Arleen Williams
Wild Rabbit

A wild rabbit nibbles tender grass
Then hops across the hazelnut
Shells beneath the garden table
To settle under the unruly brambles
To rest to think as rabbits do
Silent world in fearful lull

Watchful, the rabbit twitches her ears
Her nose—does she sense my eyes upon her
A gift of Buddha calm and nature’s glory
Quarantined in a silent world

Deep in the bamboo thicket
Along the southern fence line
My rabbit disappears to her burrow
She will return—I know—one day
Hopeful world in silent wait

Arleen Williams is the author, with Pamela Hobart Carter, of twelve short books in easy English, published on the imprint they founded, No Talking Dogs Press. Williams is also the author of of three memoirs and three novels, most recently The Ex-Mexican Wives Club (Independently published, 2019), and Walking Home (CreateSpace, 2015). Her poetry appears in the Chrysanthemum 2020 Literary Anthology (Goldfish Press Seattle, 2020). Williams lives in Seattle, where she teaches at South Seattle College.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Sylvia Hillo
Covid-19 and the Five-Year-Old

He hated germs long before you arrived
Stripping him of mud
Of social fun during a time
Social developing is so important

Mothers at their wit’s end
Sharing sad stories of personal disappointment.
I’m not a teacher
I go to school to be a teacher

Cold and flu season
Tis’ the reason
Cough’s nonstop but so is the preschool snot
Potatoes bought in bulk now sit and rot

Sanity hangs by a thread
Chickens reside in an old tenant’s shed
Bed sounds so good, but
when will it end?

—Submitted on 03/23/2020

Sylvia Hillo self-describes as “a mother and full-time student.” She writes, “like so many others, I have found myself in a situation I was blindsided by. I reside in Los Angeles, Calif., and am a student at California State University Northridge.”

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Maddison Taylor
What I Learned This Week About Being Alone in the Sky

If the moon is directly overhead, you will weigh
slightly less. When the moon is full, the side
of the Earth closest to it expands, as if the planet
wants to touch its counterpart. In order to avoid
spreading a virus, you must resist contact
with surfaces, with clothes, with other people’s
hands. This week I learned that it’s hard
to be my mother during a quarantine.
Her fear expands, touches me with its spidery
reach, like the veins that stretch her skin,
making craters. She is scared of dying too
young, leaving the way my father did, before
he could form the words, I love you, before she
felt the pull of her daughter’s love. Still, I have
no calendar to plot the orbit of my mother.
Perhaps William James was right, time gets faster
as we get older. I am moving at the speed
of the light it takes to get from here to there.

Maddison Taylor is a student at Woodbury University in Burbank, Calif. Her interview with the poet Reuben Ellis appears in Athena. She has served as literature editor and social media manager for the student-produced literary magazine, MORIA. Maddison lives in Los Angeles.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Ella Belvin
Evening Primrose

Does beauty only live in our eyes
and cease to exist without witness?
Does wisdom die with the wise
or hurt fade with forgiveness?

Does love perish in solitude,
dehydrating the heart?
Or does love continue to renew
and keep the broken from falling apart?

Is all hope of normality lost
when hell starts to seep
from every corner, to accost us?
Is death worth the power you seek?

No,
the flowers still bloom in the dark.

—Submitted on 03/23/2020

Ella Belvin is a senior at St. Mary’s Episcopal School in Memphis, Tennessee.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Amanda Ngoho Reavey
Poem for the End of the World

after Czeław Milosz

When the world ends
people may pillage, hoard food
and water everywhere
except here
at the end of the world
where the sky meets the sea.

Here, when the world ends,
the sun will blaze and smile the way
my grandfather sat up straight
and asked for food the day
before he died.

Here, when the world ends,
the Badjao will sing canticles,
boys will drink Coke from glass bottles,
and bet on fighting cocks.

Here, when the world ends,
Trappist monks will exit seclusion
and walk the dirt road to Sibunag,
offering absolutions.

Here, when the world ends,
I’ll put on my sadok and guide the carabao
through oil-mud to prepare for rice fields,
hoping my son will burn the land and till
(until)
the world ends.

—Submitted on 03/23/20

Amanda Ngoho Reavey is the author of Marilyn (the Operating System, 2015), winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Award for poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in Construction, Anthropoid, Truck, and Evening Will Come, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies Women: Poetry: Migration (Theenk Books, 2017), edited by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa; and Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), edited by Michael Boughn and others. She is a PhD student in poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She blogs about mental health, disability rights, and accessibility at stereo-type.life.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Caitlin Cacciatore
Brighter Days

winter brought little else save for sorrow—
and when it was over, we called
upon the Gods of sickness we’d all but abandoned in health;
we called one another vile names
and took the names of Jesus, Mary and Joseph in vain;
we fought in the street over petty things;
we abandoned our fires
and all the pretty things
that came along with them—
last I heard,
the nurses were swaying on their feet
against the tidal wave of the sick;
doctors were going out like matches;
(the forces of nature always seem to take us by surprise)
the dying said their wedding vows in makeshift chapels
far from the ones they loved;
the burial mounds grew mountainous,
but I can already see you on the other side of this—
a survivor picking your way across the fields
where the dead were piled in mass graves;
you will plant a flower for every life that was lost,
and I can see you, even now, planting the seeds of hope
and watering them with your tears.

—Submitted on March 23, 2020

Caitlin Cacciatore‘s work has appeared in The Roadrunner Review, Willawaw Literary Journal, and The Martian Chronicle, among journals. She is a Macaulay Honors Student studying artificial intelligence at Baruch College, pursuing a self-designed curriculum including physics, math, computer science, and philosophy.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Hilary King
Breakfast Before, Breakfast Now

Before, breakfast was yogurt.
straight from the cup, eaten
over my laptop as I researched
camps for the kids or ordered
groceries online, trying to check
off another chore before work,
swearing when a thick white
sour smelling drop of my breakfast
hit the keyboard.
An hour later I wondered why
I was starving.

Breakfast now. One pandemic day
I read a recipe In the news
and make it right away, something
I’ve never done before.
Baked oats. One cup oats, three cups
Boiling water, cinnamon, salt, peanut butter.
Bake for an hour. Thirty minutes in, the kitchen
begins to smell delicious, nutty, spicy, and warm.
I am hungry. I ran 3 miles earlier, walked the dog twice,
unloaded the dishwasher but I’m patient.
I can wait.
I can wait.

—Submitted on 03/23/20

Hilary King is the author of the The Maid’s Car (Aldrich Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Fourth River, Belletrist, Gyroscope Review, The Cortland Review, PANK, Blue Fifth Review, Ki’n, SWIMM, Mom Egg Review, Sky Island Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other journals. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is quarantined with 2 kids, 1 husband, 1 dog, and 1 cat.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Gloria Deckro
Nostalgia

I avoided doorknobs
stifled an itch
ducked as panic
ricocheted empty
shelves, stowed
one bunch of daffodils
bright as before
we knew something
could latch into us
and multiply,
before
we were scrambling
to claw back
anything familiar.

Now I grate carrots
beat eggs,
every plan curdled,
try to bake cake.
See the fine frosting
of snow
allude to a season
before
we were sheltered
in place.

—Submitted on 03/23/2020

Gloria Deckro is a physician with a background in family practice and the role of mindfulness in health and medicine. She founded the Silver River Institute in 2004 to foster an integrated approach to health skills training. Deckro lives and studies poetry in the  Greater Boston area.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Lyndsey Kelly Weiner 
Coronavirus 1 and 2

my past-husband sits in the dark in a room I’ve never seen
on the futon that used to be in our living room
laid off after one day of farm work
texted me yesterday he saw snow geese while pruning

evictions are illegal now I say
not I love you or I’m crying
picturing our old blanket around his shoulders
catastrophe is accidental close contact multiplied

*

homeschool unit on 90s rap: podcast on Biggie & Tupac

this is white privilege
that is driving while black
this is why we don’t say the n-word

that is what you say when your friends at your school of confederate flags and maga hats say it

this is where I find the magic words to keep you from saying nothing

—Submitted on 03/23/2020

Lyndsey Kelly Weiner‘s poems have appeared in The Stonecoast Review and Tiny Seed. She holds an MFA from the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. She teaches writing at Syracuse University.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Daisy Bassen
In Wales, They Are Singing in the Mountains

I’m very busy.
I’m waiting for my nightmare
And so I am watching the crows
On the grass, shadows and shadows,
I am stocking the pantry with inviolables.
You could see it all on my face
If you looked; there are no masks
To be had for all that we are
Garment-workers again in our kitchens,
Crowded together, breathing
The same tumbling air we fear.

I’m very busy, about to run
A one-room schoolhouse,
A clinic, a studio, a sanctuary
And I can’t hurry up or slow down;
Time is made of numbers
And you can’t eat them.

No one alive has ever lived in this world before.
Our advice comes only from the dead.
Descants from the grey hills.

—Submitted on March 23, 2020

Daisy Bassen  ‘s poems have appeared in Oberon, The Delmarva Review, The Sow’s Ear, and PANK, among other journals, as well as in The Dreamers Anthology: Writing Inspired by the Lives of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Anne Frank (Social Justice Anthologies, 2019), edited by by Janette Schafer, Cedric Rudolph, and Matthew Ussia. A practicing physician, Bassen lives in Rhode Island with her family.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.