Susana H. Case
That’s Not How It Was

The loneliness of not having a hand
to hold while dying did not exist,
and there were plenty of priests.
It was the prayers that were long,
not the military-like line of waxed wooden
coffins for corpses wrapped in plastic,
wheeled out at night, so many, it seemed
like a parade in a march to cremation.
Sure, burials and funerals happened,
as they unceasingly happen, but car horns
blared, those still fiercely alive
embraced in search of comfort, present
and crying. The laughter in town
of those lucky to savor their lives,
floated in the air, while they ate pesce spada,
drank vino alla spina, as did the cheers
over the latest soccer win; crowds
poured through the streets in team colors,
unworried about masking tape
marking the distance to stand apart.
And the church bells rang for each death,
not just once daily for all the deaths.
The coos of Turtle-doves didn’t seem
quite so loud. In Piazza Navonna,
the tourists jostled, posing for photos
in front of La Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi.
And at La Fontana dei Trevi, a drunken
fool was taking an illegal dip. How dirty
ones hands were–with sweat and gelato,
not busy typing #iostoacasa,
I stay at home, and it was easy to forget
to wash, instead walk to the park for a rest
in the sun, where the person on the bench
across did not listen for a cough.

Susana H. Case is the author of the poetry collections Body Falling, Sunday Morning (Milk and Cake Press, 2019); Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press, 2019); Erasure, Syria (Recto y Verso Editions, 2018); 4 Rms w Vu (Mayapple Press, 2014); Earth and Below (Anaphora Literary Press, 2013); Salem in Séance (WordTech Communications, 2013); and Elvis Presley’s Hips & Mick Jagger’s Lips (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012). Dead Shark on the N Train is forthcoming in 2020 from Broadstone Books. Case is also the author of the poetry chapbooks Manual of Practical Sexual Advice (Kattywompus Press, 2011), The Cost of Heat (Pecan Grove Press, 2010), Hiking the Desert in High Heels (RightHandPointing, 2005),  Anthropologist in Ohio (Main Street Rag, 2005), and The Scottish Café (Slapering Hol Press, 2002). Her poems have appeared in Calyx, The Cortland Review, Portland Review, Potomac Review, Rattle, RHINO, and many other journals. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City.

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Lucie Barrios
Dystopia

Reflect upon your sins,
Said the archbishop
I thought of people dying
And mothers who can’t afford diapers but even if they could the shelves are empty

And a garage filled with 99.99% effectiveness
Stolen from the hands of people who could afford to pay

The coming of Christ is at hand
But this year there is no church service
No family gatherings

My mother cries as we pray the rosary
I am afraid my grandmother will die and we will not know

We sing and make jokes and use too much bandwidth to keep from going crazy
Imagine houses with horses and tennis courts and wine cellars
Acres of freedom away from everyone

We’ve been told to sew our own masks

Spring break is cancelled
Offices closed down for who knows how long
Everyone left unpaid
And yet the line snakes a poisonous coil round the grocery store

In the leafy green fields of California
A squirt bottle of hand sanitizer burns clear paths
Across an hombre’s hands as he pauses in his strawberry picking for lunch
There’s nothing wrong here, says the boss, business as usual

I thought today about running
My finger down the page in the book
Of Revelation
In search of answers

Hellfire and disease and earthquakes
And now too, the rockets of war?

I hold you in my heart
And remember love

Lucie Barrios is a 2019 graduate of Webster University, in St. Louis, with a degree in English. Since childhood she has felt a deep kinship to a wide variety of poets and she has been a voracious reader of fiction. She believes that letter writing should be revived and that sharing food is the sixth language of love.

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Rachel Finston
A Poem for COVID-19

We stay home from work,
you sniffly, me achy.
We sleep for ten hours.
There is an element of risk in our work
I push books, you push fluids.

I cry watching a comedy,
my family is on the other side of the ocean.
I don’t know
if it’s just my medication
or if I’m really afraid.

Our cat purrs beside me
He, at least, is safe.
You sleep in our bed
I can hear your uneven breath,
your body trying to remember
how much it loves to live.

Rachel Finston lives and works in Washington, DC. She won first prize in the Fredericksburg Coalition of Reason 2017 Religious Freedom Essay Contest. Her favorite pastimes include gardening, reading, and arguing about politics.

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John C. Krieg
Coronavirus Has Nothing on Retirement

1. This Thing is Getting Serious

In all seriousness, I know this is a
legitimate National Emergency
And I must do what I can to protect
my family, and myself from it

But there are some things that smack of panic
Hoarding, runs on toilet paper, and sanitizer(s)
And some things that smack of despicable greed
Price gouging, and offering fake testing products

This is like The Book of Revelation
In real time, and in Technicolor
Great good and great evil are on high display
I’m praying that good will triumph in the end

But coronavirus has nothing on retirement
For nobody knows where I am
Or what I have been doing
Or if I’m dead or alive

A six-foot safety radius?
Try the circumference of the globe
Social distancing?
Try 5 acres removed from my closest neighbor

Containment zones
Mine starts at my property line
Chill out? I’m like a block of ice
Get a grip? I’ve never lost it

We’re always stocked up on food, anyway
Have email and satellite TV
Bank and pay bills over the internet
Have well water and 500 gallons of propane

So as long as the electricity stays on
Our lives go on as usual
We are the lucky ones, I know, and I
Feel remorse for my less fortunate brethren

And my grandchildren living at home
With the school closed, they are
going to go bonkers with boredom, and
Demand attention keeping me from my writing

Circle the wagons
Us versus them
Pray that some Americans
don’t turn on other Americans

“We are all in this together,” is the
current rallying cry, but I wonder why
It took this pandemic for the nation
to actually believe it

CFS: Coronavirus Fatigue Syndrome
It’s coming, if it isn’t here already
People will let down their guard
Paying for that with their lives

I’m paying for my retirement with my life
My golden years are taking years off my life
I blame myself first, and the system second
The truth being that when you retire—you’re forgotten

In retirement, many are under
Self-inflicted house arrest
Spending as little as possible
And never going anywhere

So retirees are at least a leg up
On the rest of the country
In knowing how to deal with
Isolation and loneliness

Coronavirus has nothing on retirement
Except the speed at which sufferers will die
A sad truth, for death is death, but now
We may not get to choose our time

2. A Few Days Later

It’s Saint Patrick’s Day!
And nobody’s throwing a party
It’s raining again in Southern Cali
So I watch the news that’s saying:

Coronavirus! Coronavirus!! Coronavirus!!!
Coronavirus! Coronavirus!! Coronavirus!!!
Coronavirus! Coronavirus!! Coronavirus!!!
Coronavirus! Coronavirus!! Coronavirus!!!

Say; have you heard about the Coronavirus?

This thing is like the grayscale
On Game of Thrones
Where’s John Brady when you need him?
To research our salvation in a dusty old tomb

And even the Mad King
Seems to finally get it
He can’t laugh and lie
His way out of this one

He’s no longer mocking all of us with:

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!! The sky is falling!!!
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!! The sky is falling!!!
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!! The sky is falling!!!
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!! The sky is falling!!!

Hey Mr. President: The sky is falling!

Dr. Edward O. Wilson tried to warn us humans
That as the apex species, we weren’t so special, because
All those little creepy crawlies at the bottom of the pyramid
Were looking up at us, and plotting our demise

And Now a Constructive Suggestion
Build the necessary facilities to house
the poor, the sick, the huddled masses
Wasn’t that the point of the Statue of Liberty?
After the plague, use them to house the CCC

Bring back the CCC!
Hasn’t this thing taught us the need for preparation?
Let the youth have an alternative to national service
That doesn’t require toting a gun or killing someone

With a standing peaceful army on our own soil
We won’t get caught with our pants down again
Those creepy crawleys aren’t going to give up, and the
New normal is to assume that pandemics are normal

3. Examining the Arc of a Lifetime

This thing is like a giant meteor
Heading straight at geezers
With preexisting conditions that most
Gave to themselves
Those with Type II diabetes (me)
And COPD (she)
We have never seen anything like this in our lifetimes
Or we would have paid closer attention to our health

That’s the worst of retirement
You have the time to ponder
The things you should have done
Not that it makes a bit of difference now

Coronavirus has nothing on retirement
Except the speed at which suffers will die
A sad truth, for death is death, but now
We may not get to choose our time

John C. Krieg is a retired landscape architect and land planner who formerly practiced in Arizona, California, and Nevada. He has written a college textbook entitled Desert Landscape Architecture (CRC Press, 1998). His work has appeared in A Gathering of the Tribes, Alternating Current, Blue Mountain Review, Clark Street Review, Conceit, Homestead Review, Line Rider Press, Lucky Jefferson, Oddball Magazine, Palm Springs Life, Pegasus, Pen and Pendulum, Saint Ann’s Review, Squawk Back, The Courtship of Winds, The Mindful Word, The Writing Disorder, and Wilderness House Literary Review.

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M Zaman
An Ode to COVID-19

Sly and stealthy, like your other brethren
you too have jumped from host to human;

(an animal, rogue with a wrathful ruse,
and pillager of habitats—all non-human).

A befitting response, a tiny strand of RNA;
a life; with a limitless capacity to mutate,

morph and live; gargantuan in gangly;
you let man know the limits of human

indigence; and of all those Anthropocene
Sins, a brilliant riposte to limitless insult.

This Earth is but a blue dot; precious and a
verdant ball, living and suspended; it is to be

shared; and thank you for reminding me that
you too, minuscule though, exist.

A poet and an accidental physician, M Zaman lives with his lovely wife on the Raquette River in a quaint college town on the foothills of the majestic Adirondacks, enchantingly irenic with rivulets full of toothsome water, and hills rarely trodden. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in High Shelf, Stardust Review, Black Horse Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Ulalume Lighthouse La Piccioletta Barca. He has recently published a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh into Bengla, his native language.

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August Luna
I’m Losing Who I Am

Losing who I am
Marooned on this island
Covered in blankets
Can’t go home yet

Days blend together
TV shows blend together
All my feelings blend together
Into feeling alone

Fear keeps us apart
The unchanging and unfamiliar
Wreaking havoc on me
Losing who I am

Homework sits
Unfinished and unnecessary
I have all the time in the world
To feel trapped
To feel helpless
To feel lazy and useless
I fear I’m losing who I am

This is August Luna‘s first publication.

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Raj Tawney
The Business End of COVID-19

My wife was laid off on Friday
Her bosses chickened out
Blame the virus, yeah, sure
She’s just a figure, a stat on a spreadsheet, a dollar in the bank
Who lets a valued employee go during a pandemic?
Cowards, that’s who
“It’s business, it’s not personal,” they say
Bullshit. It’s always personal
No remorse, no sympathy
Dumped her via Zoom
Couldn’t even look my wife in her digital eye
Maybe the distance helped them feel nothing,
But I feel my wife’s pain, her sadness, her loss, her fear
Our mortgage is due soon, who’s paying it?
If she gets sick, who’s covering it?
Blame the virus, yeah, sure
Blame each other, too easy
I’m not giving up on her, on us
We’ll get through this tunnel
and come out the other end
Brighter, stronger, wiser, less trustful
More hopeful, I hope
I hope, I hope, I hope

Raj Tawney is an American poet, essayist and journalist. Recent contributions include New York Magazine, The Boston Globe and O, the Oprah Magazine.

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