Suzanne Edison
Coronavirus—Seattle 2020

Today I revisit Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson
of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp: the cadaver’s arm splayed open

for us, and seven ruffle-cuffed and curious male faces, who peer
inside the strata of muscle and tendon or towards the bulging

anatomy book open at the deceased’s foot. The doctor is lecturing
on the visible, the common to all. In the 17th century, witnessing

anatomy lessons was a social activity; once a year dissections
welcome to the public. Our current lessons involve pandemic:

invisible viral menace whose droplets, passed in coughs or sneezes,
lodge inside our cells, igniting a cascade of cytokines, an inflammatory rush

of the body’s attempts to flood and flush foreign invaders.
Our lungs, hearts, possibly perforated or constricted.

To slow infection we have restricted congregation.

We are not standing shoulder to shoulder examining
a widespread, natural normal; we are empty

streets, shuttered restaurants, our kids banned from schools
and playdates, our elderly and homeless neighbors like tissues

crammed in boxes or left in crumpled isolation. All of us forced
to see faces on screens. Will surfing and clicking in virtual space quell

racing nerves, keep us knitted together? Even so, some of us
are singing from apartment balconies to friends and family,

some of us are calling loved ones on the phone. We need
the violinist on the corner serenading the quarantined.

As we stare into, and stave off, the grip of abyss, the unknown settles
on us, present as the shadow Rembrandt painted on his cadaver’s face.

Editor’s Note: What Rough Beast welcomes poems in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The usual editorial guidelines apply—we don’t generally like poems that dwell overmuch on the shortcomings of the Trump administration—It simply does not usually make for good poetry. Poems may allude to the administration’s catastrophic negligence in responding to this pandemic, but we’d rather read about your personal experience of the pandemic than a critique of the administration’s response.

Suzanne Edison is the author of the chapbook The Body Lives Its Undoing: Exploring Autoimmune Disease Through Poetry and Visual Art (Benaroya Research Institute, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Naugatuck River Review, Scoundrel Time, Mom Egg Review, Persimmon Tree, JAMA, SWWIM, Intima, The Ekphrastic Review, and other journals. She lives in Seattle, and in fall 2019 was a writer in residence at Hedgebrook, a retreat for women writers on Whidbey Island, about thirty-five miles northwest of Seattle.

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Pamela Hobart Carter
Sown

after “Incipience,” by Adrienne Rich

To breathe, to sleep below a safe roof
while flame dances across forests
through nights when much is done
to stem all dreams

to parry the heat and fuel
that waits for ignition
molecules of ash
invisible

to numb the aching burn
of every limb in the land

Much will be sown.
Much will be sown. Compose yourself,
measure by measure, note by note,
study the flicker of feathers
in your backyard, count starlings
allowing visits of small yellow birds
before taking their tastes
of abundance presented
this garden
this feast

Editor’s Note: What Rough Beast welcomes poems in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The usual editorial guidelines apply—we don’t generally like poems that dwell overmuch on the shortcomings of the Trump administration—It simply does not usually make for good poetry. Poems may allude to the administration’s catastrophic negligence in responding to this pandemic, but we’d rather read about your personal experience of the pandemic than a critique of the administration’s response.

Pamela Hobart Carter is the author, with Arleen Williams, of twelve short books in easy English, published on the imprint they founded, No Talking Dogs. Carter’s poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Chaos, The Ekphrastic Review, Eunoia Review, Halcyon, The Pangolin Review, Red Eft Review, The Seattle Star, The Seattle Times, Tilde, and Washington Poetic Routes, among other journals and periodicals.

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Lynn McGee

Crush, 14

I talk to you with ear buds, gliding downhill
on my bike. A metal bridge sings and the Amtrak
passes beneath me, silver roofs flashing. We talk
past sailboats tethered in the Hudson, bare masts
lurching. We talk past the airline carrier, khaki
and steel museum looming at the pier, hull cinched
at the waterline. A family in white running shoes
breezes by on rented bikes. A helicopter hovers
and its blades send blasts of sound like giant sheets
snapping. Sometimes we pause, you and I, and silence
is the marrow in our conversation. I breathe it in,
content as that girl I knew in high school, the one
who would talk with her boyfriend, lights out,
bedroom door closed, boxy phone and springy cord
under the covers, and neither hung up as they
fell asleep in each other’s ears.

Crush, 15

My flight is delayed. Air masses glide across
the Midwest, grand as pachyderms, oblivious
to the havoc they cause. A jet descends,
its trajectory a slanted line toward the runway,
then the wheels hit tarmac, wings tipped
with ailerons rigid as a dancer’s hands pointing
up, her arms outstretched. How many times,
did my father try to teach me the physics of flight —
why there is lift, what holds up the tonnage
of an aircraft as it follows the earth’s curve.
His loneliness grounded him, and mine
grounds me—yet here I am listening
for the gate announcement, ready to rise.

Editor’s Note: What Rough Beast welcomes poems in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The usual editorial guidelines apply—we don’t generally like poems that dwell overmuch on the shortcomings of the Trump administration—It simply does not usually make for good poetry. Poems may allude to the administration’s catastrophic negligence in responding to this pandemic, but we’d rather read about your personal experience of the pandemic than a critique of the administration’s response.

Lynn McGee is the author of Tracks (Broadstone Books, 2019) and Sober Cooking (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), as well as two  award-winning poetry chapbooks, Heirloom Bulldog (Bright Hill Press, 2015) and Bonanza (Slapering Hol Press, 1996). Here poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Ontario Review, Phoebe, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sun Magazine, and The New Guard, among other journals, as well as in the anthology Stonewall’s Legacy (Local Gems Press, 2019), edited by Rusty Rose and Marc Rosen. With José Pelauz, McGee wrote the children’s book Starting Over in Sunset Park (Tilbury House Publishers, 2020). She serves on the advisory board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and co-curates the Lunar Walk Poetry Series with Gerry LaFemina and Madeleine Barnes. Online at lynnmcgee.com.

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Joyce Schmid
California Fires

Forests swell and shrink,
shape-shifting in the smoky breath
of flames holed up in hollow trees,
the sky in pain, inflamed; red sun, red moon,
weird-yellow sky.
No rain. Smoke blown away by wind,

the very wind that spreads the fire.
We’re given darkness to protect us,
only darkness,
like the shadow of an asteroid six miles wide
preparing dust and stones and trees
and cars and factories and condominiums
to burst in blizzards blazing over us,
erasing us.

You ask me why I sit inside,
door closed to everything I love,
as if computer screens
were windows on eternity and I
were trying to climb through.
The sun is almost down, you say, not gone,
Open out your arms, embrace the wind.
Embrace the wind?
The wind?
The fire-starter, devil wind?

AuthorsName

Joyce Schmid‘s recent work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Antioch Review, Worcester Review, Newtown Literary, San Antonio Review, and other journals and anthologies. She lives with her husband of over half a century in Palo Alto, California.

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Chad Parenteau
Resistance Tankas, Reel 12

Hilary Clinton Jesus Tanka

Hilary Clinton—
(No, good fucking God please no!)
Hilary Clinton—
(no, no, no, not this again!)
Hilary Clinton—(please stop!)

William Barr Jesus Tanka

William Bar Jesus,
when asked by [name redacted]
Are you [redacted]?
looked up to [redacted] and
answered [redacted] [redacted].

Rudy Giuliani Jesus Tanka, Take Four

Rudy G. Jesus
hasn’t been seen in a while.
His one miracle
is to walk between the drops
of America’s shitstorm.

Elizabeth Warren Jesus Tanka

Liz Warren Jesus
fell so short on followers,
she had to fill in
for both victim and savior
of her own stoning.

Bernie Sanders Jesus Tanka

When it’s all over,
Bernie Sanders Jesus needs
no nails for the cross.
His straw body hangs nicely,
comes back down, four years later.

Joe Biden Jesus Tanka

Joe Biden Jesus
(Wait, we’re really doing this?
Are you sure? Okay!)
Joe Biden Jesus is…here.
That’s all we’re sure of right now.

Chad Parenteau is the author of Patron Emeritus (FootHills Publishing, 2013). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tell-Tale Inklings, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, Molecule, and Résonance. He serves as associate editor of Oddball Magazine and hosts the venerable Stone Soup Poetry series in Boston. His second full-length collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, is forthcoming.

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Michael H. Levin
Troy

We could imagine nothing pleasanter than to spend all of our lives digging for relics of the past.
—Heinrich Schliemann

When they crashed through the palace
the iron chests were empty.
It was all fatal illusion,
words, only words – the small
bronze-age fortress far from Mycenae
grown huge through tales told;
betrayal, greed, prideful ambition
enlarged by rhetoric,
tall gods and goddesses
gliding disguised through battle
deflecting spears, guiding them,
shedding bright ichor for
chosen-up sides. Plunder
soon scattered in quarrels
and blood-soaked revenge.

Where are the phoenix-faced breastplate
the greaves clasped with silver
those thickets of ash shafts
the horsetail-plumed helmet
that Hector once wore?
Where the thousand black ships,
the throngs of wandering dead?

What floats in our air
from that long, troubled decade –
plague, rage, endless siege –
are scenes set in mental stained glass:
The lithe joyful daughter, lured
by promise of marriage, limp
on an altar in Aulis so her father
might sail. An aged king, fifty sons
shades or soon to be, come cloaked
alone to seek his heir’s
mangled body for burial.
Achilles and Patroclus
coolly caressing
each other’s doomed flesh.

Perhaps that’s the moral:
love, just love, for all its fraught twists
and sad endings, is the sole
godlike strand of us—transcendent
in passion or comradeship
conserving what honor
flawed selves may possess.

Michael H. Levin is the author of the poetry collections Falcons (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Man Overboard (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Watered Colors (Poetica Publishing, 2014). His work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Adirondack Review, and Crosswinds, among other journals and anthologies. Levin works as an environmental lawyer and solar energy developer, and lives in Washington DC. Online at michaellevinpoetry.com and twopianosplayingforlife.org.

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Michael S. Glaser
An Odyssey

Addicted as I am to the clamoring falsettos
of siren songs,

I remain grateful for the company
of those who see me as I am,

who bind me to the mast of my better self
that I might honor the journey of my heart

toward a legacy I am still trying to understand
so that I might claim my own small part.

Michael S. Glaser is the author of seven poetry collections and the editor of three anthologies. With Kevin Young, he co-edited The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 (BOA Editions, 2012). Glaser is a professor emeritus at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where he received the Dodge Endowed Award for Excellence in Teaching. He served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2004 through 2009. More at michaelsglaser.com.

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Sam Avrett
Springtime in Auburn

Don’t wonder at us old men on a farm
As we load wood then shovel out the truck
Our truck has rust, the wood is ash
Cut from the land before the cold came.

It’s half past five still dark on the farm
First cows get fed then barn gets swept
Then town for supplies then apples pruned
Before the orchard awakes and sap starts to run.

Lights have come on at the town grange
Tonight we join for Black history month
We remember Tubman and the railroad here
Here we remain a country of decency.

All us old men in a February land
We load our stoves against the cold
We run our trucks through the work of time
We join with our neighbors no matter the weather.

Don’t wonder at us old men on a farm
It is late winter and the work will get done.

Sam Avrett lives in a rural county in upstate New York, with dogs, husband, and a startling amount of canned and preserved food stocked away for the winter.

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Rose Willow
Dwindling

aromas of cinnamon and nutmeg
mixed with sour milk and mold
linger in mother earth’s pantry
while bedroom life slows

she shuffles around on her axis
takes the last Kleenex, or perhaps
a Scotties, from the last tree
dabs at a tear near her dimple
high on her cheek

lowers onto a rotting wooden bench
and from a sliver of vision
watches the plastic tide roll in

Rose Willow lives and writes near the Salish Sea on the west coast of Canada. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies and literary magazines including Ascent Aspirations, Portal, Spring, SoftCartel, The Society, Horticulture, Saskatchewan History Magazine, and Incline. Willow lives on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia.

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