DISTANCE LEARNING

by Scot Ehrhardt

To my seniors in Literature and Composition class, Spring 2020

You aren’t alone in missing milestones.
I had a kickass poetry unit planned for April
that might have changed the way you existed
in the world--at least, the world before.

I’m not sure what you did learn. Maybe
that rites-of-passage bend and blear,
walking an evening labyrinth in
a poorly-made gown. Maybe
that Patience is too timid a virtue,
that you should have held prom early—
on the driveway of your first love,
something acoustic on Bluetooth—
and danced in the bursting light of forsythia.
You could have touched someone longer,
when people touched.

Bluetooth is the opposite of poetry.
You would have learned that in April.

I’m afraid to open the door again,
to a preserved mid-March classroom—
what papers I left, the withered
potted plants, the perfunctory chalk
message that was supposed to be read
by you, who have long since moved on
and maybe understood something new
this April, though it won’t be poetry,
not like it would have been from me.

Scot Ehrhardt writes and teaches in Baltimore, MD. His first collection of poetry One of Us Is Real was published in 2016. He has appeared in Little Patuxent Review, Tidal Basin Review, Switchgrass Review, and Lines + Stars. He supervises two journals for young writers: The Mill and Lexophilia.

SELF-DRIVING TESLA INVOLVED IN FATAL CRASH

by Don Hogle

Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist Composition: White on White (Oil on Canvas, 1918) The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 1935 Acquisition confirmed in 1999 by agreement with the Estate of Kazimir Malevich and made possible with funds from the Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by exchange).

“Neither autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor-trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied.” —TESLA Blog, June 30, 2016

There were no casualties this morning
when Bluetooth failed to connect
an iPod to the Onkyo receiver
that sends the French news
to speakers in my living room.

Nor did the Mac screen shatter
when a pop-up popped up
with the fatal words Cannot
get mail.

In the blue Pacific, rainbow fish
swim in and out of coral
encrusted bone somewhere
near where Amelia dropped
from the sky.

A crew of astronauts burst
once from their capsule like stars
in a meteor shower, glittering
briefly in their yellow-red descents
over Texas and Louisiana.

Madame Curie may have failed
to notice the fatigue in her bones,
but she saw a faint light glowing
from the tubes she carried
in her pockets.

And those at MoMA,
who might have missed
the cool white square tilted
on the warm white background
of a canvas painted by Malevich,
were just bemused by what they saw.

Don Hogle is a poet, blogger and brand and communications strategist living in Manhattan. Poems have appeared recently in Mud Season Review, Minetta Review, Blast Furnace, Shooter, Bethlehem Writers Roundtable and TheNewVerse.News among others.  He was a finalist in the Northern Colorado Writers’ 2015 Poetry Contest.