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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Nicole Callihan
from Yesteryear

(6/8) Back
Cackalacky way,
in girlhood,
I got words,
small words,
and dirty ones,
but some
really, really
ugly words,
put in my head,
butted up
against good
words, jesus
and sweet tea
and Queen Anne’s
lace which
sounded so regal
but was a place
for the mites
to crawl into
your panties,
and Cheerwine,
and mama,
mama, love
you, mama,
don’t be
that way, mama,
crabapple,
hillbilly, purdy
is as purdy
does—those ugly,
hateful, chigger
loving, niggardly,
retarded words
were butted
against the good,
sunk in, dark
flies in morning
molasses, and
slow as, and
sticky, and I wish
I could scrub
it all out
in the sink,
all the blood,
shit, and grief,
but even
in nothing
but the light
of this
full moon,
I still see
the stain.

—Submitted on 06/09/2020

Nicole Callihan is the author of SuperLoop (Sock Monkey Press, 2014), The Deeply Flawed Human (Deadly Chaps, 2016), Downtown (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and Aging (Yes, Poetry, 2018). With Zoe Ryder White, Callihan is the co-author of A Study in Spring (Rabbit Catastrophe Press, 2015) and Elsewhere (Sixth Finch Books, 2019). With Samar Abdel Jaber, she is the co-author of Translucence/بين قارّتين (Indolent Books, 2018). Callihan is also the author of a novella, The Couples (Mason Jar Press, 2019).

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Monica Joy Fara
Ode to the N95 Mask

O filter O sanitizer O separator of sick and healthy O shield that saves us from each other O sacred regalia O white veil O coy fan O curtain that hides the shape of our fear O separator of sick and sick O artifact O uniform O black market weapon O hoarded gold O amulet of protection O fetish O gag O hand that silences us O ear that listens to our prayer our song our whispered confessions O ally in this fight against our exponential enemy O flattener of functions O negative space O sensory deprivation O outer limit O border O floodgate O barricade O rebel cause O white flag O white shroud O new normal O blank unblinking face of uncertainty O distancer O mandate O hope O swaddling cloth O sterile cocoon O silk O cradle of metamorphosis

—Submitted on 04/19/2020

Poems by Monica Joy Fara have appeared or are forthcoming in The Tampa Review, The Cimarron Review, The Mid-American Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Room Magazine, and other journals. She holds a BA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Tweets @MonicaJoyFara.

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Paul Hlava Ceballos
Poems from Hospital Pamphlet

—

Heads up your next patient is a felon
is whispered to me in the hall, heads up
you can remove your name badge
can request he’s handcuffed to the bed
bright orange and chained to
a wheelchair, his heavy face is pulled
by the weight of lost decades
what I ask of him, he does obediently
tired and mute while two armed police
stand behind me in the hospital room
is this what Luchito is like now
20 years after cops tazed him, weed-cloudy
amidst the shattered store window
of his teenage collapse into mania
is this what the 1 in 3 black boys are like
who were never given the chance
to fuck up like me, tearing 60 down
residential streets, screaming at the dash
that my friend was gone now, bag of weed
safe with coins in my cupholder
my fingers imprint the prisoner’s
edematous skin, hypertensive from salt
while an officer behind me is cell phone lit
with hand casually resting on his gun
I have never seen this patient before
how many long years was his hospital wait
he sat meekly and arranged his stained
undershirt, chains preventing wrinkled
arms from reaching fully up, mucus
roiled deep inside each forced inhale
when I say he was a sick man, let me
make the language clear, we must burn
each police station to the ground
and every cop must pay for their crimes
against the community they patrol
I pledge this with fire in my throat because
I survived to diagnose and do no harm

—

It was the classic presentation
chest caved in on the stairwell
EKG showed elevated T-waves
his father died of a heart attack

in his village back home, he says
with a polite smile as I tape twelve
electrodes to his chest, I am thinking
of George Floyd, a former football champ

who worked at the Salvation Army
a black man murdered by a policeman’s
choice to bring them both
to searing summer asphalt

I am thinking about George Floyd because
a coworker said protests are fine
but she disagrees with damaging
a Nordstrom Rack, we need order, she said

alone in a hospital after severe pain
the man is laughing on the treadmill
each step is a belief in the nurses and system
that will convey him to new health

and then his blood pressure
drops, he clutches his chest
on my screen his heart is a perfect
failed machine, rounded apex immobile

gasps for air pumped nowhere
sometimes we must create
an emergency to understand
what pathology was always there

and the next day he got a stent
and stopped by to say thank you
(how rare!) before going home
where dusk set the sky on fire

—

Briefly, I see my reflection
sway backward in the dusk-dark
window and grasp
the coma patient’s bed as a brace

it wasn’t my reflection, it was
a white-gowned woman
in the room facing us
leaning down to pack her bags

—Submitted on

Paul Hlava Ceballos has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Artist Trust, and the Poets House. His work has been published in Narrative Magazine, BOMB, the PEN Poetry Series, Acentos Review, and the LA Times, among other journals and newspapers, and has been translated to the Ukrainian, and nominated for the Pushcart. He holds an MFA from NYU and currently lives in Seattle, where he practices echocardiography.

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Ally Klancnik
Three Poems

I Almost Cried Watching Porn During Quarantine

Tonight kissing replaces bondage and domination
in the search bar at the top of the orange and black
haven for the horny and lonely. I simply cannot watch

ropes suffocate the skin or silicone smother her sound
when all I want to see is you kissing me, stubble
scratching my upper lip. Instead, I struggle to touch

myself as I watch a “real couple” meet in passion
and fall in love while they fuck because I only feel
the ghostly stroke of your hand down to the small

of my back, stopping to rest with fingers slightly
tucked under the hem of worn underwear. The memory
of you struggling to remove my mismatched bra

only to give up after a few tries interrupts staged
imperfections of softcore porn where an amateur
actress gazes into the camera, eyes taunting me:

Don’t you wish you were us? Turning cuddling
into a casual blowjob, punctuated with a giggle fit
after catching a glimpse in the mirror of sex-sloppy

hair and sweat-smeared mascara, you still think
I am beautiful. She’s breathless at the apex
of pleasure and I’m breathless myself as I choke

back tears. Instead of finishing, I close my laptop,
turn off the lights and fall asleep thinking of you.

“Quarantine With Me” by Call Me Karizma

A blurred photo of highway signs found on the internet, you say you are running
to me but that’s impossible because you are 250 miles away.

Brownies made for me and you sit on the stove, don’t worry, I’ll text them to you,
download the dark chocolate, and pretend to peel back the foil.

Frozen pizzas freeze deeper in our apartment, waiting to be coaxed out by our doped
up movie night munchies and cooked in cannabis smoke.

My shower feels empty without you distracting me from washing my hair,
now my only company is a rouge spider wandering over a comb.

The parking lot where we fucked in my car under flickering playground lights sits
empty, an A-frame sign declares that the park is closed.

My anthem for this pandemic bumps through the speaker set plugged into my minivan,
the mirrors vibrate to deep bass behind wistful lyrics.

A phone propped up against my laptop, the facetime still on as we fall asleep next to each other,
unable to feel the warmth of another body through the cold screen,
the absence of a goodnight kiss, a ghost on my lips.

Isolation’s Plush Company

A childhood cow rests cradled
in shaking arms, ever-thinning stuffing
pooling in an over-sized head that flops

side to side, as if searching for a shoulder
to rest on, for someone to lift up its chin
and push back the fur blinding it.

It sits alone, locked in a bedroom
that is crowded with moving boxes waiting
to be packed, slumped over bunched up blanket

sloughing off the side of my twin bed.
As I look into blank button eyes, I feel stuffed
myself, longing for my love’s lost touch now

hours away, kept apart, this sickness
that I feel is not from coronavirus
but from craving his company.

So I lay kisses upon its nose
as if it were him because I am now left
with only his childhood cow clutched

in a tightening grip as he did so long ago,
crying for someone he had yet to meet.

—Submitted on 04/18/2020

Ally Klancnik writes: In my poetry, I often explore sex, love, body image and the complexity of relationships. I am currently working on a book-length manuscript exploring these themes while completing a double BFA in creative writing and studio art at Ripon College.

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Roger Patulny
Flatpack Hipster

One long night, confined,
I ordered a hipster online.

When he arrived,
I had a quite a time assembling him.
There was no Allen key,
and the instructions were all ticks and crosses
and pictures of sexless men scratching their heads.
So, I took a guess
and glued his beard before I realized
he was back to front and upside down;
and then he wouldn’t stop talking.

I sent him, bearded, babbling
mustardccinos and babyccinos,
to the local café-bar,
but they snickered into handlebars,
and mullets
that there were no more
jobbyccinos.

But, well designed if poorly made,
my flattie hipster
You Tubed how
if inverted, rotated,
and converted
he might just be retained,

and now he makes the tea
down there, by the bay,
and babbles about fair trade winds
while I drink gin,
self-isolate,
and keep on scrolling
through the catalogue.

—Submitted on 06/07/2020

Roger Patulny‘s  poems have appeared in Cordite, InDaily, Dwell Time, The Rye Whisky Review, and other journals.

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Jennifer Franklin
Antigone Realizes Why She Loves the Dead

The only ones who cannot betray me,
I can talk to them without judgment.
They have said every cruel thing
they will utter, stolen everything they will take.
Finished fighting their flawed battles,
they are as tired as I am, crumpled in the corner
of my bed—hiding my eyes under a silver sheet.
They are quiet; their closed mouths

stitched shut like the dolls I wanted
to smash against my bureau after my mother
lined them up around my room. I recite lines
to them when no one listens to prove I am not alone.
Sometimes, I hear them echo the same words back
while the moon watches with its rough, cold face.

—Submitted on 04/10/2020

Jennifer Franklin is the author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018) and Looming (Elixir Press, 2015). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Boston Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism (New York Quarterly Books, 2019), edited by Sean Thomas Dougherty. Living in New York City, Franklin teaches in the MFA program at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY, and serves as program director at the Hudson Valley Writers Center.

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Brooke Stanicki
For Breonna Taylor, A Fellow EMT

“There is no COVID-19”, a patient said.
As we rode, sirens blaring.
He grasped at my eyes
But found no wool for him to pull

How lucky am I,
I got to be his usher
Show him past the truck of bodies
Push his stretcher to the door.

Once full of blank certainty
His eyes were colored in,
Not with bright knowledge
But with the dark shade of the truth.

They got no such luxury.
No infinite morgue truck
Of lifeless black bodies
To bring the country to its knees.

They couldn’t argue any longer
So they spray-painted our eyes
And now we cannot avoid
The dark shade of the truth.

And now we cannot avoid the dark shade of the truth.

—Submitted on 06/07/2020

Brooke Stanicki is a pre-medical student at Johns Hopkins University. She works as an EMT in New Jersey. In her spare time, between studying and fencing as a varsity athlete for JHU, she writes fiction and poetry.

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Pamela Sumners
This Time Last Year

This time last year a neighbor who always lingers
to talk asked me if we’d noticed the silence of the
chimney swifts and the nighthawks lately. I had not.
This year, with no hum of traffic, with just the shrieks
of little girls in their speckled-egg Easter leggings
tramping the fenced back yard, I do breathe in the full
orchestral range of the birds: the grackles with their
puffed-out pipe whistle plunging so rapidly deep
into a guttural caw, the chimney swifts’ high-toned
chattering, able to call out while still on the wing,
foraging my deck for seeds, battling each other but
sharing with the sparrows. Their claws unfit for perching,
swifts lurch straightaway and bathe by doing a water glide
in flight, their pond in this case a blue plastic wading pool
we keep for the dogs. The swifts cling to the mortar joists
to roost overnight or for nesting, remembering the caves,
the sheer, creviced rock faces jutting over rivers,
the hollowed-out trees where their ancestors foraged. This
is a neighborhood of old trees, of houses with chimneys,
of Olmsted parks and meet-me-in-St. Louis wrought-iron
pickets, a perfect place for the little smudge-gray flyer,
with its cigar-shaped silhouette in flight and its fluid
sweep. They greet the surging dawn like fish singing
into the reef. Sometimes they’ve been seen in small flocks
funneling themselves into the flues like infinitesimal
tornados. They memory-hoard the dark, the cavernous
seclusion of primordial home, love their splendid isolation
in a way that the tenders of lawns, peddlers of provender,
the neighbor instinctually leaning over the fence to you, cannot.

They do not know that the chimney owners are living through
a goddamn featherstroke of history, now nesting with them, awake.

—Submitted on 04/17/2020

Pamela Sumners is the author of a chapbook, Finding Helen (forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press), and the full-length collection, Ragpicking Ezekiel’s Bones (forthcoming from UnCollected Press). Her work has appeared in Ucity Review, Mudlark Posters, Eunoia Review, Shot Glass Journal, Streetlight Magazine, and other journals, as well as in the 64 Best Poets anthology from Black Mountain Press for both 2018 and 2019, chosen by the editors of The Halcyone literary review. Sumners lives in St. Louis with her wife, son, and three rescue dogs, and works as a constitutional and civil rights lawyer.

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Marni Fogelson
Leave the Yeast

Leave the yeast
for those who have
no garden to tend
no lover’s body to tangle with for hours
no children whose hair needs braiding.

Leave the yeast
and the flour too
for them to scatter on the countertop
and knead
until the dough hugs their fingers,
for them to magic into loaves
hollow sounding when rapped with fists
and smelling like the heads of babies
just woken from a nap.

Leave the yeast and the flour
and the idea that these days mean anything more
than the time it takes for bread to
begin and breathe and rise and bake.

There is so much waiting involved
both in baking and in anticipating our uncertain futures.
But one will eat away at us, and the other will feed us.

—Submitted on 06/08/2020

Marni Fogelson is the author of A Cello Named Pablo (CTM Classics, 2017), illustrated by Avi Katz. Her work has appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Domino, Inhabitat, and other journals. Fogelson lives in Philadelphia with her husband, two children, and a beagle mix named Sparky.

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