coronavirus – Writers Resist

Pandemic

By Summer Awad

what does empire look like
in slow motion

what of nine-to-fives
stripped of their ticking clocks

shelves – aching
from stock and restock –
baring us their bones?

–

what do you make of
shuttered cafes

laptops and coffees
on the couch –
recalibrated reality

the comfortable uncomfortable
but immune – really –
to crisis?

–

how do you inoculate
a sick society

tell the boss to care
for his worker

the landlord to relieve
his tenant

the politician to protect
her people?

how do you jolt
men awake,

illumine the stepping
stones so precariously
placed?

–

what does it mean to
be without

insurance, yes
savings, yes
without the privilege
of cozy quarantine,
true

but isn’t it without as in
without the gates – as in
outside – as in without
the demarcations of
worthiness

isn’t it who we swallow
and who we cough up
and spit out?

–

what do borders look like
drawn around each other –
around ourselves

aren’t we only as good as
what’s inside our circle –
as the company
we’ve chosen to keep

and isn’t it keep as in
provide for the sustenance of –
as in guard and protect – as in
honor and fulfill – as in
keep the Sabbath?

–

what does this silence
conjure for us

what awakenings lie in wait

what meaning can we glean
from this indefinite and holy
Saturday?

Summer Awad is a poet and playwright from Knoxville, Tennessee. Summer’s poetry has appeared in Little Rose Magazine and Exposition Review. Her play, WALLS: A Play for Palestine, was produced at the 2016 New York International Fringe Festival. Summer is an award-winning, local spoken-word poet. Her work focuses on her Appalachian and Palestinian heritages, as well as feminism and politics.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

Diet Margarita

By Terry Sanville

Douglas climbed the outside stairs two at a time to his second-floor apartment over Tuck’s Liquor. He keyed the front door and slipped inside. Fugem dropped onto the carpet from her window perch and yowled, then purred when he filled her bowl with kibble.

Outside, the noise died back, only a few screams or cracks of small arms fire, but the grenade blasts continued. They seemed to come from beyond the cemetery near Linden Avenue.

“How’s my kitty?” Douglas cooed and scratched the calico behind the ears. The cat arched her back until what sounded like an RPG landed somewhere close. Fugem fled to the bedroom and hid under a dresser full of clothes and ammunition.

Douglas smiled, dumped his knapsack onto the sofa, and went into the kitchen. From a drawer he removed a slender knife, grabbed two limes, a lemon, and a small orange from the fridge and laid them on the cutting board. He’d spent half his salary already, mostly on booze, ammo and cat food.

He poured the freshly squeezed citrus juice into a tall glass, added a very healthy shot of cheap tequila, three packets of artificial sweetener, and topped the drink off with soda water and ice. He stirred the concoction with his finger and raised the glass to his lips, but his nose caught the faintest whiff of tear gas. He knew that smell from the troubles the previous year, when a crowd of embittered seniors tried taking over a Walmart during the COVID-42 scare.

He set his drink down and dashed across the room to the window that looked onto the street. He’d left it partway open to allow air for Fugem. Pulling it shut, he reached into a cabinet, grabbed a roll of duct tape, and sealed the space under its sash, then drew the curtains back.

East Flatbush spread out before him. From over the cemetery a white cloud drifted toward his apartment. He moved to the hall closet, grabbed his Vietnam-era gasmask and retrieved his margarita. Lowering himself onto the sofa, he found the remote and turned on CNN. A bearded commentator pointed to a map that showed territory occupied by the Geezer Liberation Army (GLA) and the inroads they’d made throughout New York City, with Flatbush being one of several hot spots. The harried newsman stared into the camera holding a microphone that looked like a president-sized dildo.

“This just in. Factions of the GLA have ransacked a New York National Guard Armory. Cases of AR-15s, RPGs, ammunition, and other explosive materials were taken.”

Douglas sniffed the air then took another gulp of his diet margarita, the tart liquid clearing his mouth and throat of any nasty germs. He changed channels until a soccer game between Botswana and Brazil filled the screen. The teams played to an empty stadium. He sipped his drink and decided to phone Sharon to have her come over to help him with his calculus homework.

“Hey Shar, whatcha doin?”

“Just got home from campus. Don’t know why I go there anymore.”

“Yeah, me either.”

“It got nasty on the subway. Half the seniors were packin heat.”

“Hey, they’ll be gone soon enough.”

“Yeah, including my Grandmother, you idiot. I love that old gal.”

“Whatever.”

“Have you been drinkin already?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry, I’ve saved some for you.”

“Can’t come over tonight. Streets are too weird, could get picked off.”

“Want me to come to your place?”

“No, stay put. We’ll see what it’s like tomorrow.”

“But that’s when my calculus assignment is due.”

“Ah, and I thought you cared about me.”

The signal died and Douglas groaned. He phoned Sharon back, but she didn’t pick up or respond to his texts or emails. He polished off his margarita and fixed another. The soccer game bored him so he returned to the 24/7 news channel, where the commentator droned on with old material.

“The violence started when the federal government announced it would no long support efforts to treat or eradicate the coronaviruses. According to Vice President Puntz, ‘The best way to protect Americans is to let the virus run its course and allow the populace to develop herd immunity.’ This policy has drawn fierce reactions from seniors and their advocacy groups since only relatively young and healthy people can achieve herd immunity. The violence increased after the president tweeted that the high cost of Medicare required cuts to—”

Douglas turned off the TV and slouched in his seat. He wondered how the GLA had organized so quickly. Maybe those longhaired Vietnam vets finally had enough and decided to stick it to the man. His own grandparents supported the president no matter what the idiot did.

A grenade blast sounded close, near the police station or maybe CVS Drug, and the pop-pop-pop of small arms fire forced Douglas out of his seat. He staggered into the kitchen, fixed another diet margarita, and headed to his bedroom. From a bottom drawer he retrieved his Glock and several full ammo magazines.

He edged toward his front window and stole a glance outside. A ragtag squad of armed men and women, some of them in wheelchairs, cut an erratic path down the avenue, firing at houses, businesses, and especially at anything publicly owned. They ransacked Tuck’s Liquor Store below him and continued to move on.

Douglas crept to the door and slipped onto the outside landing. His Glock raised, he braced an arm against the railing, and fired, emptying the magazine, then another, and another. The street went quiet.

Breathing hard, Douglas smiled and ducked inside, returning to his couch and his margarita. He collected his laptop, to see what other news services were reporting. Lifting his glass to his lips he noticed a red laser dot in the center of his chest. Where the hell did they get sniper–

Fugem scooted from underneath the dresser and trotted to Douglas’s lifeless body. She lapped at the tart liquid splashed across the coffee table. She’d have something other than kibble to eat for days to come.

Terry Sanville lives in San Luis Obispo, California, with his artist-poet wife (his in-house editor) and two plump cats (his in-house critics). He writes full time, producing short stories, essays, poems, and novels. His short stories have been accepted more than 370 times by commercial and academic journals, magazines, and anthologies, including, The Potomac Review, The Bryant Literary Review, and Shenandoah. He was nominated twice for Pushcart Prizes and once for inclusion in Best of the Net anthology. His stories have been listed among “The Most Popular Contemporary Fiction of 2017” by the Saturday Evening Post. Terry is a retired urban planner and an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist—he once played with a symphony orchestra backing up jazz legend George Shearing.

Photo by Erika on Unsplash.

Notes from an Epicenter

By John Linstrom

Sixteen Oaks Grove, Queens, NY

Sixteen oaks in two rows planted
down an island in the street:

school is closed, kids transplanted,
benches here are empty, clean and neat.

Auto shops still rollicking with laughter,
a boy walks by, dribbles his ball alone.

A bird keeps trilling, and will after;
the traffic, steady still, has slowed.

Sixteen oaks in two rows standing—
walkers pause, and then they quickly go.

John Linstrom’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in North American Review, The New Criterion, Atlanta Review, Vallum, and Cold Mountain Review. His nonfiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Antioch Review and Newfound. He is series editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press, making available the works of Progressive-Era environmental philosopher L. H. Bailey. He coedited The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener’s Companion: Essential Writings (Comstock-Cornell UP, 2019), and he prepared the centennial edition of Bailey’s ecospheric manifesto The Holy Earth (Counterpoint, 2015), featuring a new foreword by Wendell Berry. He currently lives with his wife and their joyful window garden in Queens, NY, where he is a doctoral candidate in English and American Literature at New York University. He also holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash.

Dispatch from the Holding Tank

By Nancy Dunlop

It is my first day in— what are they calling it? Self-quarantine? Social distancing? Shelter-in-place? I suppose, for me, it’s isolation.

But unlike many others my age, I’ve been in isolation for almost a decade, due to a disability. Today is really no different than any other day for me. Except that I sense other people are also in isolation. So, in some bizarre way I have company.

But when this virus is controlled, when “the curve flattens,” those who are newly self-isolating, and fortunate enough not to get infected, might return to a busy world. A world where people interact. Are productive. Are externally defined.

Another difference between me, an old hand at this isolation thing, and those who are brand, spanking new at it is that I’ve had a long time to deal with introspection. To look inside myself for answers. I had to re-define myself, by myself, from within. But I’m not particularly good at this. I am not good at loss: no more external validation or respect or job title or credentials or any sort of official auspices; no podium, microphone, cubicle, corner office, daily commutes, or jostling for a subway seat to distract me from any need to get quiet and go within.

If you saw my immediate surroundings, you might say, “How perfect for a writer!” The knotty pine cupboards and thick stone fireplace. Those birds racketing out the window. What the sun does to the afghans my grandmother crocheted for me, draped on the back of the love seat. If you could see what I see from my desk. My framed diploma. The photo of Stephen and me at the very moment we were pronounced husband and wife. My two gentle cats, Piper and Chloe. All the things that can bring comfort. Such a perfect retreat for a writer. A writer needs solitude, after all.

But not isolation.

It has taken almost a decade of being by myself to come to terms with being by myself. With my holding tank. So, to the young and healthy I say, “Welcome to the holding tank.”

I am following the news, social media, the stock market, the hoarding-of-toilet-paper and guns. I am following reports of people denying any problem or defying any precautions. And I get it. I know how difficult it is to go from 100 mph to zero. What it is like to hit a wall. To be told that you need to stop everything. That you’re not really essential. Oh, and by the way, nothing will ever be the same.

In the U.S., we’re told that we are a strong people. That we are the strongest people on Earth. We celebrate robustness. Vigor. Movement. Staying busy. Underneath all of that, though? I suspect fear. And anger. And a wicked need to blame. Or to scapegoat. But not a whole lot of anything more subtle or gradated. Like patience. Or acceptance. Or empathy. Not right away. Maybe not ever. Such things take work. Work that doesn’t necessarily look busy.

In addition to being strong, we are said to be ruggedly individualistic. We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, gosh darn it, and are told to just go for it. Grab that brass ring. We are blasted with seemingly countless opportunities to be on the go.

I’ve noticed this all over social media, a well-meaning impulse to provide ways to stay exactly the way you were before you were isolated. How to work from home. Set up workstations. Put up with your family. Home-school. Learn to draw. Or knit. How to cultivate new interests, immediately. In general, how to stay cheerfully in the world when you are anything but. How to remain unchanging and robust in the midst of a situation demanding change and acknowledging we are not robust.

So, yes, I get it. I understand the sudden burgeoning of tricks and techniques and lists for how to do everything just as before. To do anything but deal with what comes with actual isolation. Like the opportunity—the actual human need—to feel vulnerable. To be soft. Or receptive. Or quiet. To practice not fearing fear. To be kind, despite.

Nancy Dunlop is a poet and essayist, who resides in Upstate New York. She received her Ph.D. at UAlbany, SUNY, specializing in Creative Writing and Poetics. She also taught at UAlbany for 20 years. Most recently, she has been curator of Wren, an international online forum for women in the arts. A finalist in the AWP Intro Journal Awards, she has been published in a number of print and digital journals, including Swank, Truck, The Little Magazine, Writing on the Edge, 13^th Moon, Greenkill BroadSheet, and Writers Resist: The Anthology, 2018. Her work has also been heard on NPR.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

Heretic Hymn from the Pandemic

By D.A. Gray

One morning the cats who once
Crept up to our doors – stopped.
For a time the bird’s voices grew louder
Then they, too, disappeared.

We prayed on command. We were sure
The symbols would save us.
Leaving the church we made stops
At every store that promised
A cure – the backup spells of old
Superstition – just to be sure.

A man in our town has been chosen
To head the response task force.
Each day he offers a spot of wisdom.
‘The worst you can do,’ he says,
‘is panic.’ He bows before the camera.
His hair is bright white
Like a horseman from an old tale.

Most of us simply carried on.

When the least of these grew ill
We sang solemn hymns
This time to our neighbors, and the dead
We had never met. We were begging
Forgiveness for averting our eyes, away
From them and toward the sky.

I saw my parents begin to shrink, still thinking
Tragedy could be beaten with piety.
The louder they prayed the smaller
They grew. One day my father’s
Eyes jolted open. He was small enough now
He could see it coming.

Keep calm. Be civil. After the funeral we pulled
Out the box of aphorisms
Which was always here waiting our return
In case of emergency.

If we listen we can hear the sounds of hooves,
Really the sounds of breath rasping,
The remaining beastly sounds, bringing the end
Of the tale galloping closer
Like any metaphor – if you believe it too much.

D.A. Gray’s poetry collection, Contested Terrain, was recently released by FutureCycle Press. His previous collection, Overwatch, was published by Grey Sparrow Press in 2011. His work has appeared in The Sewanee Review, Appalachian Heritage, The Good Men Project, Writers Resist, and Literature and the Arts, among many other journals. Gray holds an MFA from The Sewanee School of Letters and an MS from Texas A&M-Central Texas. Retired soldier and veteran, the author writes and lives in Central Texas.

“Four Horsemen” by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1860.

A Modern Fable

By David Laks

We’re all going to die. It’s just a question of when. That is my job—to figure out when you will die. Well, not you specifically, but you as a representative of you. The digital model of you. I am a data analyst at John Adams Life Insurance Company and my job is to program big databases to determine the life expectancy of people. What we like to call in the biz, the actuarial tables. John Adams was a pretty stogy old fashioned workplace when I first got there. We were still expected to wear a jacket and tie to work every day, sit down in our cramped cubicles and click and clack away at our keyboards extracting whatever data we could find from the U.S. Census. My claim to fame was to modernize the whole approach and bring John Adams into the 21st century. Here’s what I did.

One day, sitting at home in my Back-Bay condo, kicking back with a cold brew from the corner Starbucks, I was hacking into the Facebook database. Hey, some people watch Seinfeld reruns, I like to hack sinister social media giants for fun—don’t judge me. I was trying to see if I could search on vaping posts, and then correlate that to vaping shops in the area. That part was easy. It was a bit harder to burrow into the area hospital databases to see if we could find an increase in admissions for respiratory illnesses. Hard but not impossible. Now don’t get your privacy knickers all in a bunch. I was not looking at individual names; this was a big-data exercise. The Feds will take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to determine what I found out in my one elicit nocturnal journey: The rate of lung disease from vaping is the same as smoking cigarettes, and you can expect the same reduction in life expectancy. The next day, I showed my boss the data and told him that we need to change the insurance policy application to include vaping alongside smoking tobacco.

Let’s do the math—I love those four words—let’s do the math. It’s kind of like God saying, “Let there be light.” The world is in order, harmony. No messy indecisions, relationships, indeterminate feelings. Math is deterministic; it has structure, meaning, answers. I went through the numbers and showed that by changing our insurance policy to treat vaping like tobacco we would save $3.7B over 20 years. My career ascended. Literally. I was given an office on the 38th floor and asked to put together a crack team of software engineers that would drill down into every aspect of human behavior and genetics to quantify its impact on life expectancy. Our floor was like a tech start-up. Bring your dog to work. Free meals, beer and kombucha in the fridge. We revolutionized the insurance business. Customers filled out an application and our algorithms went through their social media footprint in an instant and calculated an insurance policy that was customized for each of them. Legal? Hmm, maybe. Read the T&Cs.

It was January 30, 2020 when I was taking an Uber from my new luxury condo at the Wharf and I read about the corona virus disease. The warnings were muted, with numbers coming out of China that had a 2% death rate. I felt a stir in my stomach but ignored it as my focus at the time was on correlating the racial changes due to Trump’s immigration policies and how that might impact our numbers. Racial profiling—that’s kinda what we do.

On February 15, I was reading that the number of virus cases was up to 67K. Now it caught my full attention. I decided to do a hack of the Wuhan, China, hospitals to see what numbers I could find. Holy shit. The death rate was not 2%, it was 50%. I did some mathematical simulations—this was a fucking disaster for us. I mean the deaths were disturbing and all, but the number of life insurance policies that would have to be paid due to the virus was staggering. I had to talk to my boss right away.

“You can go in now Mr. Little,” said Ms. Penny the admin for my boss Mr. Duck.

“Little, what can I do for you? You look kind of pale yellow. Are you OK?”

“Well, sir, I decided to do some investigation of this coronavirus, and I don’t know how to say this other than just come out and let you know that John Adams will be bankrupt by the end of the year.”

Mr. Duck staggered across his office and said, “Let’s get your whole staff to work on the numbers and see if they get the same numbers you do.”

So, I got the team all working on various simulations and each of them came to the same conclusion, that John Adams would cease to exist by the end of the year.

One of them said, “What are we to do?”

Another said, “If these windows could open, I would jump out.”

A third added, “My goose is cooked.”

And finally, I said, “The chickens have come home to roost. We have no choice but to let our CEO know.”

We all marched up to Ms. Fox’s office and demanded to see her immediately. She listened intently and asked if we had told anyone else? We said no, and then she said, “I want each and everyone of you to never speak of this again. If I find out that you have shared this crazy theory with anyone, I will fire you on the spot. Is that understood?”

• • •

Jan 18, 2021. Boston Globe

The stunning demise of one of Boston’s financial pillars, John Adams Insurance Company, was further complicated by the indictment of its longtime CEO, Loxanne Fox, derisively known as Foxy Loxy. It appears she knew of the negative financial impact the coronavirus was going to have on the company and secretly sold shares in a clear violation of insider trading law. It has been rumored that Fox left the country for a villa on a remote Pacific island. A former company employee said off the record, “I told her it was like the sky was falling. I guess she did listen to me after all.”

David Laks was an engineer and business leader during his 40-year career in high-tech electronics. He now is not.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash.

Six Feet Is All We Need

By Robert Knox

Generally speaking, I’m pretty good
at keeping my distance
In fact, for days on end I’m practically
sheltering in place,
possibly even self-quarantining,
though I’m not sure where one of these nonce phrases
leaves off, and the other begins.

I did, however, break solitude to
stroll with my bestie
to the post office, where she may well have
violated her parole,
by engaging with a postal clerk
over required postage for an early draft
of our tax returns,
seeing that our customary live inquisition
was deferred
for all the appropriate public health protocols

And then, totally on my moral dime
for which I assume complete civic responsibility
we stopped at the nearly closed coffee shop,
all its tables lying sidewise against the wall,
where, in all probability,
I most infringed upon the magic circle,
pointing a blue surgically-gloved finger
at the blueberry scone
for which I felt a pounding need

transgressing that six-foot safety zone,
as if, after all these years,
once more
leaving room for the Holy Ghost
on the dance floor whose like I fear
never to know again.
to fox-trot with the pastry of my choice,
having discovered
by the bane, and boon, of enforced separation
from my fellow creatures,
that all we need in life is six feet
of safe and clean and healthy air

and at its end, those six feet under.

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, and Boston Globe correspondent. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal, Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, New Verse News, Unlikely Stories, and others. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty, published in 2017, was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. He was recently named the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.

Photo by Scott Nothwehr on Unsplash.

Grace in the Time of the Virus

By Melanie Bell

Take this time
For yourself.
Everyone around you
Is doing the same,
Snatching the last eggs from air.
You start, you care
A little too much,
Don’t finish the chapter
You intended to write.
Everybody’s chapters
Are unfinished, now,
Some cut off mid-sentence,
The foot suspended midair,
The period still to come.

You are alive.
Remember, every breath,
Hold in the droplets
Lest they infect.
Act as if you are the virus.
It lives inside all of us now,
Eating our cereal, oatmeal,
That bread we were lucky to get.
So does grace.
Remember, it whispers,
Not to touch your face.
This is how best to avoid
A shelter in place.

Grace puppets your body
And motivates your limbs.
Grace closes restaurants and gyms.
Grace in the faces of loved ones on the screen,
Of tweets reaching out,
All those hearts behind the news, news, news,
All those people dancing in their kitchen
And smiling at you.

Melanie Bell holds an MA in Creative Writing from Concordia University and has written for various publications including Autostraddle, Cicada, The Fiddlehead, Every Day Fiction, and CV2. She’s the co-author of a nonfiction book, The Modern Enneagram (Althea Press, 2017). You can visit her website at InspireEnvisioning.com.

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash.

Writers Resist: The Viral Resistance Issue