quiets in her ears,
until she believes herself.

Practice. Tomorrow will finally be the day.

Tonight will be their last nice night together,
the last night she keeps her mouth shut so she doesn’t
ruin the evening,
the last night she will allow him to forget the things
she was brave enough to say
once
but not repeat.

One day at a time, but
days become so many years,
and one more day is unbearable.

Promise. Tomorrow the day will have arrived.

Then: residents ordered to shelter in place
through April 7, at least.
Stay home as much as possible,
and only leave for essential activities.
Prevent the situation from getting much worse.
Every hour counts.

The lock turns, the door opens,
the dog bounds in ahead of him, a sweet,
sloppy greeting.

One day at a time.

—Submitted on March 23, 2020

Elisabeth Ampthor graduated magna cum laude from the University of Cincinnati with a major in international affairs and minors in Spanish and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

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Jill Crainshaw
Dear Midnight,

Who do you talk to
when the wrens and robins
go quiet in a storm?
You know, when lightning
strikes every city in every land
and ignites down deep darkness?

The tiny terrier and I
cock our heads—
She growls down deep
in her belly suspicious
at not hearing electricity
scurry through the house.

Rain tiptoes toward us
then chases us home,
silken hair flying out behind her.
She slips in with us as the
door slams with a sonic boom
and a single metallic flash of light—

Silence sidles in too,
scampers off into corners
and down deep into crevices
and we all peer out the window
at a sky homesick for stars.

Dear Midnight,

Can you tell us what it all means?
You, who wander fields and forests
seeking the fierce feeble embers
of once-fiery mornings—

The tiny terrier and I cock our heads.
Out there—
in the dripping down deep darkness
a train whistle melts
into the rain-slick trees
and a barn owl queries the night.

Jill Crainshaw is the author of the poetry collection Cedars in Snowy Places (Library Partners Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared Tuck, The New Verse News, Star 82 Review, and Panoplyzine, among other journals.A professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, she is the author of several theological books, including When I in Awesome Wonder: Liturgy Distilled from Daily Life (Liturgical Press, 2017). She blogs atdrdeacondog.wordpress.com.

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Bianca Singelstad
An Unconscious Ending

The only life I’ve ever known,
Rests dead.
As I lay in bed
I imagine
The last hug,
Last laugh,
And last
Goodbye
I said.

Teachers say not to fear.
Pastors remind us
That Jesus is here.
Parents shake their heads,
Not knowing when the end
Will come near.

Lights went out.
For the last time.
We closed our math books,
Shut our computers,
And left our friends,
With no consciousness
Of the months ahead.
We didn’t spend enough time
Saying goodbye.
Nobody closed their locker,
Thinking it’d be the last time.
Nobody thought this was the end.

Hope seems distant.
As friends start to respond
Less
And less.
Love seems strained
As fists are raised
Again
And again.
The protesters
Have been silenced,
And now the streets lay dead.
Hope seems lost
And today
Feels like the end.

Bianca Singelstad is a 16-year-old writer from Lake Mills, Iowa. She enjoys being involved in her school, church, and community. This appears to be her first publication, although something else is forthcoming in For Women Who Roar.

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Susan Craig
Water

My husband’s soaking his summer sneakers
the ones we both thought were terribly cool
he’s weighted them down with the super-sized bottle of Lysol
from Sam’s I’d left sitting for years in the back
of the lowest laundry cabinet—O, I find this a hopeful thing
tan canvas turned dark as tannin, sunken and
surrendered in faint clinging bubbles like two willing hands—O
where once the brown plastic tub perched unabashed
on the Corian counter would have galled me—what
a glory I find now in this clutter
of thick sinking laces, insoles yellowed, bend of the soles
to accommodate the mercy
of water.

—Submitted on March 19, 2020

Susan Craig is a graphic designer in Columbia, S.C. Her poems have appeared in Kakalak, Mom Egg Review, The Collective I, Fall Lines, and Jasper, among other publications.

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Adam Oyster-Sands
Banana Bread and Weeping Willows

Hamlet said
all life is suffering controlled by the whims and wills
of luck and the mysterious force of fate—slings and arrows.
I want to feel that Ophelia was wronged
and the true tragedy of the play lies with her flowers
floating on the water under the willows and moonlit winter sky—native and indued.
Her madness comes too quick though,
consumed entirely by the larger than life figure worthy of the title—
his name in everyone’s mouth.
The petulant child screaming for attention
the melodramatic teenager crying for unrequited love
the white man speaking too loudly on his cell phone in the store
the drunk at the bar reciting the same nonsensical story to strangers—
all assaults on our peace.
Before the end though, we understand—come what may.

Some believe our ancestors watch over us long after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil.
They say we can pray to them and they will guide us
offer us aid, direction, comfort, wisdom.
I grew up with my grandmother—banana bread and lukewarm milk.
For the first nineteen years of my life she was a permanent fixture
a never changing north star—bear hugs and back scratches.
Then cancer ate the parts that made her a woman and now,
now I’ve spent more years of my life without her.

Last night in winter air I swear I saw her float across the deck with my breath—a ghost.
And I remembered what Hamlet rightly said
—The readiness is all—
and my ancestors watch and wait
for the reward of their life bequeathed to a future predicated on
luck and
fate and
the loudest voice in the room.
And Ophelia weeps still for her father but more for her own loss—
innocence stolen for the sake of a hero’s journey.
My grandmother baked banana bread and held my head in her lap
as the willows outside the window swayed in the winter wind
weeping with a child unable to give a voice to his pain.

Adam Oyster-Sands is a high school English teacher in Portland, Ore. He holds an MA in humanities. This may very well be his first publication. It will likely not be his last.

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Jed Myers
Seclusion Math

Let us count, but not number,

the embraces before.

Count the imagined

kisses, let them speed through the clouds to reach
just those lips, cheeks, brows

they were sent for.

Let us count now,

with no accounting, the moments our arms will fly
round one another in August,

though we can’t
be sure.

And count, without tally,

those quick subtle starts of the hand
toward love’s faces across towns, ranges,

even across the edge of breath.

Let’s count each

touch between hearts, whether or not
we can sense it, every spark or harmonic,

flicker, hint in the air,

like a small bird’s dark

flash across vision’s border. Count all our care.

Jed Myers is the author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center, 2014), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press, 2019), and four chapbooks. Recent poems appear in Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Southern Poetry Review, Ruminate, and other journals. His work appears in the anthologies For Love of Orcas (Wandering Aengus Press, 2019), edited by Andrew Shattuck McBride and Jill McCabe Johnson; and Take a Stand: Art Against Hate (Raven Chronicles Press, 2020), edited by Anna Balint, Phoebe Bosche, and Thomas Hubbard. Myers is poetry editor of the journal Bracken, and lives in Seattle.

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