COVID-19 – Writers Resist

Gravity Ungrateful

By Mark Blickley

Yes, I am dressed in mourning.
Dark clothes for a dark time.
Yet I yearn to escape
pandemic imprisonment
with the germ of an idea
that will allow me to soar
above my confinement
in an airborne threat
against complacency and boredom
as I reach up to a blue heaven
that promises social distancing
on a cosmic scale.
But that old bitch gravity
bears down on me,
slapping me down
like a petulant child
crying out
for what she cannot have,
slammed back
to a blanketed earth
of red white and blue.

Mark Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center. His latest book is the text-based art collaboration with fine arts photographer Amy Bassin, Dream Streams.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash.

The everyday

By Ronna Magy

Here, another day, another morning,
another hour, another moment.
Mantle clock refusing to turn
even half round the dial.

She is, he is, they are, the country is,
waiting. For TV anchors, doctors, government officials to
discuss, divulge, to declare
in words, phrases, sentences,
in passages clearly anchored to the land,
stone posts rooted in the earth.
Waiting for words that will
free them, shake them loose from the
unending same: same walls, same doors,
same kitchen, same floors,
same tables, same light fixtures,
the same soundless air.

Hovering about, around, above words, the
numbers rise. Eighteen million
cases yesterday, eighteen million, two hundred thousand today.
Numbers of masks, ventilators, numbers of
black plastic bags.
By noon, the numbers
soar from the charts.
Red line crosses blue.
Red climbing upwards
when it’s supposed to
point down.

Air in the house never
seeming to move.
Dust on cup, saucer, spoon,
dust seeping through cracks.
Dusty soup ladle
arched in the sink.

This, one more morning,
afternoon, one more evening,
one more moment in unmoving space.
Each clock tick
echoing the second before.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, writer Ronna Magy calls Los Angeles home. In her poetry, Ronna combines roots in the rustbelt, community organizing, decades of teaching ESL, and a deeply held belief in social justice. Her work has appeared in: American Writers Review, Persimmon Tree, Nasty Women Poets, Sinister Wisdom, In the Questions, Glitterwolf, Southern Review, Musewrite, and Lady Business: A Celebration of Lesbian Poetry.

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash.

Sing the Songs of Our Youth

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

24 October 2020

Uncle Jack died this morning.

The stroke, the collapse, the surprise mass on his brain? Whichever or all, at least he went faster than Aunt Peggy and Mother. Not as fast as Father—the gift of a heart attack. The comparison? I don’t know, perhaps it’s a futile attempt to lend context to Jack’s death, to the loss of the last of his generation on our closest family branch, my siblings and mine, an attempt to accommodate one loss among many. So many, it’s easier to focus on only one, and it is one that changes us.

My cousins now join us in our adult orphanage—a disregarded subset of parentless offspring. We are left to follow six or seven decades of memories down lanes straight and twisty, dead-ended and endless. To quietly mourn and slowly, slowly recover.

In the meantime, “At least it’s not the COVID,” some will say.

This will enrage me, and not only because of the unnecessary article, but because COVID-19 persists and worsens while too many leaders fail us, abandoning us to the ravages of the virus. But I’m prepared, having practiced my rage for so long—on occasion with Uncle Jack—perfecting it with each onslaught of ignorance and hate and … I don’t know, sociopathy?

Before Uncle Jack lost the strength to place his large hands on either side of my head and lift me to wonderfully frightening heights, before he could no longer deliver his trademark jokes with aplomb, before he was unable to name the seated president, we would share disdain for the corruption of our democracy, revile the sinners and their sins. And when my rage was about to consume me, Jack would swoop me out of its reach with one of those jokes or grab a ticklish, tender knee and draw a giggling yelp instead of a bitter profanity.

Sometimes we would even gather up a friend of Jack’s, the wounded survivor of a Baltimore scandal, and calm ourselves on an early Sunday morning, beside a misted pond. As day broke, we’d fish for bluegills, fry the fillets with hushpuppies in a well-seasoned skillet, and tipsily toast the Fall of the U.S. Empire with Bloody Marys.

That was forty years ago. And that toast was a half-assed joke.

Just a few days ago, Jack didn’t know who I was, but he could still shuffle at least a few feet off to Buffalo, strum an occasional ukulele, and sing our family songs, the sometimes bawdy, sometimes silly songs that have bound us, that overcome schisms and sorrows, that entwine distinct generations and personalities and beliefs into a fun and fabulous choir.

Today, though, the loudest voices we hear are discordant.

Today, I’m thankful for the dementia of Uncle Jack’s last years. I’ve said the same of my parents: I’m grateful they didn’t live to see the corruption that now divides us, that drives people to the polls or away from them, that forces us to don masks or deny they are needed, that keeps us from family deathbeds or exposes family to potential death.

Today, Uncle Jack has died, and I wonder what else we might lose. I don’t know, but I think it’s time to sing the songs of our youth—the cheery songs, the ribald songs—and to hope.

Please vote with love, please encourage others to do the same,
K-B

Kit-Bacon Gressitt is a founding editor of Writers Resist and the publisher. Her website is KBGressitt.com.

Poster art by Holy Mole UK, available from amplifier.org.

Artist’s statement: “My 2 cents on the US election, and of course an ode to the amazing Robert Indiana, the creator of the iconic LOVE sculpture (a global symbol for hope in 1960s) and Obama’s ‘HOPE’ presidential campaign (2008). [Indiana] once said ‘I’d like to cover the world with hope,’ and, with sculptures popping up all over the world, he did just that.

“Sadly, Indiana died in 2018, but I think if he were here he would have felt his voice was needed more urgently than ever. My design uses ‘VOTE’ this time (as he did himself in 1976) and aims to encourage voting in the upcoming US election. I wanted the message to be vibrant, to sing with colour and positivity for the future. There is still hope, but we need to make very bold decisions regarding the environment. The US needs a leader that is more focused on global issues than their own twitter feed! US friends, if you are reading this please vote, it is so, so important!”

These Poems Don’t Come Out Right

By Bunkong Tuon

The virus breathes like fire over city streets
and farmland, across oceans and mountains,
over YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter.

The president suggests injecting the body
with disinfectant to kill it. Maybe
he could go first; it’s his idea after all.

I’ve become a hack, ranting as if the world
will heed my words and stop spreading
violence through fear, hate, and ignorance.

Mix misinformation with racism, greed, and ego,
and you get 2020, a reality show you didn’t know
you were a part of until it is too late. Oh,

These poems don’t come out right and
my poor wife is asleep, hands clutching
the crib where the baby was fussy all night.

I cut slices of cucumbers and strawberries,
spread apple wedges on a plate for my daughter.
Our beautiful baby is crying again.

I fetch my coffee and a baby bottle,
run up the stairs, cradle our newborn in my arms,
watching his desperate eyes look up at me for comfort.

But I have no words for him, and this ending
is not right, but I don’t know what is anymore.

Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian-American writer and critic. He is the author of Gruel and And So I Was Blessed (both published by NYQ Books), The Doctor Will Fix It (Shabda Press), and Dead Tongue (a chapbook with Joanna C. Valente, Yes Poetry). He teaches at Union College, in Schenectady, New York. He tweets @BunkongTuon.

Photo credit: m anmia via a Creative Commons license.

Welfare Check East of Downtown

By Christie Valentin-Bati

“It is 2020. Everything is canceled except for police terror.”
–Nick Estes

They said close down everything
non-essential: The coffee shop,
blue trimmed with a green porch,
white-potted flowers that hung down
from the awning,
closed – so I roasted my own coffee.
The outlet mall
with high-waisted jeans,
gold-plated, pearl earrings
I’d been saving up to buy
closed too. So I wore nothing
in my ears, dug deep into my closet
and cut my own shorts instead.
They told me to stay home. I stayed home.
I used Instacart. I worked remotely.
I bought surcharged surgical masks off Amazon
though I knew, it wouldn’t help much
to block the droplets should they come.
Still, I was young, white.
I washed my hands regularly,
soaping around the thumb,
between the fingers,
even around my wrists,
I scrubbed clean.
I sexted, watered the plants,
and when I tired, I turned on the TV,
watched the news do its count
of another thousand people dead,
which meant only 100,000
were left to die.
Every now and again
I would peak over the fence,
happy to see my neighborhood
silent and unmoving,
the cars parked, quiet, in the driveways.
If any noise ever did pass through,
a construction truck, police sirens,
I’d pull down my windows
to mute out the sound,
certain that the noise was headed
to another place. I never worried
about any strangers in uniforms
coming to knock on my door,
carrying with them
something more deadly than a virus.

Christie Valentin-Bati is a poet and photographer based in small-life suburbia Hollywood, Florida, and soon big city Chicago. She is a co-author of Existential Quandary, a book of haikus from the perspective of a chicken, and her poetry has been featured in Columbia Journal. More of her work can be found on Instagram @_christieos_, Twitter @christiee0_0 or her website christievalentinbati.com.

Photo credit: Alachua County via a Creative Commons license.

The Spectators

By D.A. Gray

We’d grown thin during the pandemic.

I don’t know when it began. Years ago, I think. When we began to look at neighbors with contempt, to walk head down into the house from the car, looking neither left nor right. Something broken in us and we would enter the house and lock all three locks behind us, and turn on Box—the friend who understood us.

We would post jokes about lost drivers on Robertson Road, the coworker who couldn’t seem to do anything right, Texans and their beer hands that kept them from reaching the turn signal, or the lady in her bunny slippers at the H-E-B.

It was funny then, right? We meant no harm.

Faces from our angle seemed forever stuck in a moment of worry, or maybe lostness.

When the pandemic hit we noticed more in the mirror—or less—the way we almost disappeared from the side was cause for slight alarm. We vowed to eat better, to exercise. Then we sat down with Box, who loved us as we were and flashed pictures of pets, of stories curated for us.

Anyway, there’s still this pandemic. But it’s been so long since you’ve taken in a game.

In the stands, we notice faces frozen, you might say with “pasted on smiles.” Or frowns. Or maybe screams. Who knows. Everyone is silent here.

We’ve forgotten how to enjoy a simple game.

But the game itself is good, right? Slow moving, sure. But we watch the strategy unfold. There are outfield shifts, signals from the sides, pitcher and catcher in their esoteric talk. We never noticed when we used to talk.

Now the action has us glued to our seats.

And the sky has become an orange haze.

Players run through the motions. The stop and start drama, the overthinking, the occasional sprint after a collision of hickory on cowhide. Someone yells “Yes” as the ball drops onto the green grass.

Here the orange sky gets brighter.

Back home, Box tuned to something more pleasant. I hope it’s just conspiracy talk.

My skin is feeling thin, papery, which has me a little unsettled. My chances of surviving a combustible world were not good before this development.

What was that? Another crack of the bat. Maybe. No one’s moving. Perhaps the crack of timber from a nearby hill.

We keep watching. No one’s speaking to each other anymore and the faces seem to carry a look of perpetual anxiety. I think of the time we could have spent talking but never did. We assumed those around us were nothing but cardboard cutouts of something we feared. Now I fear we’ve become that, while watching other things.

And outside this place an orange menace lumbers—I can’t ignore it anymore—slow and clumsy, but steady. Its fingers—it seems to be feeding—grabbing at everything, as if our silence were consent.

D.A. Gray is the author of Contested Terrain (2017). His poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Writers Resist, Comstock Review, Still: The Journal and Wrath-Bearing Tree among others. He holds Master’s degrees from The Sewanee School of Letters and Texas A&M-Central Texas. Gray now teaches, writes, and lives in Central Texas.

Photo credit: Eric Drost via a Creative Commons license.

Presidential Seal

By Jennifer Shneiderman

Slipping into Cadillac One
Gliding on lies and half-truths
Trump greets supporters
waving off warnings
and all that is humane.
He is the clear and present danger.

The SUV
a mobile panic room
used for political theatre
could be the Secret Service
Presidential seal of death.

The truth is a ghost
a shadow
an inconvenience
an artifact
dismissed out of hand.
Turn around and
White House portraits have been replaced
with funhouse mirrors.

Secret Service
doing their duty
following orders.
Only an enemy
would define them as expendable.
The devil is in their detail.

Before the fate is sealed
the future insular, fanatical
overrun by white supremacy
ruled by the stunningly irrational—
Vote like Jim Jones is standing over you
with a syringe.

Jennifer Shneiderman is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Indolent Book’s HIV Here and Now, The Rubbertop Review, Writers Resist, the Poetry in the Time of COVID-19, Vol 2, anthology, Variant Literature, Bright Flash Literary Review, Wingless Dreamer, Trouvaille Review, Montana Mouthful, the Daily Drunk, Sybil Journal, Unique Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, Terror House, Thirteen Myna Birds, Potato Soup Journal, Awakened Voices, GreenPrints, and The Perch. She was the recipient of an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Laura Riding Jackson poetry competition.

Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash.

Sonnet for the Woman in Walgreens

By Diane Elayne Dees

It’s been a week or two since our encounter,
yet your voice haunts me, and I see your face
in waking dreams. There, at the checkout counter,
you yelled and gestured as you made your case:
“It’s all a hoax!” you shouted, while the clerk
delivered a lecture on government regulations,
declaring—as she put aside her work—
that we are so much cleaner than other nations.
I wonder if you’re staying safe inside,
washing your hands, and canceling your cruise—
or are you spreading the virus far and wide,
and getting tips from experts at Fox News?
I think of you, your rage, your blind belief;
there’s no vaccine for that, and no relief.

Diane Elayne Dees has two poetry chapbooks, I Can’t Recall Exactly When I Died and Coronary Truth, forthcoming. Her microchap, Beach Days, can be downloaded from the Origami Poems Project website. Diane also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Visit her author site, Diane Elayne Dees, Poet and Writer-at-Large.

Photo by Adam Nieścioruk on Unsplash.

Americans are rushing around stocking up on toilet paper

By Marcy Rae Henry

In Himalayan India we used leaves

buckets of water and our hands

Best-selling tampons have applicators

because Americans are afraid to touch themselves

In Himalayan India we didn’t have tampons

We used rags and pads

but didn’t touch each other’s hands to say hello

When wiping with leaves or plants you have to know

which ones are poisonous and that’s different

from knowing the price of toilet paper at Sam’s v. Costco

They want to install outhouses in rural India

where people have only used the forest

Don’t women have enough problems on buses

without feeling vulnerable trapped in a shitbox at night

We learned to cut off tops of water bottles and pee in plastic

during an unknown night

With the tops we made spoons and flimsy guitar picks

At crowded train stations or bus stops food was sold

on plates of leaves that were tossed from windows

to degrade sooner than bones that are outlived by plastic

In Himalayan India we didn’t have many choices

for shampoo toothpaste or hair ties

We got whatever someone carried up the mountain

The States is mad about choice

about opening bars and closing borders

Some see the lack of a mask as an act of rebellion

The Great American Rush on Toilet Paper

A virus that cannot space out everyone

And we are the perfect hosts when we don’t want to be

Marcy Rae Henry is a Latina born and raised in Mexican-America/The Borderlands. She is a resister and an interdisciplinary artist with no social media accounts. Her writing and visual art have appeared in national and international publications and the former has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. Ms. M.R. Henry is working on a collection of poems and two novellas. She is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Fine Arts at Harold Washington College Chicago.

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.

A Colossal Crisis

By Shawn Aveningo-Sanders

~ after Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”

When brazen towers fell, we wept in disbelief—
our great nation attacked upon her own shore.
We obeyed our leaders who hailed, “Shop More!
That’s how we’ll heal.” And we found some relief
in the stuff we hoarded, albeit the feeling brief.
We shop-till-we-drop, as credit card bills soar
so high, we can’t afford our child’s mortarboard.
Delusional and desperate, we elected the wrong chief—
unfit to save us from an enemy we can’t see.
Mr. Whipple whispers, “Secret stash on Aisle 3.”
The huddled masses, yearning to be free
of their germ-laden asses, in need of more TP,
racing toward wipes and the last shopping cart,
forgetting sage advice to stay six feet apart.

Shawn Aveningo-Sanders is the author of What She Was Wearing, an inspirational book of poetry/prose that reveals her #metoo secret—from survival to empowerment. Shawn’s poetry has appeared globally in over 150 literary journals and anthologies. She’s a Pushcart nominee, Best of the Net nominee, co-founder of The Poetry Box press, and managing editor for The Poeming Pigeon. Shawn is a proud mother of three and shares the creative life with her husband in Portland, Oregon.

Photo by Erik Mclean 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.