Becky Wills
the virus diaries #30

letter to grace

if it weren’t for you,
i’d never know
about the musk ox,
that it is one of
the longest surviving
creatures on earth,
and that over thousands
of years of evolution,
it has developed a method
for enduring winter
in the freezing tundra.
if it were not for you,
i would never know
that all the method is
is ‘hunker down and cope’,
that over thousands
of years of evolution,
that was the best
the musk oxen
came up with.
i know that what we are
experiencing is more than
just a seasonal rut,
but i can’t think of
better advice for us now.
if there is one thing
i do know, though,
it’s that this world
loves a come back

—Submitted on 05/22/2020

Becky Wills is a member of the Poems While You Wait Collective. She has worked as an editorial intern for DiningOut Chicago. Her work has appeared in Gigantic Sequins.

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Austin Alexis
Social Distance

Percussive silence
won’t leave me alone.
Loud in the pantry,
louder in the garage.
My solitude is enforced.
My solitude is a cloth
doused with bleach
and pressed to my mouth.
My solitude is crowded
with quiet.
The odor of loneliness
owns all my minutes.
Even when I leave
my empty house—
roam about the streets—
involuntary reclusiveness
claims my legs,
stains my clothing, my teeth,
my stretch of days
that are no longer mine
but belong to the hush
at the center of today.

—Submitted on 04/02/2020

Austin Alexis is the author of Privacy Issues (Broadside Lotus Press, 2014), winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award; Lovers and Drag Queens (Poets Wear Prada, 2014) and For Lincoln & Other Poems, (Poets Wear Prada, 2010). His work has appeared in Barrow Street, The Pedestal Magazine, The Journal, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015), edited by Joel Allegretti;  Suitcase of Chrysanthemums (Great Weather for Media, 2018), edited by Jane Ormerod, Thomas Fucaloro, and David Lawton. He received a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholarship, and teaches at New York City College of Technology.

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Marilyn Johnston
My Husband Talks About COVID-19 as If He’s Still on Patrol

Anytime going out from the base camp,
you take your chance with snipers.
You take a risk, even all suited up
with night gear, thick flak jacket
and combat boots, M16 at the ready.
It’s hard to tell the difference between
friend or foe without a scope.
How they can trick you and kill you,
even if you have your helmet in place;
even with masks and gloves, you take
a chance with the things you can’t see.
All suited up, you could take a shot
in the neck or an artery hit in the leg,
somewhere that’s vital. So you cover
and lay low, even on base, where
a rocket can zero in and find you—
fear of friendly fire. Triage will become
unreliable, once overwhelmed with
casualties. And, again, it’s a matter
of luck or fate, who lives or dies. Now,
the helicopters are circling the perimeter
and someone has to be in charge,
ready to drop the red smoke grenades
to mark the landing zone. He’s on duty
once again, waking us, as he prepares
for an enemy that refuses to show its face.

—Submitted on 05/22/2020

Marilyn Johnston is the author of Before Igniting (Rippling Brook Press, 2020) and Red Dust Rising (The Habit of Rainy Nights Press, 2004). Her work has appeared in CALYX, Natural Bridge, Poetica, War, Verseweavers, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies including Terra Incognita: Oregon Poets Write for Ecological, Social, Political, and Economic Justice (Bob Hill Publishing, 2019). Johnston teaches in the Salem Art Association’s Artists in the Schools program serving Marion, Polk and Yamhill counties.

Johnston writes, “I wrote this for my husband who views this pandemic through the lens of the Vietnam War he fought and brought home with him…as well as for other men and women who have experienced trauma, their PTSD resurfacing during these surreal times.”

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Jennifer Martelli
I Don’t Have It, Do You?

—Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes, 1982

Deep into coronavirus’s sway, I drive through the rain to my childhood home—
I am safe in my car with my husband and my son.
There was a man who joked about death and then he died of Alzheimer’s.
My mother died of Alzheimer’s and so there is no God.
That man joked for three years: jokes about fairies and kissing: things he believed
made a man less of a man, things he believed made a man a woman.
My mother forgot everything but her fear and so there is no justice.
The new owners put a stone façade over part of the old house: tonal colors my mother
would have liked. Big blocks of fake rock.
(Lentivirus: long incubation. Lent: long days. Lent: it shall be returned.)
I stay awake until first pearl light. The whole world has been cancelled and so there is no time.

—Submitted on 04/01/2020

Jennifer Martelli is the author of In the Year of Ferraro (Nixes Mate Books, 2020), My Tarantella (Bordighera Press, 2018), After Bird (Grey Book Press, 2017), and The Uncanny Valley (Big Table Publishing Company, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Rise Up Review, Superstition Review, Grimoire, Glass, and other journals. Martelli is poetry co-editor of Mom Egg Review. She co-curates the Italian-American Writers Association Boston Literary Series. Online at jennmartelli.com

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Diane Englert
COVIDku—Haikus for an Uncertain World

ku – 苦
noun
pain; anguish; suffering; distress; anxiety; worry; trouble; difficulty; hardship

I

Nature is pissed off!
We failed to honor the earth.
Now we pay the price.

II

Skin dry from washing,
face chaffed by the mask I wear,
heart heavy from loss.

III

No shared gatherings.
Goodbye to hugs and handshakes.
Now is all we have..

IV

Inside—fear, outside
robins nesting in the spruce
remind me—it’s spring.

—Submitted on 05/21/2020

Diane Englert is a writer and theater artist. Her work has appeared in We’ll Never Have Paris, Ovation, Nanoism, and other journals. Englert is sheltering in place with her husband and daughter in Portland, Oregon.

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Marjorie Moorhead
Two Poems

Coronavirus Diary III
3/20/2020

It’s not as though life is perfect
and everything is shining and smooth.

No, there’s a lot I’m unsatisfied with.
Many cluttered things, undone, in dust.

So why is there this precious feeling
like an ache in my heart

when the birds sing?
They sing, and fly together,

in the breeze
and the branches

and my heart cracks open
like the ice cliffs calving.

And the thought that life may end
is an unbearable thing.

Coronavirus Diary IV
3/23/2020

The odor of yeast bubbling
in warm honey sweetness

as my husband starts his bread.
It sits in a large ceramic bowl, covered

with damp thin cotton tea-towel,
waiting to get punched down

at the appropriate time.
Meanwhile, we do our qigong exercises

in front of the desk-top, as a white clad
practitioner we have stored in the cloud

does his slow moves with names tagging
crane, lion, bear. “Expand the chest

to cleanse the body.” Eagle spreads its wings
and bear swims across the water.

Our son, sequestered in a bedroom
of his childhood, has been robbed

of the experience, new for him last fall,
of being on a college campus, learning

about life, with his peers.
Instead, they must practice “social distancing,”

and attend “virtual leaning” classes
on Zoom.

—Submitted on 04/01/2020

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. Moorhead practices tai chi, a daily walk, and poetry on the NH/VT border.

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Aurora Anderson
Reaching

I reached my boiling point,

I reached the point of unnecessary reactions,

I reached thinking with emotion and no rational thought.

I reached the point of peak anger levels,

and it felt so horribly wrong.

This isn’t who I am,

I can’t even recognize myself in the mirror,

and so, I sat.

I sat with my anger, until I realized it’s mask.

I reached over to disassemble the appearance,

and then,

I drank with my disappointment

I smoked with my frustrations

I yelled at my failures

I cried into my embarrassment

I lashed out with my shame

I sobbed with my stress until it poured down the drain

I broke down with my trauma

I sang with my regrets

I struggled to breathe as my anger dismantled

and crushed me with the sheer size of the iceberg I had front of me

and then,

I shook hands with what was left of my “anger” and realized I was completely overwhelmed.

I picked myself up.

I held onto those dear to me.

I asked for help.

I reached out to my therapist.

I committed to getting better.

I let go of the emotions I let build up.

I said thank you, and goodbye, to the remains of the iceberg that had melted in my bathtub.

—Submitted on 05/20/2020

Aurora Anderson is a mixed Métis woman. Living on Treaty 7 land in Calgary, her indigenous roots are from Québec. She holds a BA from the University of Calgary with a major in English literature and a minor in psychology.

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Michael Tyrell
To Have Them

Even my beloved bees set upon me today when I numbly knocked aside their sugar feeder, and I am all over stings….
—Sylvia Plath, in a letter to her mother, October 1962

One week into lockdown
the dogwoods flowering
look more foam than flower.

Flowers at the ground and in branches
a white at the lips like a first symptom.

A stillness, as in post-seizure.

Maybe a first symptom, noticing.
Like losing smell, shedding the taste buds, the tongue’s

scant flowers. How many of us
flowering now insignificantly, not noticeably?

Faces in boxes on the phone
and faces beaming through screens in Lombardy.

And still it’s spring like the sum of many previous
springs. The outside what you remember,

not the hours at home.
The beloved bees you can’t see in the rain.
All along building and dismantling the flowers.

The sirens and the mourning doves
like the mask and the rubber gloves.

Like the sum of springs, like noticing.

Like, I am all over stings.

I go outside.
I put each of them on.

Against all sense
wanting skin against skin again.

More than the words and the masks
and the gloves.
For someone in the world,
to topple me, take them off me—
to have to touch me, talk to me
to have them.

—Submitted on 03/31/2020

Michael Tyrell is the author of Phantom Laundry (Backlash Press, 2017) and The Wanted (National Poetry Review Press, 2012). With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press, 2007). His poems have appeared in Agni, Iowa Review, New England Review, The New Republic, The New York Times, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other journals, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2015 (Simon and Schuster, 2015; series editor David Lehman, guest editor Sherman Alexie). Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, Tyrell holds a BA from New York University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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Emily Hockaday
Last Breath

I think of my own breath
and what would happen
if I exhaled in space. It is not
romantic, but I can’t help
feeling drawn to it. The inky dark,
the utter quiet, objects moving—
and me one of them. Out in
the Kuiper Belt, planetoids
school like fish. They glitter—
frozen ornaments moving
in a loose, massive donut.
Here at home, my orbit
is getting tighter, smaller,
less important. Sixty-three days
of isolation, and I am hardening
to ice. My atmosphere is thinning,
it is harder and harder
to draw breath. I am
cold. My daughter places hot hands
on my cheeks. She says,
I’m not sad. Every time she asks
if the germs are still out,
if the playgrounds are closed,
I lose more heat. I don’t know
how to keep spinning. I’m losing sight
of what I should be orbiting.
Which way is the Sun?

—Submitted on 05/16/2020

Emily Hockaday is the author of Vocabulary (Red Bird Chaps, forthcoming), Space on Earth (Grey Book Press, 2019), Ophelia: A Botanist’s Guide (Zoo Cake Press, 2015), What We Love & Will Not Give Up (Dancing Girl Press, 2014), and Starting a Life (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Newtown Literary, The Maine Review, Salt Hill, and other journals. Hockaday is an associate editor at Analog Science Fiction and Fact Magazine and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Based in Queens, New York, she is online at emilyhockaday.com and on Twitter @E_Hockaday.

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Alexandra Méndez
A Song of Solace

Just remember:
We will congregate again.
There will be plays again.
There will be class again.
We will hold hands again.
We will brush coats again.

When all this passes, we will not be the same.
The ghost-imprint of masks we wore,
the mental gauge of six feet
sounding alarm bells when it shortens—
they will linger, but they will fade.

We will learn to touch again,
share the space of the world again.
And a gleeful little girl
born in quarantine
will laugh like spring and run into our arms.

—Submitted on 03/31/2020

Alexandra Méndez‘s poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in Tuesday Magazine, Dudley Review, Public Books, Harvard Review Online, Language Magazine, Harvard Political Review, and Harvard Crimson. Raised in Decatur, Ga., she holds a BA from Harvard University, where she received a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship. Méndez is a doctoral candidate in Latin American and Iberian cultures at Columbia University.

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