Gerald Wagoner
Three Poems

A Grumble of Muffled Voices
April 8, 9:50 PM

I hear a grumble of muffled voices
from a second floor room.

Outside the hospital, a row of
ambulances wait idling.

Shuttered shops
spawn wind strewn trash.

Someone in shadow,
mad in disappointment,

declaims a poem
of non sequiturs.

Across the canal, it echoes
through hollow buildings.

The tide comes in heavy
on yesterday’s wind.

The pink moon untangles
itself from still black branches.

The flaccid flag’s halyard
taps the pole wearily.

It’s the same empty
night after night.

I am lost to myself.

I Want
April 4, 9:30 PM

I hear the subway rumble
through down there.
I want to go somewhere,
but alas, I am now too
aware, so das’nt dare.

How Grand It Must Be
April 5, 9:15 PM

Tonight I came upon two big rigs
parked head to head on the sidewalk
opposite Con Ed. On each lowboy
trailer tons of copper cable
spooled onto five tall, wide wheels.
Each cab sported gleaming chrome,
an array of custom running lights.
Each was painted lustrous white.
Scripture, lettered in silver script
behind the driver’s door on one.
I don’t remember the text, exactly,
but it rang Calvinist, and once
I would have dismissed the driver
an unthinking drone. An enemy
of complex thought. A stranger
to the sceptic’s requisite doubt.
But, tonight, I imagine how grand
it must be hauling Interstate 80 from
your Indiana to my Brooklyn.
Up high, maybe the window down,
your elbow out, with what you
believe to be truth hand lettered
meticulously beside you
for all the world to see.

—Submitted on 06/10/2020

Gerald Wagoner‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Right Hand Pointing, Ocotillo Review, Passager Journal, BigCityLit, The Lake, and other journals. He went to college at the University of Montana and holds an MFA in sculpture from SUNY Albany. Wagoner moved to Brooklyn in 1983, and taught art, writing, and literature in the New York City public schools for over thirty years.

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Elizabeth Warner
Little People

The big people are supposed to look out for the little people,
But the little people are big people,
So now they’re disposable people.
And in the “almost heaven” community,
We are just two steps away,
Because these blessed, god loving people,
Have all the right underlying conditions
And none of the right education.
So we’re left with blissful ignorance,
And these towns barely had business before the pandemic
and small business was struggling as is.
And now, when we certainly don’t have immunity,
we will pretend that we do, and suffer with no impunity,
so that maybe we can survive through the year.
Because somehow the sickness,
the worldwide killing machine,
is less threatening than the small town horrors
of poverty.

—Submitted on 04/22/2020

Elizabeth Warner is a 17 year-old poet from Morgantown, W.Va.

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Anne Kenny
Refuge

Our home is a small island, with a shoreline
no stranger can cross. Its rooms,
unused to such constancy, wonder why we seldom leave.
Why suitcases gather dust and goods are quarantined.

Windows look out on a sea of long grass, afloat
with daises and dandelions. Here all is new life:
improbable pink petals on the trunk of a Judas tree,
sprays of lady’s mantle spreading across shingle,
the scarlet poppy flirting among artichokes.

Some days we walk to where ancient yews
are gathered in a churchyard. They’ve seen it all before.
Pestilence, the carrying of coffins. Renewal.

—Submitted on 06/12/2020

Anne Kenny‘s work has appeared in Equinox, South, Blue Dog Australian Poetry, Contemporary Haibun Online, and other journals. Along with co-authors Judith Dimond, Nicky Gould, Frances Knight, Gillian Moyes, Lyn White, and Vicky Wilson, Kenny’s work appears in Mirror Writing: An Anthology of Poetry by Common Room Poets (Categorical Books, 2009).

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Cecilia Byer
Economy of the Forest

He was there at the layoff, where
The forest shut down—the rippled pond
In every oak recessed its banded babble

And chilled its notched marking of age.
The forest held its swell (indefinitely),
Waiting for two trillion to be carted in.

Up, up were the halos, stacked in swollen pause—
The trees, in wind, neither twitched nor ached.
Nothing, not even the rings, moved. And he—

He was there, at the layoff, the only thing
Growing in that awful place. The unripe,
The stillness, it rattled him. So empty it was,

Like gutted things: fish and plums and chests
And hollowed trees; trees hollowed,
Hollowed by him, by him! His fist

Punched holes in all that wood. He clenched
The pulp of backyard oak; soggy rings,
A puree of engagement between his fingers.

It was then that his veins branched and scratched at skin.
Blood sapped and the wedding never came.

—Submitted on 04/22/2020

Cecilia Byer is a 2020 high school graduate who will be attending Emory University in the fall. She has received a Certificate of Superior Writing from the National Council of Teachers of English, and a Gold Key for poetry from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. You can follow her poetry page on Instagram @celipoems.

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Stephen Huiting
Distancer

He totes a slim flask
Of alcohol, slips
It in
And out of a hidden
Pocket
In his coat.

His mask
Makes mystery of mood
Or of mouth
At all.
Tarnished by his silver
Breaths; when
Retracted to a shadowed
Groove, a corner
In the room,
Distance
And gloom swear to secrets
Whether breath moves
The faceless
Fabric, which an eerie
Faith,and his eyes,
Say it must.

He is a lone man,
A splitter, fractured
From the main flow.
No
One has seen
Him come close;
Whenever another
Seems to approach—
To finally,
Peeringly
Quench question to known—
He is gone,
Inhaled by a
Wall, by his own
Masked aura,
Own sorrow.

He is hardened,
Yet he has never killed a man.
His hands
Share their spiral
Souls
But with gloves.

Who is
This stranger?
Why is he feared?
Others fight
To be less alone.

He is a survivor,
A wizened
Distance strider, with careful
Life thudding through
Sterile veins.

—Submitted on 06/12/2020

Stephen Huiting‘s poems have appeared in The Union, a newspaper serving Grass Valley and Nevada County, Calif.

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Buffy Shutt
Disaster Fucking with Bette Davis

Disaster fucking.
Now, stupid! Then what is keeping us alive?
Now hands on my nipples—did he wash his hands?—
and his breath on my neck once a good thing now
wish he had a mask.
The virus is here. Close by. Possibly in this room,
possibly on the tip of his penis,
now ramming inside of me.
The TV is on, now a Bette Davis movie, black-&-white,
I know it by heart. We usually turn off the TV
but maybe he thought I would break in two if it goes dark.
I wriggle under him getting comfortable with the idea
the virus is inside of me
now. That’s okay.

I’ll contain it, I’ll flatten its curve, isolate it. I leave that
and put the slide under the microscope. My daughter
upside-down. I smell citrus. Tangerines. She likes the ones called cuties.
Think of my daughter, our daughter, no my daughter he isn’t thinking about her.
He goes long stretches without thinking about her, he isn’t thinking about her
now as he metes out some rhythmic present I don’t want and if she gets sick
what will I do? I can’t go there. I won’t go there.

I’m not Bette Davis. I’m not in Jezebel, the movie she made
because she wasn’t cast as Scarlett. Margaret Lindsay plays Amy,
saccharine, pretty, mewley. What is wrong with me? I look at the screen.
He doesn’t notice. Bette is brave. I mouth the dialogue, Bette’s southern accent
on my tongue as former lover-Bette fights with wife-Amy over Henry Fonda.

Bette Davis (Julie): But are you fit to go? Lovin’ him isn’t enough….
Margaret Lindsay (Amy Bradford): I’ll make him live or die.
Julie: It’s not a question of provin’ your love by layin’ down your life. Nothin’ so easy.
Amy: What do you mean?
Julie: I’ll make him live… Whatever you might do, I can do more,
I know how to fight better than you. Amy, if you knew the horror… It isn’t a hospital. It’s a desolate island…. You must….. be there with your body between him and Death.

The bed now a bulletin board and I am pinned to it.
He gets imaginative, replacing the absent televised sports
with a new still-in-Olympic-trials position. I go along.
Gives me time to consider what a bad mother I am. And
a bad lover. Now I am on my stomach, half-off the bed.
The virus stealthy & fast moved the bed upside-down. I don’t give a shit
that I am a bad lover—that I can hide. I am flattened, squeezed
into a grain of rice. I am a bad-mother-grain-of-rice.
A tiny nothing.

Now he’s keeping at it. I hate his focus, his enjoyment, his long
minutes away from the virus. Another inequity, gender-discord
runs through me like a fever. I’ve wound up inside those small distorted
profile pictures on Instagram of doctors-strangers-brave nobodies.
Pleading. My brain a firefly. I am on top, now. Not so out of it
as I want. I give a little back to him.
I take him in my mouth. Nancy Reagan pops into my mind.
They say she gave great head in the back of limos
when she was Nancy Davis, B actress and thin. Always thin.
Just say no Nancy. She behind the scenes, the husband out front.
They are responsible

for this. When the air traffic controllers’ union was busted,
we didn’t realize
that was the dam, and when it broke, the virus oozed.
Oozing became what? Dripping. And dripping became streaming
and streaming rushing and rushing flooding and that is when the virus took hold.
Am I insane fucking while Mommy—our President called FLOTUS Mommy—
floats around my head? Get out.
Now fucking is still free—if you believe that, which I don’t.
I’m paying the price right now. The sides of my insides bruised ice cubes.
I want to stuff my crazy scared mind up my ass and let him try to coax it out
with professional fingers.

But I can only think if my daughter calls me,
if she calls me, if she calls me, what if I have to stand up to the virus?
Will I do it? Am I Amy Bradford? Now? I want to be Bette. Goddamn it.
I hear our whole conversation, what she says, what I say, what she says, what I say.
She is soft, lets the phone slip from her mouth, refuses facetime, won’t write down what I am telling her to write down, remember this password, she coughs or clearing her throat calls me Mommy. Each time we fly close . . . the virus interrupts now the white rabbit
with his fucking ticking pocket watch. The virus—he-she-they tarted up in graphs
and maps and concentric circles of pulsing
pink and red. Less and less blue.

I don’t know how long we fuck. A long time—no time.
He comes.
I’m out. Now disaster sleeping.
For two hours,
I am nobody’s
Mommy.

—Submitted on 04/22/2020

Buffy Shutt‘s work has appeared in Lumina, Whatever Keeps The Lights On, Rise Up Review, Dodging the Rain, Split Lip Magazine, and other journals. A former movie producer, she lives near Los Angeles.

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Denver Butson
Weariness

even the peonies are weary
they drop their heads
on fence railings

they hang their heads
down along their stems

the air is so heavy
with what we have
asked it to carry

with the burdens
of ourselves
we have given it
to hold

yesterday I saw a man
who looked like
he could belong
to a distant century
except for his face mask
and plastic bag
stop and pull peonies
out of that bag
and lay them on the bumper
of a refrigerated corpse truck
humming behind a funeral home
and look up at the sky
above the corpse truck
with dignity and ceremony

he turned
looked right at me
and then seemed
to go back to
disintegrating
into weary dust
before my eyes

every evening
at approximately 7:02
when the applause
on our street
and apparently every other street
in the city ends

a little boy
a few doors up
whose name is Samson
tries to have the last word
with me

after all the cheering
and clapping
and pot banging stops
he looks at me
across the stoops
between us
and bangs his pot
decisively

and I look right at him
and bang my popcorn can lid
with just as much meaning

and then he bangs twice
and I bang twice
and then three and three

and then with great fanfare
he lifts his spoon
one last time
and I try to match
his strike
so that together
we make one last
mighty sound

it’s as if we are
two dueling drummers
who have decided
to work together
and not against
one another

or just two people
who won’t drop our heads

who refuse to simply go back
into the silence

without doing all we can
not to be weary

—Submitted on 06/11/2020

Denver Butson is the author of five books of poetry, including most recently In Which We All Kiss Something Secretly (Court Tree Collective, 2019), a collaboration with visual artist Maria Mercedes Martinez. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Ontario Review, Field, Zyzzyva, Tin House, and other journals, as well is in several anthologies. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

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Austin Reilly
And This Is by No Means a Comprehensive List

I’m scared of more time than I know what to do with
I’m scared of slow declines
I’m scared of inevitabilities
I’m scared of being direct
I’m really scared of acting my age
I’m scared of antiques
I’m scared of people who seem to be on top of things
I’m scared of abstractions
I’m scared of the last line
I’m scared of white coffee mugs
I’m scared of black coffee mugs
I’m scared of coffee
I’m scared of people my age in 10 years
I’m scared of wide-ruled paper
I’m really scared of boredom
Narcissism too
Starting sentences out with the first-person pronoun
I’m scared of being perceived
I’m scared of vibrant colors
I’m scared of my golden years
I’m really scared of my golden years
I’m scared of packing
I’m scared of what soda does to teeth
I’m scared of irony
I’m scared of coasters
I’m scared of aluminum blinds
I’m scared of thin shower curtains
I’m scared of fingerprints
I’m scared of standing behind the white, yellow, or red line
I’m scared of smooth jazz
I’m scared of fonts other than times new roman or calibri (body)
I’m scared of oat milk
Oats don’t have mammary glands
I’m scared of software updates
I still don’t know what RAM is
I’d like to hear a foghorn in real life
I’m scared of embers smoldering in dry grass, which strikes me as a very sane thing to worry about
I think it’s good that someone thought of smokey bear
I’m scared that I’ll forget what to do when I can leave my house
I’m scared of dating apps
I’m scared that people older than me mention the economy with solemnity
I’m scared that maybe I shouldn’t have kids
I’d like to re-watch Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood
That reminds me of Jay Jay the Jetplane
It’s been a while since I’ve played a flash game
I wish so many things didn’t feel like transgressions
I’m scared of keeping condoms in my wallet
I’m scared of physical calendars
I’ve found some easy hours, but should that make me feel guilty?
I’m not sure
There’s a lot I’m not sure about

—Submitted on 04/19/2020

Austin Reilly graduated summa cum laude from Indiana University in 2019. He will go on to study genomics at the University of Chicago. This is his first poetry publication.

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Nathaniel Kostar
MOVE
American Airlines Flight, May 19th, 2020

The plane back to Mexico was full of workers,
young men with tanned skin and baseball caps,
worn backpacks slung over their shoulders,
leaving.

American Airlines chose money on this flight,
and now the stewardess, who didn’t speak Spanish,
was nervous and afraid.

There were no middle seats, as promised,
but the workers didn’t complain.
This wasn’t the first promise
America had broken.

I sat next to a Chinese girl who was
dressed like an astronaut.
She wore everything except
the helmet.

I think she was returning from an important
mission since she carried a manila folder
and seemed satisfied.

She stole my arm rest
and fell asleep.

I guess we were all on a mission
on this flight—
but she was prepared.

And so were they, I thought,
as I looked across the aisle
at the old couple, los viejitos,

as they remained composed,
fiercely holding hands,
even as the flight-attendant
barked at them in English:

“You’re in the wrong seat.
You must move. You must
move. Move. You must.
Move…Move.”

—Submitted on 06/10/2020

Nathaniel Kostar was born and raised in Central New Jersey. He holds a BA from Rutgers University and an MFA in poetry from the University of New Orleans. He lives in Mexico City where he works as a writer, lyricist and English teacher. For more info visit NateLost.com or follow Nate Lost on Spotify.

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Carol Alexander
Envy, or Intake

I could almost envy body, its luxurious swoon to the conqueror.
The fairytale stroke at midnight, a horse’s neigh—

kindling of protest and wariness lit to a firestorm.

O I need a river. A moat. One the other side,
a friend can’t bury her mother. Golden efficacy of prayer.

A dog howls down the block and body too howls,
sweats a fog of cells.

The virus besieges the town, wracked, bristling with arrows.

With a little flourish I tick off points of ingress,
armpit glands and throat, a rushing cage of birds in my head.

Then the nihilism begins, I can barely wait to rid self of self.
That too is a lie: meat and drink, a drift from one lilac window to the next.

If pivots to when. I will feed the hungry. Accept a truce.

—Submitted on 04/19/2020

Carol Alexander is the author of Environments (Dos Madres Press, 2018), Habitat Lost (Cave Moon Press, 2017) and Bridal Veil Falls (Flutter Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Chiron Review, One, Southern Humanities Review, Sweet Tree Review, and other journals.

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