Ed Meek
The Crown

This king of viruses wants to thank you
For hosting. We couldn’t have survived
Without your help. We would like
To apologize for spoiling the party
And making you ill, but there’s a price
For everything in this life
And that’s the price you pay
For hosting. Next time
Don’t cage the bats.
Don’t play the pangolin.
Meanwhile, gracias, danke, merci
For the chance to travel
All over the world.

—Submitted on 06/19/2020

Ed Meeks is the author of High Tide (Aubade Publishing, 2020), Luck (Tailwinds Press, 2017), Spy Pond (Prolific Press, 2015), What We Love (1st World Publishing, 2007), and Flying (Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). His poems have appeared in Blue Mountain Review, First Literary Review East, Red Wheelbarrow Review, Constellations, Aurorean, and other journals.

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Christopher Braciszewski
Timelessness

Forever never felt like much
Until we wept for a hand to hold
Lonely smoldering cauldron
This life is embolden with hypocrisy
Shouting loudly for justice in a small room
Timelessness, effortless, and beguiled
Soft eyes, soft hands, soft lips
Hard times not fixed
We miss the universal you
We miss the world we once knew
Could there be a second where we hold one another,
Where we all agree that each other is the one and be still in that love
Does your heart beat in sync?
Does it beat in fashion and fortitude?
Masterful pulse of cryptic layers
Hollow tree with a hole to fill
Void next door, Opens calm
We all have the pieces but no puzzle
To connect the dots and see the answer
The question was never
Will we be alone forever?
But are we forever alone?
Timelessness, effortless, and beguiled

—Submitted on 04/26/2020

Christopher Braciszewski is the co-founder, with Charlotte Miller and John Harris, of EST, a San Diego-based band that has been described as an amalgam of shoegaze, dark wave, and goth influences. In a recent interview, Braciszewski says of their music, “As humans we have so much untapped knowledge that can aid in the access to bettering ourselves and this understanding can help us all adapt to the externality of the ever changing world through creativity as expression and art as experience.”

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George Neame
Two Poems

Liquorice Nighttime

Marmalade lamplight at the
windowpane, tubs of chinese takeaway
ageing on the coffee table
where cars still set their headlights.
In this latitude and on this carpet
we lose sight of the little victories
won in an afternoon spin cycle
or fitness classes in the kitchen
and instead we regret the things
we push onto each other’s lips;
time, night, rice, liquor.

The New Normal

*
the scent of warm rainwater
was enough to remind us that
a previous existence once spiralled
behind our curtains, and because the
streetlight still needs re-bulbing we know
that it somehow still survives like that hour
we lost somewhere close to a midnight
at the receding end of March but we never
really lost because we used our own fingers
when we collectively wound it out of existence
*
and while we waited and wondered how
an hour, a month, a springtime could be
handled and tangible and ticking in our hands
but also empty as the husk of a chestnut
we became a rally of repelling magnets
and evaded each other on pavements
the way black peppercorns evade soapy fingers
*
in warm water. now our doubts spread quicker
than bacteria and now fear cultivates fear the way a
rotting pink lady in our fruit bowl hastens
the decay of its intimate co-conspirators—
suspicions ricocheted off satellites,
misinformation in internet cables—
and now idleness is a virtue not a sin,
*
and now we answer the world’s first call
to inaction, because when we are reborn
we will say that we would have wound
an hour out of every day if we knew we
would inhale one more time
*
the second-hand smoke of a beer garden
and the scent of warm rainwater
peppering ash trays and rinsing the foam
from the urn of a pint glass.

—Submitted on 06/20/2020

George Neame‘s poems have appeared in Acumen, Antiphon, The Moth, and Ink, Sweat & Tears. Having lived in Tennessee, Dublin and Yorkshire, he now lives in London.

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Anthony Chesterfield
Three Poems

Clean Air Under a Corona

I am taking cleaner breaths at work. My lungs expand—happy to let oxygen—
Enable them to sag like hammocks—Occupied by some lazy man
On a beach without a care in the world.
Down the hall, a resident’s chest collapses.
This morning, he ate the Product 19, along with an omelet
This morning I ate the Product 19, along with a hard—boiled egg
The shipment of cereal came in last night from upstate.
The ears of wheat were harder to husk—they were more hardy
Less riddled with carbon from automobiles.
When the farmer harvested them, they were not drooping,
They were not hunched, not curved over
Like some druids singing incantations to a wrathful god.
This healing of the earth is to my benefit, not to his.
Didn’t we both just breathe the same air?
Shouldn’t we both reap what we sow?

Too Many Rules

Ever since COVID—19 hit, I’ve been in the company of misery.
The phone rings. It rings with the same urgency as
the nurses hands that are trying to pump life into a man who has been dead for an hour.
He won’t be brought back—But—because of a paper he signed three years ago, our hands are tied. I’ve been expecting this call. I’ve been warned of the sibling dynamics.

The hatred, the anger, the subterfuge—I’d hoped that the virus—
which has just struck their father down—
Would have them grow up. Put their differences aside.
And by doing so saved me from having to utter this trope—which in its own right is the hangman to my psyche. I measure the words in my mind. Twenty—four, two dozen, two score, doesn’t matter how I quantify them, they will be my noose.

I can’t tell you what you want to know.
You are on the list of people I can talk to—
But not about that.

I pick up the receiver:
“Hello, my name is X I am Y’s son can you tell me about his medical state.
“I am sorry, I can’t tell you about your loved one’s medical condition.”
“Why?”
“You are not the health—care proxy, and are not on the contact list”
“But you actually pick up the phone—unlike the doctor”
“I’m not a doctor.”
“Just read the chart.”
“I can’t.”
“You’re heartless. He could be dead for all I know”—Click.

He is—He is.
As I hang up, the nurse Purells her hands. She wanted to wash them earlier—there was no hope.
I’m shaking. Aren’t rules made to be broken? Had they been, my deceased patient’s ribcage wouldn’t be shattered—and my heart would not be leaping out of my chest.

Nursing Home Under Siege

You are thirty percent empty on both fronts—Staff and patients
Admissions have ceased—and—the morgue—is overflowing.
Every day, a third of workers are out sick.

Good intended leaders, pontificating—
With the same degree of elegance
As today’s shit in yesterday’s bedpan.

When normality returns will I genuflect to a culpable conscience?
I’m only one person. I can’t be all things to all men.
I can only clock in early, clock out late
I can only check out if my chest is achy
If I run a temperature, have cough

Our census is down two hundred.
Every day we see the morning star
We wait for that influx from the hospitals
Whose harbinger graces the papers daily.
The DOH, unreliable as a squeaky hinge,
Changes protocol with such abruptness
Causing our PT therapists to feel like lapdogs
To a circumspect Dr. Jekyll whose alter—ego Hyde
Paints a retrospective of second guessers.

For the past two weeks, it’s been Death’s birthday every day.
He has become so complacent—
He has forgotten how to hand out party favors
He risks the same anonymity I experience at work
Where social workers become chaplains—
Chaplains become nurses’ aides and doctors—
Doctors become shadows of their former selves as they are rotated out weekly.

The anxiety ridden home
Whose mission to bring comfort
Has been suspended
For him to gloat over
Have his cake—and eat it too.

—Submitted on 04/26/2020

Anthony Chesterfield is the author of Death’s Strife (XlibrisUS, 2018). A social worker pursuing an MFA at Manhattanville College, he lives in Bedford Hills, NY, with his wife, three daughters, and three cats.

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Kendra Nuttall
Where We’re Going

American is not a religion, but bible
verses are written on our soda cups.

God is In-N-Out / is Forever 21 / is a roadside
billboard somewhere south of Normal,

Illinois. Where are you going?
Heaven or Hell? The anti-masker says

I’m going to hell. Politics are not a sport,
but team spirit is what keeps us alive.

My cousin, #blessherheart, wrote:
#coronavirusruinslives in response to:

“My fav all u can eat place
isn’t doing all u can eat anymore.”

I want to tell her what it’s like to lose
someone you love. It’s like a buffet

shutting down, but forever.
It’s like a pandemic, but permanent.

It’s like the suffocating heat of a mask,
but you can never get rid of the sweat.

I want to tell her #coronaviruskills
but the message will never make it through

our socially distanced feeds.
American is a religion and politics are sport

and we’re on opposite teams.
Where are you going?

—Submitted on 06/19/2020

Kendra Nuttall‘s 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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Hope Andersen
Chalk Messages

The children leave bright chalk messages
on sidewalks that spread out like a fork’s prongs
in our neighborhood,
little, eclectic messages of Hope:
faith not fear,
don’t worry, be happy,
we are all in this together,
decorated with rainbows and big flowers,
birds, sunbeams and smiles.
A child’s way of dealing with covid-19.
They bounce on their trampoline,
ride bikes wearing halter tops and shorts,
missing friends but not school,
the makings of a happy memory,
a time when summer came in March,
and let them laugh, play, gaze at stars.
These are their independence days
of bottle rockets and sparklers, bonfires
long before the 4th of July.
I’d like to be a part of their Bliss
but I am too close to 65.
It isn’t Wisdom that keeps me wary,
or knowing the Facts, because no one really does,
but feeling the Wolf’s breath hot on my neck,
my dead mother reaching out across my dreams.

—Submitted on 04/26/2020

Hope Andersen is the author of Taking In Air (Kelsay Books, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Ink&Nebula, The Awakenings Review, The Pangolin Review, The Literary Yard, and Time of Singing. Andersen lives in North Carolina with her husband of 30 years. They have three grown children, two dogs, and a cat.

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Nichole Acosta
Daily Video Calls With My Grandmother

1.
She speaks in broken English.
To me
These are full poems.

Today she warns,
“Don’t stay outside
too long
Last night I see the fire
on T.V.
You know?”

I reassure her I will be safe
I try to reassure myself.

2.
I make the mistake
of telling her I have a headache
one that is so painful
I have to call her in the dark.
The flood of text messages
from other relatives
fill my inbox.
She doesn’t sleep all night.
I call her in the morning.
She is relieved the virus didn’t take me
Like it took 5 of her best friends.
She doesn’t know I know.
I call her twice that day.

3.
She says my grandpa sleeps
most of the day,
imitates his loud snoring
We laugh the purest laugh
we’ve heard in months.

4.
At dinner time we do show and tell
of what we are cooking
evidence we love the one we are with
and they love us back

5.
On Mother’s Day
I tell her happy mother’s day
She’s shocked that no one has called her but me
I don’t spoil the surprise
that her daughters will drive-by visit.

6.
The day when things shut down officially
my grandfather asks why no one comes over
for family dinner anymore.
I write in big letters because he cannot hear very well,
“There is a virus outside,
making people sick
so they have to stay home.
Turn on the news.”
He journals every day.

7.
The nation is erupting.
The white protestors
are voluntarily becoming human shields
for black protestors.
The police are herding the masses
with force.
I saw one protestor nearly be pulled apart
Police at the foot of him
Protestors at the arms
Tug of war with a human body
The stretched man got away
ran off screen with his fellow protestors.
This happened in Chicago
on CNN
My wife just got home from a protest in Brooklyn
says, “cops are crazy,”
too much to explain now
She needs to go out again.
I call my grandma
She says,
“Too many people outside
I don’t know what happen”
I want to say,
“There are two viruses
making people sick,
hate and COVID”
Instead I say,
“It’s crazy. It’s all crazy.”

—Submitted on 06/20/2020

Nichole Acosta is a Brooklyn-based poet, performer, and carb counter. She enjoys bridging the gaps, between page and stage, identity and perception. She is the author of Throat on Fire (The Soap Box Press, 2020). Her work appears in The Americas Poetry Festival of New York 2018 anthology, the Diabetics Doing Things podcast series, the This Is Not What I Ordered podcast series, the Connect. Politic. Ditto youth poetry anthology from Urban Word, among others.

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Margo Berdeshevsky
Wolf Watching Us in Hiding

Locked in singing
softly to ourselves if not to one another—

daylight stills
for mass graves or one
lily cupping rain

The hummingbird
is thirsty,     and you,     and so am I

There is dawn,
candle-silence-lit with waiting

Blackbirds darker than dogwood buds
Blue heartbeats as determined
for spring to survive as our sang-froid

Our rooms, and the river, and the river-child
waiting for its waters to turn to milk

We whisper we
noticed you, worm moon,
Lenten moon, setting.

Listen,
listen,
we will—survive

—Submitted on 04/26/2020

Margo Berdeshevsky is the author of Before the Drought (Glass Lyre Press, 2017), Between Soul and Stone (Sheep Meadow Press, 2011), and But a Passage in Wilderness (Sheep Meadow Press, 2007). Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Mom Egg Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and other journals, as well as in numerous anthologies. Among her prizes is the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. Born in New York, Berdeshevsky lives and writes in Paris.

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Chad W. Lutz
Two Poems

House of Cards

embers burn
in a desert
hot
while a country
cold
to the cries
of the snuffed
stuffs their pockets
& plans to go to war

what was it
but another
assassination?

perhaps another
blind attempt
at control
at power
at the expense
of the world

a single bomb
costs the equivalent
of a nice house
in the suburbs

that’s exactly
what’s at risk
for either side

Dower in a Dry Land

a fragrance
I’ve known forever
now my only
place of refuge

cool rain
& oak pollen
little bits of industry

the sky lights
up electric
as the west wind
meets the north

I hear thunder
and wonder
if it’s
clapping
for me

who else would it be?

can’t pay the rent
can’t insure myself

the sky lights
up electric
& a criminal
gets his wings

jail for a quarter of a gram of marijuana
jail for the man wearing peace signs

one application becomes
two applications becomes
three applications…

the screen
on my lap
keeps telling me
sorry
we’re just
not moving
forward
with your
candidacy
at this time

that’s my favorite rhyme

… becomes
seven applications
becomes eight…

the position
has been filled
or some bullshit

…becomes eleven applications
becomes twelve…

I get it

the treble
of the thunder
its baritone pop &
cantankerous mount
& pout
conjure images
of a wrong turn
I made down
a one-way street
when I was eighteen

a one-way street
that changed everything

on a night
pretty similar to this

—Submitted on 06/18/2020

Chad W. Lutz is the author of the novel For the Time Being (J. New Books, 2020). A non-binary writer born in Akron, Lutz holds a BA from Kent State University and an MFA in creative writing from Mills College in Oakland.

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Kirsten Jones Neff
Two Poems

In Search of Eggs

I leave my suburban home
and drive west
toward farmland
in search of eggs.

The road stretches
ahead, adorned with
wings of silver grass
shimmering,

infinite as ocean,
and my mind jumps,
skittish as a bird,
back and forth,

from this pure
certainty of spring,
to the grocer’s
metal shelves, barren

under hard fluorescent light,
tags and prices
dangling, aimlessly,
signage posted,

day after day:
NO EGGS.
But foothills rise,
as always,

as if in relief,
a majesty above meadows,
asking for trust
in my approach.

Just this week
the dishwasher broke
and then the microwave,
then the vacuum clogged,

and everyone in my home
was crying,
or angry.
The world is breaking.

The contagious frailty
I suspected
inside my self
is leaking out
through cracks,
and the imperfection
of living
is growing

louder and louder
as nurses and doctors plead,
begging us to listen.
They stand inside

moments of silence,
accompanying the dead
left so alone.

I focus on the line
in the road ahead.
All I want is an egg,
pale brown and smooth,

born of this silver land,
perfect and unbroken.

Coronavirus Diary: Days 1-31

On the 1st day,
I rushed to the store,
bought potatoes and leeks.
I made soup
and cried
fat salty tears,
right into the broth.

On the 4th day,
I washed the linens,
even the rags.
I tried to make them
bright and clean.
I ironed everything,
every last wrinkle,
and felt calm.
But when I lay down to sleep
I felt wrinkled
and uncomfortable.

On the 9th day,
I dug up weeds in my garden.
Angrily.
I killed the weeds
with my hand trowel,
stabbing them
over and over,
until I hurt my wrist.

On the 13th day,
I cleaned the oven.
It had never been cleaned.
I put my head in
to remind myself,
I am not
living alone
in a dark oven.

On the 18th day,
I looked up at the skylights.
They were dirty
and I couldn’t see out.
I got up on the roof
to clean them.
It felt important
to see clouds moving,
to know that orbit
is still a thing.

On the 23rd day,
I wrote a book.
It was a historical novel
about a person
who lived
without feelings,
no memory
of the past,
nor vision
for the future.
She had no desire.
There was no plot.

On the 31st day
I sat outside
on my front stoop
with my dog.
I caressed him
all day long.
Nothing else,
only touching his fur,
the softness of his fur,
feeling nothing,
nothing but love.

—Submitted on 04/26/2020

Kirsten Jones Neff is the author of When The House Is Quiet (Finishing Line Press, 2009). Her work has appeared in Believer Magazine, Stanford Magazine, Ms Magazine, Literary Mama, Spillway, and other magazines and journals. She sits on the board of the Marin Poetry Center.

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