Sara Epstein
Bar of Rest

Semi-breve, that silent rest,
hangs from the middle staff,
indicates nothing, goes nowhere,
pauses before the next lively
relentless phrase.

Gentle rain splatters stones
and oak leaves outside my window,
oak leaves float, swirl, crash down
or still cling and hover mid-branch,
they bide their time until they fall.

Saturday morning at 11:30
we pause, hold our breath
as phones ding, chime, sing
Biden has won the election.
Now we tremble, shake,
release waves of tension
more than we can name.

Semi-breve, name of the restaurant
I want to open, who knows when?
Where we can pause, eat, drink,
in between what was
and whatever comes next.

Like La Llibertària cafe
in Barcelona, still serving
as it did during the Spanish Civil War
the resistance fighters and us,
we who remember them.

Menu at Semi-Breve:
Chicken pot pie, soft double chocolate
brownies with blueberry sauce.
Edith Piaf sings.
On the walls, rotating exhibits,
paintings or photos of the rest:
ballots being counted,
pussy hats from the women’s march,
a cactus plant’s sangria blooms.
Doctors, parents, nurses, teachers, kids:
those who lived and those who died.

—Submitted on 12/07/2020

Sara Epstein‘s poems have appeared in Mocking Heart Review, Silkworm, Paradise in Limbo, Mom Egg Review, Chest Journal, and other journals. She is a clinical psychologist and lives in Winchester, Mass.

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Scott Chalupa
Pandemic Vignettes

I.
Virus hives the wood grain. Along with this pier’s planks and beams, its microbial multitudes will soon shamble to the sea. Contagion is a smuggled promise that brings one closer to life. D.W.’s stencils and dada-dada-do-me graffiti proclaim the silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated. I tell you it isn’t the case and it isn’t not the case. My beloved not-yet-painter splatters the walls with acrylic and spray-can joy dubiously free of time’s constraints. Here a place to forge, not fuck. To come tell me to come tell you to come when I come too. Here a place to snap a pic of Rimbaud shooting up—B.B. in a mask, a truth behind the truth. It’s always never gonna be quite unlike this or that nothing we had to see once again and say girl, girl, OMG girl. This. This is everything. It’s a Reaganite name-drop several years too late. It’s a dirge mistaken for matins that taps the overripe valves of an angel’s trumpet. Rescue me from the hightide of a lowgrade fever dream. Ride with me an unflattened curve of our always-already unavailable ventilators, presidential promises begotten, unmade as though twin bed sleeping three beyond the post-party after-glower. Carry me to where we will not-say it all, will not-say not-no to another joint, unsure of the limits of mustn’t do. Where our beginning unspooled itself back through two summers. A superposition of star-struck duckwalks in Central Park. Your overnight Tuileries bag a clutch of travel-size toothpaste and misdirected lust. The down-drooped assent of devil’s trumpets surveilling our weeks-long cruise. Larches lurching in lamplight. Virus beetling beneath the bark.

IV.
A life after a life after a life after, a cherrywood cortege cavalcades past a parson unborn again. To step out from old boots onto bare ground opens us into afterlife. To breathe beyond any arbitrary moment in a life is an afterlife, isn’t it? We’ve been here before just then and there husking aeons by the hour to leave behind what we have yet to square what we must always carry with us. A broken toe—a threshold to afterlife. Post-orgasmic sleep is afterlife after a fashion, no? The bar against heavens once set so high that all life withered before the before, our lives wasted on thoughtless anticipation, an antedated antidote for never here and never now—the hoped-for heaven were never there in a pinch, a foxhole promise only half-delivered until erenow. But heaven could be here, now, here yes here, a clockwork door sprung ajar and tolling its come-hither cocked-brow antechamber always opening to another after-living after all our lives undreamt fashioned after an ever-unfolding field of windowpanes windblown open by ebullient gales blowing apart the promise of heaven to reveal heaven. Oh God, it was always wasn’t it always yes it was always meant to be like this.

VII.
We could leave Monday but the coastal connecters will crush us beneath the weight of all those golfcart-towing Tahoes. Some stupid meme calls it a Corona-cane but mom calls it several nights without sleep. Thousands are dying and I just wanna pack my blender and cast iron before the drowning starts. Din of Denalis drowning out the storm roiling up the seaboard. We thought we’d leave Tuesday when potential tropical cyclone nine was a mother’s worry stalling north of Venezuela. Krogering oftener than we should, eating half what we planned. Gratitude is a fridge overflowing with the shame of overpurchase. Did I tell you that B. bought a car on vay-fucking-cay? We came to the beach and B. goes home with a Lexus to replace a Lexus. Isaias is blowing their corona northward as I trek out of Babylon back to Babylon. Truth be told is usually followed with a selfish half-lie firmly fellated. Everywhere I run I take Babylon with me. Isaias is my quarantine and I wont to hunger. I hunger to return to my transplant but the babies behind golfcart wheels are tipping at tropical cyclones. Three derelict teens rolled a golfcart on Atlantic Avenue trying to catch a couple of two-ft barrels at low tide. We could leave we should leave tomorrow before Monday crushes this barrier island into more a gorgeous marsh.

IX.
After all hope was the only little one left behind in Pandora’s cursed amphora No wonder we’re sore when our stories sour our awestruck poses When our world is less is more than six millennia immature When we see Nietzsche hit the nail on the nose of God When ain’t nothin’ operant in the omniverse but Occam’s algorithm pulling upstream as we cross the tracks It will all come undone once done even the galaxy gone go dark drift to space beyond place Even the information in our mad mumble to inscribe ourselves on the ceiling of spacetime’s untender belly will unravel Beginning and end arbitrary points of convenience same as me and you same moraine same mountain Show me some body without a story aphasia without a named self without Narcissus’ referential tic There were no creator here beyond an ego and we be all Echoes in a polymorphic triangle twain by twofold twins in love with another at the fork of a lazy slipstream

—Submitted on 12/06/2020

Scott Chalupa is the author of Quarantine (PANK Books 2019). His work has appeared in PANK, pacificREVIEW, Nimrod, Beloit Poetry Journal, The South Atlantic Review, and other journals. His work appears in an anthology of poems related to Eve (of Biblical fame) forthcoming from Orison Books in 2021. Chalupa lives in South Carolina, and teaches at Central Carolina Technical College.

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Kendra Nuttall
Hope, Like an April Morning

when dew dots fresh blooms
and patches of sun fill the cold
gaps between houses too close together.
Our throats are parched from screaming
into what we thought were
silent nights
when winter only sighed,
stretching into never-ending
dark.
I know it’s not spring,
but do you see it? Just there,
where the pine tree grows,
where you watch the birds come home.
On the canyon’s edge,
where a solitary cactus reaches
towards the sky.
It’s in our home too,
in the glow of the lamp
and the soft belly of our sleeping dog.
Let me open the clouds,
do you see it now?

—Submitted on 12/05/2020

Kendra Nuttall‘s debut collection of poems, A Statistical Study of Randomness, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2021. Her work has appeared in Spectrum Literary Journal, Capsule Stories, Califragile, Chiron Review, Maudlin House, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus Volume Two edited by G.A. Cuddy and Liz Kobak as a benefit for Doctors Without Borders and Partners In Health. Nuttall lives in Utah with her husband and poodle.

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Parker Sera
Questions About the Rebellions

1.The summer we burned all the cop cars
The summer the people rose
Like shimmering heat from the asphalt

Was it a mirage
The future deceptive as a horizon line
Imaginary and constantly retreating

2.does entropy mean chaos or just equilibrium and does equilibrium have to imply tepidness or can it imply justice and does tepidness have to be a bad thing because I looked it up and it just means “a warmness resembling the temperature of the skin”

3.Will the will burn away
Like the heat shimmer when it finally rains
It has not rained; this is a reminder that

It has not rained yet

—Submitted on 11/13/2020

Parker Sera’s work has appeared in The Rising Phoenix Review, Knack Magazine, and the Aurora Review, as well as in the anthology 11/9: The Fall of American Democracy (Independently published, 2017), edited by Casey Lawrence. Parker is a queer, midwestern horse girl, poet, actor, and theatre-maker from Minneapolis. She lives in Philadelphia, where she’s working on her MFA in acting at Temple University.

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Lisa Molina
Two Poems

Now I Shower at Dusk

Before Covid
I showered at dawn
as a new day began.
Through the slit of window next to my left ear,
The sun on the horizon would rise in the east.

Then drive to work,
where I would
talk with, laugh with, learn with—
Our special students, hoping to help them believe in themselves,
even when their bodies and brains move and think differently from most.

Hoping each day,
as I crossed the parking lot to enter the school,
that I wouldn’t have to shield one of them—
with my body,
From a bullet.
The murderer in my imagination—

Now, before exiting my car each morning, I put on a non-metaphorical mask and shield

Hoping each day,
as I cross the parking lot to enter the school,
that I won’t infect one of my students or colleagues—
With a microscopic bullet.
This time, the murderer in my imagination is me.

I drive home at 5
Get out of my car
Numbly walk straight upstairs
Unmasking to nakedness.

The running water covering my shuddering body, my sobbing cries.
Hoping, begging that here, home, I won’t kill my husband, son, daughter.
Azure sky, clouds, and sun falling in the west.

Yes. Now I shower at dusk.

A Teacher’s Lament

My teacher’s lanyard—
Dog tags chainmail around my neck.
Cloaked in mask, shield, gloves, and gown.
A knight? A soldier?
Just a cavalier
No One?
Am I Searching for the Holy Grail
Of purpose?
Of meaning?
Or Perhaps a hero’s death?

Breaths. So. Many. Deaths.

Patiently, passionately, purely,
Have I loved and been loved.

So.
Therefore.
I, too, will refuse to leave.
I, in fact,
will Breathe….

Teaching;

Waiting;

Never;

Abating.

—Submitted on 11/11/2020

Lisa Molina holds a BFA from The University of Texas at Austin, and has taught high school English and Theatre. She was named Teacher of the Year by the Lake Travis Education Foundation. She also served as Associate Publisher of Austin Family magazine. Her life changed forever when her son battled leukemia three times over seven years, and still has numerous health issues as a result of the treatments. Since 2000, Molina has worked with students with special needs, both at the pre-K and high school levels. She believes art is essential for the soul, especially in times of darkness. She lives in Austin with her family.

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Sarah Sarai
Sappiness Is Not in the DSM

You scorn an impulse to
	ripen 
the peach within,
	enchant 
a more grand yesterday.
I’m with you but
	a deft solemnity 
	like a monster fog
	spreads over our 
	already lived so
I’m saying, colorize anguish.
	Push through
	green-up.
Trust the conviction 
	of all ten fingertips’ 
	subtle musculature. 
Ten multiplying visions 
	threading to reach air.
You get the idea 
	which is already 
	out there
seeking shelter in a poem
	or a bar, wherever
shelter is sought.
	It’s all good, comrade.
That guy daring us to 
	eat a peach?
I’m daring us to be one.
	Then eat it.

—Submitted on 12/02/2020

Sarah Sarai is author of the poetry collections That Strapless Bra in Heaven (Kelsay Books, 2019), Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books, 2016), and The Future is Happy (BlazeVOX[books], 2009). Her work has appeared in E-ratio, DMQ-Review, New Verse News, Live Nude Poems, Big City Lit, and other journals, as well as in anthologies including Stonewall’s Legacy (Local Gems Press, 2019). Sarai lives in New York.

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Deonte Osayande
Two Poems

Baptized in Fire

My dad wrote
my mom

love poems
in letters

before
they were married,

& I looked for them
after he was cremated

but they didn’t survive
the fire from when I was

just a boy
obsessed

with playing
video games.

Pups aka Baby Sharks

Sharks migratory patterns were changed because these predators followed the ships in the Middle Passage because when a slave died they were thrown overboard, or if they were killed because they were protesting, or if they committed suicide, the sharks knew that they could follow the ships, and it changed the migratory patterns of sharks during this period of time.
—Donald M. Payne

I get to thinking
about baby sharks,
pups, who like dogs

instinctively follow
where their meals
originate from
on the middle passage,

or the cops
spraying hoses
on us & sending
their hounds

who have been trained
to think of our flesh as food,
without consideration

of how we even became nourishment
for their hungry, ravenous aptitudes

& wondering
if they even think
of us as well

—Submitted on 11/10/2020

Deonte Osayande is a writer from Detroit, Mich. His books include Class (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2017), Circus (Brick Mantle Books, 2018) and Civilian (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2019. His poems appear in Button Poetry and other journals. Osayande has represented Detroit at four National Poetry Slam competitions. Manager of the Rustbelt Midwest Regional Poetry Slam and Festival for 2014 and 2018, he is a professor of English at Wayne County Community College.

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Marjorie Moorhead
Two Poems

11/7/2020

City folk dancing in the streets
exorcising built-up toxicity

Here, amongst tall trees,
recently bared, I’ve
made a celebration cake.
confetti colored sprinkles
on a white frosting cloud
atop dark cocoa sponge.

Something had to be done
to codify the joy
the relief an out-breath
before our struggles resume.

It’s KAmala Baby!

It’s KAmala baby! Learn
to say it right.
Just like we did with OBAma.
This can be done.
An adjustment made.
Different names different hues.
Let’s move on and up and forward.
Let’s demand action that saves
our Planet
and treats every person with respect
for their dignity.

—Submitted on 11/08/2020

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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Carmelina Fernandes-Kock am Brink
Falling Back

The fetal position consumes her
Sheets up to her ears she sleeps
Bereft. Calling out to her absent husband
“Are you there?” and
“Is the baby safe?”
The fracture of her pelvic bone
Causing her to writhe in pain, the
Physical memory of traumas past
Washing over her brain, taking her
There locked in a frame of
Long ago.
One second of negligence
At the senior home
Had sent her crumbling.
The brakes of her walker
Unsecured
While the attendant had gone reaching
For the comb
To smoothen her hair, make her feel
Pretty as she always said.
She had become
Confused incoherent reverting to the
German of her childhood.
Fearing a stroke, her husband had phoned
For an ambulance.
In the hospital isolation ward
Corona measures prevail. Spouses
Left out. The agonizing wait. Testing
Negative, both of them. Three days later,
In the general ward he
Holds her hand. Holds her fast.
She takes him for her father reminds
Him to take her mother for a walk
To show her some attention. All this
In German when English had always
Been their lingua franca
Both of them strangers in this promised
Land.
He drives back and forth wonders
How long her mind will cling
To the lifeboat that keeps
Him away
Adrift on shore.
Today he’s her father still and she
Is chatting away in her native tongue yet
This time smiling, doted on by the tired
Staff, who hadn’t thought of the safety
Strap of the chair where they’d seated her
While making her bed. She’d tipped over
Fallen, yet gently so.
This evening back in the home alone
In his bed distressed
By the certainty of security
Measures that will impose her isolation
Yet again once she
Returns. The testing for Covid.
He hopes to recover in her eyes
The features of her life-
Long partner.
He’s elderly and tired too.
All this running.

—Submitted on 11/29/2020

Carmelina Fernandes-Kock am Brink is of German-Indian background, grew up in Canada, and teaches English in Toulouse, France. 

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Francis Fernandes
Hard Times

Back when it all started, I woke up coughing
at night, but I knew it wasn’t the virus
just those blessed white blossoms
outside the window filling the bedroom
with the pungent scent of spring. If I kept
the window shut it was that damned if you do
and damned if you don’t sort of thing,
the simple rush of panic at the loss of air,
filigreed cobwebs filling my beleaguered head.
Life suddenly became so dramatic: higher
and higher numbers on the news. No longer
the sweet birds, but those damned electronic
twitters. We were now asked to choose
between a rock and a tombstone. In retail,
the quandary posed was no longer paper
or plastic; it became more existential
than that, as in latex or no latex, which could
eventually bear on the answer to: be or not be.
In the produce section, they looked at me
as though I were actually fondling
the avocados. The fact is, germs are
everywhere, even on the baby-blue surgical
masks and those fashionable foulards
we wear in town. Batman’s choice was clear:
either hide who you are or the vile poison
of crime goes unchecked. That seems
obvious. Not so the question: breakup
or no breakup. Why keep tally of the deaths
and not the sad rifts? Ask ABC. The nation
is foundering and we are constantly making
wrong decisions. Just ask the statisticians.
The state closes restaurants and churches
and concert halls. What are we supposed
to live on? Jobs and love are on the line.
The year won’t be a good one. No one
can sleep. You are over there and I am over
here. I bet you don’t even remember the time
we woke on the couch, dazed from all that
love-making, staring at each other, both
of us wondering how and when we got there.
At least then I played live for you, my sole
mate and fan. Now, headlines on the web
take the place of our mere touching. Summer
came and went. The sun is sputtering
and the trees that spouted huge green leaves
some time ago are now blazing bright
orange and yellow. Soon they too will lose,
trembling in the cold breeze. Billie Holiday
sings They can’t take that away from me, about
the way someone drinks their tea, smiles
and all that. But then in the very next song
she throws in the towel, so to speak,
with “Gloomy Sunday,” a song the BBC banned
in the 1940s, as it killed wartime morale,
they said, not to mention those poor souls
whose minds seethed with self-doubt.
It’s not easy, it never was, to quote almost every
philosopher—or dirty politician. I’m doing
my best not to think of Nietzsche and the horse
he fell in love with. I’m doing my best to stay
afloat and, if need be, to forget your smile,
your touch, and that certain way you drank
your acrid herbal tea.

—Submitted on 11/27/2020

Francis Fernandes‘s poems have appeared in The Zodiac Review, Amethyst Review, Beyond Words, Third Wednesday, Montréal Writes, and other journals. Having grown up in the US and Canada, he lives in Frankfurt, where he writes and teaches.

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