Marjorie Moorhead
Portal

There’s a bruise in the crook
of my arm
a portal
the thinnest skin

access
to my heart
a bruise, where the needle went in
and prodded

trying to get blood to flow
a letting (blood letting)
necessary to check
and see how I am doing.

The bruise
a yin-yang now of purple and yellow
takes me back
The day I saw them on your arm,

grayish black    a whole row
“tracks”       the mark of a journey
a descent
a road to the end

an escape route
when you stepped on that path
there was no leaving it
you managed to stray    for awhile

you stayed
                     But then,
you left
                     for good.

—Submitted on 09/27/2020

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of the chapbooks Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press 2019), and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books 2020). Her poems have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig, Porter House Review, Verse-Virtual, Rising Phoenix Review, Amethyst Review, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including most recently Covid Spring (Hobblebush Books, 2020). 

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Marjorie Moorhead
Before It Goes, Remember

Remember when you could sleep
at the end of day, with expectation
that upon rise,
our world would be okay

When you felt a sense
of balance under your feet;
connection to earth and sky
Because they were alive

and well. And you could tell that
from abundance. Birds in the air,
flowers in the field, bees in the hive
Remember

when clouds were clouds
and not hovering doom
foretelling fire storms, flood,
Polar ice ablation

Remember when you felt we were marching
toward Justice
maybe too slowly but at least
in that direction

When you believed
in election
being fair and true representation
without question.

—Submitted on 09/27/2020

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of the chapbooks Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press 2019), and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books 2020). Her poems have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig, Porter House Review, Verse-Virtual, Rising Phoenix Review, Amethyst Review, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including most recently Covid Spring (Hobblebush Books, 2020). 

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Marjorie Moorhead
Connection

          after “You Are the Everything” (R.E.M., 1988)
          for Max-Henry

Sometimes it feels I will never sleep
dark, dark is the night
Afraid of the world; the world we’ve made
dark is the night

Afraid of disconnection. Imagine riding
in a car; try to imagine—there is no internet!
The windows surround you
and point out the stars

Press your face to the glass
gaze out at the sky. It’s vast
and winking; spilling
with sparkles twinkling

You’re moving through space
white lines shoot by; a rhythm
to the night. Secure in this vessel
driven by others, you trust in the future…

Sometimes it feels I will never sleep
dark, dark is the night
Afraid of this world that we’ve made
dark, dark is the night

Go back to a sense of wonder Try look out
at the birds in your tree, living
outside of your window
they’re there for you to see. Why?

Put down, put down the phone. Use binoculars.
Yellow wings match perfectly the changing leaves.
See this blending has a purpose;
puzzle pieces nestle into their places

—Submitted on 09/27/2020

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of the chapbooks Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press 2019), and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books 2020). Her poems have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig, Porter House Review, Verse-Virtual, Rising Phoenix Review, Amethyst Review, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including most recently Covid Spring (Hobblebush Books, 2020). 

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David P. Miller
Angelic Ghazal

Brethren, shrug your shoulders, yawn. The killed were “no angels.”
Who’ll hose the blood away? Our high-fivin’ bro angels.

Prez gotta have a pic clutching Prez Bible upside down.
Prepare ye the tear-gas way, arch-roboangels.

One body, brown, four hours sheeted silent in the street.
Flatlined on the double yellow, feed for crow angels.

Very unfair, sez Prez, people to genius me are so unfair!
So bless their souls with rubber bullets, status quo angels.

Turn in your hymnals to Lord, we fear for our pale lives.
Now sing sound cannons, let them blow, angels!

Bullets no-knock through bedclothes. Justice pinkslipped at the curb.
I’m sick of your golf junkets, God. And your damned slow angels.

—Submitted on 09/27/2020

David P. Miller is the author of Sprawled Asleep (Nixes Mate Books, 2019) and The Afterimages (Červená Barva Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Hawaii Pacific Review, Turtle Island Quarterly,  poems2go, riverbabble, and other journals. He is retired from a career in library services, and lives in Boston.

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David P. Miller
A Shroud of Synonyms

          Lay back the darkness for a salesman
          who could charm everything but the shadows
          —Edward Hirsch

—Submitted on 09/27/2020

David P. Miller is the author of Sprawled Asleep (Nixes Mate Books, 2019) and The Afterimages (Červená Barva Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Hawaii Pacific Review, Turtle Island Quarterly,  poems2go, riverbabble, and other journals. He is retired from a career in library services, and lives in Boston.

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David P. Miller
Go Back

The pale people, they who host plague from
a world across the ocean, will not go
into the rivers to wash themselves. They came
from a ship with a flower’s name. Back
in their own land, do flowers stink so? I ask you,
how many times must we show them where

to bathe? The strangers insist that linens are where
purity happens. Underclothing sucks filth from
their skins and they become clean, they believe. You
and I must shut our noses from the results. They go
to their god’s house with dirty bodies, then back
to their huts, praising. Who knows why they came?

This is not their land. I hear, where they came
from, women plaster their faces where
the pox they carry scatters pits. Keep it back,
they must, the air itself poisoned, rising from
their skins. For face-covering fat, they go
to executioners, who harvest it warm. Would you

wear carcass-fat mashed with beeswax? Would you
swallow a powder of herbs with dust that came
from an unburied skull? The high people go,
I hear, after dead youths’ body parts. Their
lusts are prolonged by eating those organs. From
that feast, they think, corpses give young years back.

What repair will they make to us? What give back?
Speak to them simply, with reason, never can you
move them to listen. The “astrologer” priests from
their land of illness and guns declare that where
sweat makes the pores open, foul air will come
in to sicken. That way their race’s beliefs go.

And we are to sit with them, smiling go
to their feast, hear them give glories back
to their god. I ask you now, where
in their faces will our guts remain calm? Can you
filter pure air away from their breaths? They came
here in what is called peace where they are from,

but we must force them to go. Tell them, you
will carry your pestilence back, with your names.
For us, nothing is good where your skins come from.

—Submitted on 09/27/2020

David P. Miller is the author of Sprawled Asleep (Nixes Mate Books, 2019) and The Afterimages (Červená Barva Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Hawaii Pacific Review, Turtle Island Quarterly,  poems2go, riverbabble, and other journals. He is retired from a career in library services, and lives in Boston.

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Alfred Nicol
Midnight Prayer

          Seul l’amour divin donne les clés de la connaissance.
          —Arthur Rimbaud

My Lord, as you have given your consent
to the installation of a demagogue
at the highest magnitude of earthly power,
I guess it must be no concern of yours
who pulls the levers of this apparatus.

And as you have equipped the human heart
to feel attraction even where nobility
and grace are absent, so that people throng
to hear a vulgar man contort the language
taught them by their mothers, stripping it

of all significance to make of truth
a dancing bear, you must be sick to death
of hearing prayerful appeals to reason.
I do not question your benevolence;
I only ask, what question should I ask?

—Submitted on 09/26/2020

Alfred Nicol is the author of Brief Accident of Light: Poems of Newburyport (Kelsay Books, 2019), a collaboration with poet Rhina P. Espaillat; Animal Psalms (Able Muse Press, 2016); Elegy for Everyone (Prospero’s World Press, 2010), and Winter Light (University of Evansville Press, 2004), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award. Nicol’s work has appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, Dark Horse, Commonweal, The Hopkins Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Contemporary Poetry of New England (Middlebury, 2002), Obsession: Sestinas in the 21st Century (Dartmouth, 2014), and Best American Poetry 2018 (Scribner, 2018), among others.

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Alfred Nicol
Stay at Home Advisory

Pity those who live apart,
unvisited, untouched, unknown,
who’ve kept their distance from the start,
and much prefer to be alone.

Pity the unhealthy too,
who watch the night, who sit and brood,
who really ought to pity you,
far less adept at solitude.

Pity those in attic rooms
who seldom pull the curtains back
to peer out where the sickness looms
in search of some bright thing they lack.

Yet those you pity may well ask,
estranged, Was it not ever thus?
Who goes outside without a mask?
So what is quarantine to us?

—Submitted on 09/26/2020

Alfred Nicol is the author of Brief Accident of Light: Poems of Newburyport (Kelsay Books, 2019), a collaboration with poet Rhina P. Espaillat; Animal Psalms (Able Muse Press, 2016); Elegy for Everyone (Prospero’s World Press, 2010), and Winter Light (University of Evansville Press, 2004), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award. Nicol’s work has appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, Dark Horse, Commonweal, The Hopkins Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Contemporary Poetry of New England (Middlebury, 2002), Obsession: Sestinas in the 21st Century (Dartmouth, 2014), and Best American Poetry 2018 (Scribner, 2018), among others.

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Alfred Nicol
Shelter in Place

There is an emptiness in everything,
like the shade cradled in the crescent moon.

A motorcycle’s engine, echoing
the large abstraction of an afternoon;

the broken gate that opens on a square,
the bricks and shadows rubbing elbows there
where silence lectures in its monotone;

another shade that walks the streets alone,
past windows—yes, the windows too are blank,
where people dwell inside their separate lives,
huddling there like money in the bank—
to where the river sheathes its glinting knives.

The tides have seized; the stillness is unreal.
The surface poses as a sheet of steel.

—Submitted on 09/26/2020

Alfred Nicol is the author of Brief Accident of Light: Poems of Newburyport (Kelsay Books, 2019), a collaboration with poet Rhina P. Espaillat; Animal Psalms (Able Muse Press, 2016); Elegy for Everyone (Prospero’s World Press, 2010), and Winter Light (University of Evansville Press, 2004), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award. Nicol’s work has appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, Dark Horse, Commonweal, The Hopkins Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Contemporary Poetry of New England (Middlebury, 2002), Obsession: Sestinas in the 21st Century (Dartmouth, 2014), and Best American Poetry 2018 (Scribner, 2018), among others.

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Jeanne-Marie Osterman
White

          New York City, March 2020

Higher than normal temperatures have Yoshino cherries
in Central Park blossoming early. White flowerets
fall like snow in next day’s storm
turning paths
I walk
so white
it hurts my eyes—
branches, a network of wintry nerves.

Outside Lenox Hill Hospital,
white refrigerated trailers
are lined up the length of the block—
the super-luxe kind used for wardrobe and makeup on location shoots.
Chutes at each end eat white
body bags,
stacked three wide
x three deep
by knights in white gowns.

A friend texts
u have 2 laf
c humor in this
Sends video
of woman
wearing white
thong as mask.

East Meadow of Central Park, white with tents—
emergency field hospital for virus patient overflow.
Christians only, non-gay—white.

Tent flaps swirl like the white skirt I wear
dancing to Obtalá, god of Orishas,
most beloved god
because he doesn’t see humans as imperfect beings
who cause their own suffering;
he blames himself, his own negligence—
loves his white wine—

imperfect god.

—Submitted on 09/23/2020

Jeanne-Marie Osterman is the author of There’s a Hum (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Shellback (Paloma Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Borderlands, Cathexis Northwest, California Quarterly, The Madison Review, Bluestem, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Our Poetica: A Testament to the Shared Uniqueness of the Poetic Experience (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2019), and Of Burgers and Barrooms: Stories and Poems (Main Street Rag, 2017). Osterman lives in New York City, and serves as poetry editor for Cagibi.

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