Michael Broder
First Thing in the Morning of April 13, 2020

You sip your coffee. You take your meds. You
feed your kitties. You check your email. You
check your Facebook. You check your Twitter.
You used to get straight to coffee and your poem.
Now you are far more distracted. Now before you
write your poem, you check the headlines. Cannot
start your day without knowing yesterday’s death
toll. Cannot start your day without knowing if a new
clinical trial started treating patients with an
investigational new drug. You anticipate the governor’s
daily press briefing, live streamed on Facebook
or watched later if you miss it. It’s your Mr. Rogers.
It’s your fireside chat. One of your backyard feral
cats looked sickly, and then stood off and looked
at dinner but did not eat, and then just did not come
back—you assume he’s dead; that’s how they do it;
you’ve seen it before. And it (most likely, although
based on current information, not definitely) has
nothing to do with the pandemic, and yet it seems to,
with everything that happens during this time—a
new TV show you start watching, a book you read
for a few minutes at bedtime before your Ambien
kicks in—everything seems to be Covid-19 edition,
everything seems connected to the…you like the
term health crisis, which nobody seems to use.
That’s what they called AIDS—the health crisis.
Then you were marginalized and the federal government
dismissed your plight. Now you have marriage rights
and characters in TV shows, movies, and stage plays—
and the federal government fucks you right along with
everyone else. Plus ça change.

Michael Broder is the author of Drug and Disease Free (Indolent Books, 2018) and This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for gay poetry. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies. For several months, he has written a poem of at least 25 lines every morning; this was the poem for April 13, 2020.

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Marjorie Moorhead
In Silence

after Ilya Kaminsky

How is it I can hear a neighbor’s lawnmower, buzzing like a fly,
watch the sunlight from my front room windows,
see the breeze in leaves…

How is it I can breathe with ease,
when a small body washes up on a shore,
alone?

(forgive me) I take in the sunlight.
I block out the body (forgive me).
I eat my lunch, in silence.

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books, 2020). Recent poems have appeared in Verse-Virtual, Amethyst Journal, and Sheila-Na-Gig, among other journals. Her poems have also appeared in several anthologies, including Planet in Peril (Fly on the Wall, 2019), edited by Isabelle Kenyon, and From The Ashes (Animal Heart, 2019), edited by Amanda McLeod and Mela Blust. An AIDS survivor and mother, Moorhead found a voice in poetry. Her work speaks of environment, survival, attention to the “every day,” and how we treat each other. She writes from the NH/VT border.

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Lynn McGee
Crush, 5

I’m leaning back against the ropes
and the mat is blue leather, my hands deep
in red gloves, swollen tongues. Punching bags
swing like giant capsules; white on top, black
on bottom. There’s a row of hanging lights,
and beneath them, a row of stars that hatch
across the glossy floor. I’m leaning back
against the ropes, heart hammering
in the call-and-response that keeps my pulse
sprinting like a rabbit across a football field.
I’m calm as that field, and lean back
against the push of braided cable, a lot
of spring in its wrap. I blame you
for how good that feels.

Lynn McGee is the author of Tracks (Broadstone Books, 2019) and Sober Cooking (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), as well as two  award-winning poetry chapbooks, Heirloom Bulldog (Bright Hill Press, 2015) and Bonanza (Slapering Hol Press, 1996). Here poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Ontario Review, Phoebe, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sun Magazine, and The New Guard, among other journals, as well as in the anthology Stonewall’s Legacy (Local Gems Press, 2019), edited by Rusty Rose and Marc Rosen. With José Pelauz, McGee wrote the children’s book Starting Over in Sunset Park (Tilbury House Publishers, 2020). She serves on the advisory board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and co-curates the Lunar Walk Poetry Series with Gerry LaFemina and Madeleine Barnes. Online at lynnmcgee.com.

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Remy Dambron
[nahr-suh-sist]

narcissist goes too extreme
measures

avoids
taking responsibility

for narcissist is never
wrong

but narcissist can only be
if those who praise exist as well

in abundance

for narcissist fears
solitude

in this vain
narcissist loves only conditionally

those who enable its self
serving behaviors

for narcissist demands absolute
loyalty

narcissist systematically
inserts itself
seamlessly
into

everything

for narcissist is blind
to worthiness of
others

narcissist is never
content

constantly craving
endlessly creating conflict to mask its lawlessness
mastering deception

for narcissist is an agent of chaos
thriving on

disorder

narcissist is pathological
repetitious
superfluous

hypocritical
parasitical
pernicious highly

devious

narcissist is multiplying
like swarms of locusts
biblical

city of sin
nation of lies

sickness level

critical

Poems by Remy Dambron have appeared previously in What Rough Beast, as well as in New Verse News, Society of Classical Poets, Poets Reading the News, and Writer’s Resist. He and his wife live in Portland, Oregon, where they advocate for social justice and spread smiles under the belief that happiness can be contagious too.

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Jane Yolen
That Damned Pipe

I met you that way, the sweetness
of the briar, your confident walk
eating up city streets where once
it devoured southern mountains,
a lust-filled lunting that took me in.
Who knew time was already ticking
beneath your tongue, greedily
building the reservoir of death.
You who were always so full of life,
never ill: hunter, fisherman, birdwatcher,
your closest companion field glasses
that brought the world into clearest view.
That damned pipe, that damned lunting,
taking you from us way too early
leaving only the field glasses behind.

Jane Yolen is a poet, novelist, children’s book writer, essayist, short story writer, and lyricist. To date, she has published 376 books, 10 of them poetry collections for adult readers. She has won many awards for her work, including two Nebulas, two Golden Kite Awards, a Caldecott Medal, two Christopher Medals, a New England Public Radio Arts & Humanities award, and three World Fantasy awards. Six colleges and universities have granted her honorary doctorates. Yolen writes, “But awards can be dangerous. One set my good coat on fire.”

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Ellen Welcker
Pennsylvania

We were swimming,
bobbing in the tide with all the people,
talking about puberty.

Phthalates, I say, parabens &
phenols, BPA, PBDEs & perchlorate—
whose little baby drank rocket fuel

& squishing your cheeks in my mind.
You don’t like ‘puberty’—who does—
we call it ‘Pennsylvania,’

veer briefly toward ‘spon-
taneous’ & ‘laboratory.’ Beautiful.
Polychlorinated biphenyls, I say, a link

between exposure & onset—the mother—
her child lying limp on her nose—
the orcas of the Salish Sea & the mothers

of Flint & Bundaberg & Kabwe
& Oakdale & Lahore & Johnson
County are lingering

as I do with you here, in the warm wash
of human tide, saying Pennsylvania happens
when it happens, as if passively

precocious—the brain letting go
of its hormones like bubbles. Factors,
as if in a bubble, include being a girl.

Ellen Welcker’s books are Ram Hands (Scablands Books, fall 2016), The Botanical Garden (Astrophil Press 2010), which was selected by Eleni Sikelianos for the Astrophil Poetry Prize. Her Chapbooks include The Pink Tablet, (Fact-Simile Editions, 2018), Mouth That Tastes of Gasoline (alice blue books, 2014); and The Urban Lightwing Professionals (H_NGM_N, BKS, 2011). Recent poems are in Okey-Panky, Gramma Daily, and Poetry Northwest, as well as in the anthology WA129: Poems Selected By Tod Marshall: State Poet Laureate, 2016–2018 (Sage Hill Press, 2017). Ellen lives in Spokane, Wash. Online at ellenwelcker.com

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Adam Malinowski
For Sale

For Sale: Ignorant love, impossible science. Falling firebombs. The irrepressible art of paramilitaries. Dispossession of missionaries and malls. Bank fascists on the work. Tar and feather sanctions. Empty discounts for ambitious wages. Executive pensions and faltering strip malls. Car bombs and democratic oil kingdoms. No squalid classes needing love. Wildcat solar and gas. Cayman island suicide. Blackfacing boats, the death of spiritualisms. F-14 Tomcat psalms. Splintering politicians. Wildfires in Oakland and LA.
For Sale: Anarchy for the masses.

Poems by Adam Malinowski have appeared in  Poets Reading the News, Philosophical Idiot, and in Mirage #5/Period(ical) #6. They hold an MA in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University, live in Detroit, and facilitate a poetry workshop at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, Mich.

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Mary Ann Honaker
Trigger

It’s the week after El Paso
and Dayton, Ohio. The grandsons
are here for a visit and my mother

has bought them new Nerf guns.
I’m not judging here– two Christmases
ago I bought them semi-automatic

Nerfs that could fire thirty to fifty
soft foam rounds in one great blaze.
My brother’s house was peppered,

pellets in between couch cushions,
wedged under decorative lamps,
rolled under end tables.

*

When we were kids, we played
the cooler version of Cops and Robbers:
Cops and Drug Dealers.

We had tiny pistols that cracked,
argued over who was now dead,
raced around on bikes

equipped with yellow plastic sirens
bolted tight to the handlebars.
The sirens had three settings:

Police Car, Fire Truck, and Ambulance.
We never used Ambulance;
we never dreamed of aftermath–

*

but now of course kids do.
Kids young as we were then
have known aftermath as a spill

of red from their own bellies.

*

The middle boy immediately
schooled the younger one
on these more complicated,

more life-like guns.
Soon there was an argument.
The ten-year-old strapped

one gun into a shirt waist-tied,
another down the back of his T-shirt,
and held the third, true child warrior

stance. He crept room to room
targeting the four-year-old,
who cried, “Don’t shoot me!”

“But you shot me in the face!”
the older child tattled. Dad tore
the guns from their hands

one by one but not before
the ten-year-old, seething with fury,
pinged a plastic bullet casing

hard on the hardwood floor.
His cry of unfair so loud
we all jumped a little, shocked.

*

Super soakers were the rage
when I was in high school.
There was a summer spate

of super soaker drive-bys,
like real drive-bys except
victims were only surprised, wet,

and sometimes, even, refreshed.

*

After El Paso I refreshed my screen
and watched the death toll rise.
The grandkids– my nephews–

watch hour upon hour
of safe, silly, violence-free
cartoons. But they know

how to jam a cartridge in,
how to rest the butt on a shoulder,
how to pull the trigger.

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in 2 Bridges, Drunk Monkeys, Euphony, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, Off the Coast, Van Gogh’s Ear, and elsewhere. Honaker holds an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She currently lives in Beckley, West Virginia.

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Dion O’Reilly
Scavenged

…what becomes
of us once we’ve been torn apart
and returned to our future…
—Dorianne Laux

When I was nineteen, a flame clung to my back
and ate me to the spine. Torch-lit and alone,
I ran through the house, a contagion
cindering the couches and carpets.
Flayed, my fingertips peeled back
to the nail beds. My spongy tissues touched air,
light, and the steel cot where they took me.

The way, each day, they peeled me
like Velcro from my sheets,
left bits of my meat there.
Lowered me into Betadine,
and scrubbed me to screams—
that became my history. Scavenged
by the curious. They see my twisted fingers
and are hungry for the tale.

I’ve done the same, stared
at a leg’s nubbed end, wanted to touch it,
feel the cut bone under the knob,
hear its shrapnel story. I wanted to know
how that man was alive, arms glistening
playing basketball from a high-tech chair,
making his shots.

The body’s scarred terrain becomes
consecrated field. We gather to pick
through the pieces that remain—
an ear hanging from its hinge of skin,
diamond stud in the lobe, a ring finger
shining with its promise-band of gold.

Poems by Dion O’Reilly have appeared or will appear in New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, and other journals and anthologies. O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. She has worked as a waitress, barista, baker, theater manager, graphic designer, and public school teacher.

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Michael H. Levin
City of Flowers

(Firenze)

Serene beneath its heart of beating stone
the city stretches and reclines in pleasing
ocher curving lines; spreads its gray paws
upon the piazzas, haunches tucked against
precisely windowed and proportionate facades;

turns—a glint of claws. Secreted daggers
at the Duomo’s doors, Savonarola’s
fierce dark face, edged as an axe,
still cut their saturnine steel ways below
arcades that run from weathered corner frescoes

past slit palace eyes, to the Campanile
lifting itself hand over hand in slender
colonnaded spurts of hope towards heaven.

What caused this nuclear outburst
we can never know, who talk
of grand dukes, Buonarotti, Fra Angelico

the force that remade sight
still volleys, vaulting passionate and hard
down arched percussive halls to where its dwarf
retainers troop—small shuffling bands
on tessellated floors.

Michael H. Levin is the author of the poetry collections Man Overboard (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Watered Colors (Poetica Publishing, 2014). His work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Adirondack Review, and Crosswinds, among other journals and anthologies. Levin works as an environmental lawyer and solar energy developer, and lives in Washington DC. See michaellevinpoetry.com.

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