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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Patricia Nellene Deal
Mid-March 2020 Revision

Last week we called it the coronacation.
Memory’s distancing in magnitude
of need not known before the breadth
of a collective sigh could exhale. Disbelief
mute in living rooms watching new cases
climb charts daily like ladder rungs leading
to anxiety. Death falls from the ladders
held standing by hospital workers forced
to make protective gear with two sided tape
In hospital conference rooms across America.

Patricia Nellene Deal is a writer in McLean, Va. Her current writing focuses on the exploration and challenges to the ideas of a single story, memory, and the resilience of the female spirit. Here poems appeared in the Clerestory Press Quarterly, a journal formerly published by the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta.

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Timothy Kelly
More of the Same

A year ago—The alarm bells go off on the cardiac monitor
I run my hands under the hand sanitizer
Scrub for 20 seconds
To keep from bringing harm to others
The monitor broadcasts its anxieties
To the entire Emergency Department
The bedridden woman, with her husband by her side
Worried about its tone, the smell of fear on the horizon
My reply, as always, “When I look concerned
Is when you need to be worried”
As I gesture to my rock hard face, the shadow hiding
The year of practice to remain motionless

Today the winds gust in and out of your lungs
Asking me if you are going to get sick
During our therapy session
If your Omma and Oppa will be safe
From the Germ. The silent invaders
Destroying the family, you finally have settled into
“Does this face look worried to you?”
The same rock face, weathered slightly from the storms
A cough comes from the other rooms
And the bells go off once again

Timothy Kelly‘s poems are forthcoming in The Emerson Review, The Weekly Write and an anthology from Riza Press. An introvert trained to appear extroverted, Kelly is a self-described healing artist, social worker and volunteer firefighter (emergency medical technician).

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Cassie Doubleday
The Kleenex Is a Landmine

The kleenex on the street has become a landmine: my surrender is social distance,
innocence lost among thy neighbor, we are all suspects in Virusland.
My sanity is forgotten to sanitation
and latex gloves,
and cotton masks.
Don’t look at me.
The Free World was coughed on, Under His Eye the documents read in red,
sneezing twice on the revolutions, lungs collapsed; we’re going to need Joan of Arc’s soap.
Thoughts and prayers are finally not an answer. The microscope has become
the cross
and the lab
a church.
Grant us the serenity to escape the hands we’ve held. Science, Thy Will Be Done.
The media machine is lovin’ it, they’ve supersized fear. Panic is a profitable stock,
rising chaos and downing supplies. “It’s crazy, it’s a zoo.” We need an Oprah giveaway:
toilet paper for you!
And you!
And you!
I’m rectangle living, a hostage to my home, suggested to find connection on my screen,
the same screen they said confined me. Show me your corona dance. What are you wearing?
Sing it for me from your balcony, “Don’t act like you forgot…
I call the
shots,
shots,
shots.”
There’s a kleenex laying on the floor in the hall of my apartment, it guards my freedom.
A potential death sentence, a tissue is now my enemy: this is a viral war,
and you do not have enough aloe vera to soothe my mental mucus. This soap will cut you.
Welcome to the Sick Free World, please stand two meters away from me.

Cassie Doubleday is a Canadian poet, writer, and journalist currently living in France. She has a graduate diploma in journalism from Concordia University. Her work has appeared in Subversions Magazine, The Canadian University Press, Cult MTL, ForgetTheBox.net, The Link, and others.

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Libby Foster
Love in the Time of Coronavirus

It appears the kids are safe to this
Indecisive on life
Invest in something disaster proof
Coming back home to cozy ruins
Has your heart stopped fluttering
for the things you felt in freedom
See me for the first time
since graduation
scream
DO I NEED TO REMIND YOU
OF THE FINITE NATURE OF LIFE
from six feet away
Feeling a little feverish
The small of my back
curves
as you step closer
Know I’m not your patient zero
We fight over test kits
to prove we’re both positive
Can’t use strangers as defense mechanisms
in this time of social distancing
Fantasies of forced quarantine
Forgot how time stops between four walls
We dry cough in the darkness
Holding each other through cold sweats
Wake up with sore throats
Is this the kind of sickness
We can’t forget about in the morning
Severe cases are starting to appear in the youth
Once every hundred years
a pandemic forces us to feel something

Libby Foster is a freshman at the University of Alabama studying English on a National Merit Scholarship. Her poems are forthcoming in The Blount Truth, a University of Alabama literary journal.

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Harper Ellen Houston
Protection

I was getting a shot in my ass
when they asked me if I had travelled
recently. The gloom lifted
from a lukewarm winter
and spring is gonorrhea yellow,
pollen covering cars
and filling gutters. A yellow nothing
like the sun, like my asshole
is like a dead eye in the dark
of A Tell-Tale Heart
and I want to bury an older man.
While everyone coughed and sneezed,
I was sent home because my throat
was slimed with words I couldn’t say
until now: I was raped…
You said it before I could.
You are gentle, the way you say
we gotta be good Christian lovers
keeping the sheets between us,
waiting for the blessing
of The Health Dept.
You are patient, the way you kiss
every single slice of me.
Just as the marks on my arms
fade from fresh pink,
just as I was getting better,
our moment turned
into an apocalypse. I sit,
stuck at home smoking
away the terror and making myself
eat before throwing away
the last groceries I’ll get for a while.
All I think about is you,
just a county away, and I can’t help
taking it personally
when executive orders replaced
our simple Christian sheets.

Harper Ellen Houston has lived in North Carolina most of her life. This is her first published poem, but she has a small lovechild collection she is shopping around. When Houston is not writing, she pays for cat food as a chef. She is a 33 year-old trans woman whose raw experience cracks her voice.

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Gad Kaynar-Kissinger
Shells

Now that everything closed down,
That vain display windows
Withdraw inward and whisper
Like traitors:
You could have dispensed with us long ago.
Now that stages expose their misshapen
Backs, that tablecloths are pulled off
Tables in luxury restaurants
Like a seductive brassiere from the prosthetic
Silicon breasts of a first-class stripper,
Now that the belly is sucked in to silence
The bellows of the stalled ox,
Now that credit cards are converted to
Fortunetellers’ cards calculating
Galactic Cataclysms,
And all the accountants
Consider how much more they can subtract
From their heavy
Clients so that they may
Elevate in the refracted light
Ascend upon the shaky rectitude
Of the spirit toward
The shells.
Toward themselves.

—Translated by Natalie Feinstein

Gad Kaynar-Kissinger is the author of the Hebrew language poetry collection Selfi (Safra Publishing, 2018), among many other books of poetry and prose. His poems in English translation have recently appeared in Atlas and Alice, Pidgeonholes, The Bombay Review, and Anomaly. A stage, TV and film actor, Kaynar-Kissinger has translated some 70 plays into Hebrew from English, German, Norwegian and Swedish. He was awarded the Norwegian Order of Merit for his translations of Henrik Ibsen’s works into Hebrew. Until his retirement, Kaynar-Kissinger was a professor of theater studies at Tel Aviv University. 

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