GRAB-'EM-BY-THE-PUSSY ℞: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

by Steven Shankman

The former guy and a detail of “Oedipus and the Sphinx” by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, part of the collection at the Louvre in Paris. (Trump photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images; “Oedipus” image by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images via The Los Angeles Times) 

King Oedipus was certain he alone

Could fix it. When he heard his Thebans groan,

Then die en masse, he offered his expert

Advice. Blame Creon, blame the seer! Hurt

By the grim news, he vowed to find the cause

Of the great plague, to act at once, not pause

To look within himself. It soon was clear

He was himself the cause, his pride, his fear

Of self-examination. Sophocles

Saw Oedipus as Athens, her disease

A plague of arrogance. Our former leader

(Unlike King Oedipus), a bottom-feeder,

Has none of the ancient king’s nobility

But like King Oedipus he fails to see

He is the plague. Devoid of empathy,

Obsessed with money and celebrity,

He feeds red hats to haters. USA!

USA first! We’re winners, led the way

In COVID-19 deaths! The plague will stay

Until the voters make it go away. 

 

Steven Shankman holds the UNESCO Chair in Transcultural Studies, Interreligious Dialogue, and Peace at the University of Oregon, where he is Distinguished Professor of English and Classics Emeritus. His poems have appeared in a number of journals including Sewanee Review, Literary Imagination, Tikkun, Literary Matters, and Poetica Magazine. He is one of the co-editors of The World of Literature (1999), an anthology of world literature from a global perspective that contains some of his own poetic translations from Chinese, Greek, and Latin. His Penguin edition of Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad appeared in 1996. His chapbook of poems Kindred Verses was published in 2000. His book of poems Talmudic Verses (Finishing Line Press) appeared in 2023. He is the author of many scholarly books, including Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies (SUNY Press, 2010), which contains some of his own original poetry, and Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison (Northwestern UP, 2017).

HOW DO YOU DEFINE AN ENDING?

by Mark Danowsky

“Never-Ending Road” painting by Elizabeth Kenney

After three years, The New York Times announces that close coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic is coming to an end.

What has ended, I wonder,
And what has not?
 
So many with prolonged illness
Know the battle rages on 
 
And those soon to fall ill
And those who will fall ill
 
I count myself 
Among the lucky 
 
Recall my sureness
That I would not survive
 
Of course, few foresee
The deft hand of death 
 
His scythe, at times, the edge
Of visible—a bullet 
 
Stops the heart 
Without just cause
 
The needle droops 
In a useless arm 
 
Tires spin on ice
And metal crushes metal
 
A cloud opens up 
For tears to flood

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry. He is author of the poetry collections As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press), JAWN (Moonstone Press), Violet Flame (tiny wren lit), and Meatless (Plan B Press). Recent poems in Red Ogre Review, Green Ink Review, The Broadkill Review, anti-heroin chic, Harpy Hybrid Review, Otoliths, and elsewhere.

SNAKE OIL

by Julie Steiner

Cartoon by Necessary 2021 GoComics.com

“At least seven radio hosts and high-profile anti-mask and anti-vaccine advocates have died from COVID-19 in recent weeks. The men are radio hosts Dick Farrel, Phil Valentine, Bob Enyart, and Marc Bernier, as well as former CIA officer Robert David Steele, anti-masker Caleb Wallace, and conservative leader Pressley Stutts. Misinformation around the virus and vaccines remains widespread as cases continue to rise.” —Business Insider, September 19, 2021

“You shall not—surely!—die. Fake news!”

he scolds. “Don’t do as you are told!

(Except right now, of course.) Refuse

to be so easily controlled!”

“You shall not—surely!—die,” he sneers.

“The risk of death’s been overstated.

Powers That Be keep fanning fears

so Man can be manipulated.”

“You shall not—surely!—die,” he hisses,

half disdainful, half disgusted.

“Keeping you from knowledge? This is

why Authority can’t be trusted.”

“You shall not—surely!—die,” he scoffs,

then bites the dust. But that’s not closure:

Eve’s now fevered. Adam coughs,

aware at last of their exposure.

Author's Note: Genesis 3:4-7

Julie Steiner is a pseudonym in San Diego. Besides The New Verse News, the venues in which her poetry has appeared include the Able Muse Review, Rattle, Light, and the Asses of Parnassus.

BARE FLOOR, WITH COAT HANGER

by Francesco Levato

Author’s Note: This piece dealing with Texas Senate Bill 8 is from a series I’m working on titled SCARLET, a digital visual/poetic meditation on the fractured state of psyche induced by extended social isolation under COVID-19 lockdown. The digital/visual poems are created through erasure of Jack London’s post-apocalyptic novel The Scarlet Plague collaged with glitched imagery from everyday life to reflect the state of a pandemic self in forced confinement.

Francesco Levato is a poet, a literary translator, and a new media artist. Recent books include Arsenal/Sin Documentos; Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug; Creaturing (as translator); and the chapbooks A Continuum of Force and jettison/collapse. He has collaborated and performed with various composers, including Philip Glass, and his cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Poetry, a PhD in English Studies, and is currently an Associate Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos.

POEM IN AUGUST

by Julian O. Long

“August Painting” by Ivan Kolisnyk

First day of my eighty fourth

year to heaven, I got up

turned off the O2 machine, hung

its canula over the arm of the walker

beside my bed, intimate with

these acts as I am with my hand

on my thigh the last thing before

throwing off the covers,

                                       intimate too

with comorbidities (only recently

learned that word) my troubled heart

remembered from recent echoes, aftermaths

of strokes that stopped parts of my brain

and legs (maybe other things

as well—hard to tell with all

the medicines.

                        Still, one more stick

and I’m boosted, at least in a qualified

sense; I’ll continue intimacy

with covid fully vaccinated, as I

was those childhood summers with series

of asthma shots, but this birthday

I am choosing as well to quarantine

myself—better that than bronchial

spasms, since this virus kills.

Writ large does the covid pandemic shed

light on die ups such as the great

reptilian? Chances are it will run

its course and become endemic among us

like the flu. But what if it doesn’t?

And what if unlike plagues of past ages

this is the one big one? Will it

usher in new times of dearth,

strife, and loss driven by vicious

death-demanding ideologies?

Will we humans learn care for one

another in such new times, or will we

follow the worst among us and in

ourselves? Chances are we’ll do

the latter.

                        Cogito ergo sum,

unassailable formulation, works

both ways, Latin doesn’t care

it’s the perfect sum of being, balking

at prospect of its own quitclaim

consciousness cannot fail to name

itself, but no heuristic can

afford me knowledge of my death;

I am intimate with that absence.

Conversely, no perception affords

me knowledge of another’s. In these

times it’s a forced option to choose

intimacy as well

                           —with that absence.

Julian O. Long’s poems and essays have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Pembroke Magazine, New Texas, New Mexico Magazine, and Horizon among others. His chapbook High Wire Man is number twenty-two in the Trilobite Poetry series published by the University of North Texas Libraries. A collection of his poems, Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church, appeared from Backroom Window Press in 2018. Other online publications have appeared or are forthcoming at The Piker Press, Better Than Starbucks, The Raw Art Review, and Litbreak Magazine.  Long has taught school at the University of North Texas, North Carolina State University, and Saint Louis University. He is now retired and lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.

EMPTY PLACES

Illusion painting by Daniel Siering and Mario Shu.

Frederick Charles Melancon lives in Mississippi with his wife and daughter.  He is vaccinated and wears a mask.

AMADIBA

by Donna Katzin

 

Meet Vusle 'Malombo' Dlamini and Sinegugu Zukulu of the Sigidi Development Enterprise who coordinate the 100+ farmers across four villages who are collectively farming Sweet Potatoes and Madumbes (yams) on the northern edge of the beautiful Eastern Cape's Wild Coast in South Africa. The Amadiba Farmers of the Sigidi Development Enterprise normally sell their produce to informal vendors in Durban. With the start of COVID-19 lockdown collapsing this market, FoodFlow stepped in to purchase this harvest and redirect it to Food for Life in Port Shepstone to be distributed to townships and villages along the KZN South Coast to assist with the hunger crisis. 

They stand as one in their fields,

holding sweet potatoes the size of their hearts,

to sustain life

while the hungry wait.

 

Holding sweet potatoes the size of their hearts,

they harvest for comrades

while the hungry wait.      

Virus and violence stalk shacks like stray dogs.

 

They harvest for comrades

to cook so all can eat.

Virus and violence stalk shacks like stray dogs.                   

Old wounds run deep.

 

To cook so all can eat

they fill the communal pot with amadumbe and beans.

Old wounds run deep

in the land whose strong man has fallen.

 

They fill the communal pot with amadumbe and beans,

nurturing their neighbors                                              

in the land whose strong man has fallen,

refusing to die.

 

Nurturing their neighbors,

they rekindle generations of hope               

refusing to die—

honor every seed.   

 

They rekindle generations of hope,

stand as one in their fields,

honor every seed   

to sustain life.

Donna Katzin is the founding executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa.  A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing.  Published in journals and sites including The New Verse News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.

AGGRIEVED

by Karan Kapoor

Many patients across India have died when hospitals suddenly ran out of oxygen. Credit: Atul Loke for The New York Times, May 16, 2021

I

An old friend's father whom I once called father

is now dying. We're hunters who cannot hunt

oxygen for him, or her or the many theys, 

nor god, and the men who bought the internet

know we've tried to find both. Anything below

hundred minus five is a potential threat. 

He is at 51 and going down with the sun.

We carry time on our shoulders as it bleeds.

Souls leave bodies; leaves in autumn, 

pus from an abscess. Everywhere birds 

appear; everywhere there's song.

II

Our premier is deaf without being mute.

Isn't he guilty of all the good he did not do?

Sometimes the body astonishes the mind.

He visits a gurdwara to pray, to pay homage 

to Guru Teg Bahadur, extends greetings 

to a nation dying. He bows to him: a guru

respected globally for his courage and his

efforts to serve the downtrodden, a guru who

refused to bow to tyranny and injustice. 

We're trying to balance on the fence 

between irony and contempt.

III

Some pray for their fathers to be relieved,

some want them to live no matter. The one

who now stands in the queue for oxygen will 

soon stand in the queue for crematoriums.

The sun scorches us like a lover we've

wronged, pissing fire on us. In turn, 

our shaved heads threaten the moon.

Everyone we love plunges deep into a sleep 

there's no waking from, men and women

reduce to rising numbers on television.

We were never taught to count so far.

 

IV

India's spine crushes under the burden

of screams. The newspapers must be full 

of obituaries but they aren't. The trees laugh.

The dead are nameless. The government

is busy filing cases against the aggrieved.

The greatest indication of irresponsibility 

is blame. We get high on camphor, the sky 

falls. We exit the world through a wound.

Is there no god in the heart of a monster? 

He is tearing us apart, and making slow work 

of it. Dear destruction, we dread your old song.

V

When people suffer, they want to scream.

All we hear is an expression of suffering,

not the anguish itself. Time is a window

we cannot pass through. Have you ever

watched someone suffocate slowly?

We are drifted ashore, stripped of all but

our grief which too needs oxygen to survive.

There are no words, all we can do is look

silently at the dead. Sometimes the song

just sings itself apart. The birds disappear.

Future is nothing but a hole in the ground.

Author's Note: A friend's father died today, and another friend's grandfather. Many others have lost many others. India is suffering with an almost-apocalyptic second-wave, which comes directly as a result of failure of the Modi-government to prepare for it. This poem emerged from the angst which is a big, initial part of grief.

Karan Kapoor is the author of a novelette Maya and the co-author of a novel The Dreaming Reality, both independently published. Long-listed for Toto funds the Arts awards, his poems have appeared in The Indian Quarterly, G5A Imprint, Stride, and the Mountain Ink. He's currently working on his debut poetry collection. When not reading or writing, he is obsessing over classical music. Currently in his final semester of MA in Literary Art Creative Writing, he wants to continue to live a life devoted to music and literature.

ILLUMINATION

by James Schwartz

500,000.

We are not equipped to process this level of grief, the news anchor sighs. Video plays of the President, First Lady, VP and Second Gentleman surrounded by candles. 

500,000.

A statistic surpassing wartime numbers. The day will come, President Biden promises, when the memory of our loved ones will bring a smile before a tear. 

500,000. 

We are an illumination in this dark stillness. One morning we will smile at the empty chair. One morning we will smile. 

James Schwartz is a poet, writer, slam performer and author of 5 poetry collections including The Literary Party: Growing Up Gay and Amish in America. Twitter: @queeraspoetry

500,000

by Cathy Hailey

Ascent and descent

Symmetrical staircases

Move candlelight bent

Flames flicker faces

Pathways towards transcendency

Spirits drifting in

Liminality

A presidential burden

Despite empathy

Comforts multitudes

In national eulogy

Church bell interludes

Ritual “Amazing Grace”

All, Requiescat en Pace

Cathy Hailey teaches as an adjunct in Johns Hopkins University’s online MA in Teaching Writing program and previously taught high school English and Creative Writing in Prince William County, VA. She is northern region vice president of The Poetry Society of Virginia and organizes In the Company of Laureates, a biennial reading of poets laureate held in PWC. Her writing has been published in Poetry Virginia, The Journal of the Virginia Writing Project, Written in Arlington, The Prince William Poetry Review, Grid Poems, and in anthologies associated with ekphrastic collaborations.

WHEEL OF FORTUNE

 by Mary K O’Melveny

“Vaccine Wheel of Fortune” by JMbucholtz at Deviant Art.

               In the Circle of Life

                    It's the wheel of fortune

                    It's the leap of faith

                    It's the band of hope

                    Till we find our place…

—“The Circle of Life” (Lyrics by Tim Rice)

No one wants to be the last woman down before the cure.

So everyone is staring at computer screens, leaning into

laptops, cradling cell phones. Legions of faithful vaccine

seekers are as determined as El Camino de Santiago pilgrims.

Or would-be buyers of Hamilton tickets back when Broadway

was still open.  There are waiting lists, rumors, promises.

Appointments made, then cancelled. Lines form, disband.

Recorded messages say don’t call us, we’ll call you.

 

Everyone is at risk. But not enough to be advanced to more

fortunate categories. We reside in data bases far and wide.

We’ve filled out forms as if they were lottery tickets, sent

every scrap of personal data to would-be hackers around

the globe, called doctors we’ve not seen in years, even searched

for fake college IDs that might jump us to new age brackets.

Some neighbors raced to appointments in neighborhoods they

had never seen, forgetting who the odds had already disfavored.

 

As usual, the privileged see serendipity. Everyone else

knows how often the game is rigged. Kismet is a figment.

The carnival barker is gone but his fabrications linger

like smoke from a cheap cigar. Even as chilled vials traverse

the highways like pilgrim caravans, new viral strains mutate,

shapeshift. Before all our waiting arms are raised, half a million

will likely die. So we click and call and cry for our chance

at good fortune. Once again, Lady Luck smiles, then disappoints.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

ALL PRAISE TO VACCINE SCIENTISTS

by Earl J. Wilcox

Özlem Türeci, left, and Uğur Şahin of BioNTech. Backed by Pfizer, their vaccine is 90% effective in stopping people from falling ill. Photograph: Wolfgang Eilmes/FAZ Foto via The Guardian, December 6, 2020.

Metaphors pile up to describe

our anticipation as we await

the first doses, await the vaccines’

power to save us. Doubtless we

elderly will not live long enough

to know the whole story of how

and who and where the scientists

worked and worked to develop

the long-awaited medicine.

Alert! Octogenarians! Give up

today’s nap, rise in praise of vaccine saviors.

 

Earl Wilcox in his late 80s awaits the vaccine in South Carolina.

HAIKU

Photo credit: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration via The Jakarta Post.

Sari Grandstaff is a high school librarian in the Mid-Hudson Valley/Catskill Mountains of New York State. Her work has appeared in many places including Chronogram, Eastern Structures, and The New Verse News. Being born on Christmas Day she still has visions of sugar plums dancing in her head. 

CONGRATULATIONS

by Michael L. Ruffin

In a 5-4 ruling, the US Supreme Court sided with religious organizations in a dispute over Covid-19 restrictions put in place by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo limiting the number of people attending religious services. —CNN, November 26, 2020

Let us congratulate

the people of faith

who successfully

used the secular courts

and the secular Constitution

to secure their right

not to do what their

faith should compel

them to do willingly, 

voluntarily, and gladly: 

care about people.

Michael L. Ruffin is a writer, editor, preacher, and teacher living and working in Georgia. He posts poems on Instagram (@michaell.ruffin) and prose opinions at On the Jericho Road. He is author of Fifty-Seven: A Memoir of Death and Life and of the forthcoming Praying with Matthew. His poetry has appeared at The New Verse News, Rat's Ass Review, 3 Moon Magazine, and U-Rights Magazine.

OUR COUNTRY... NOT OUR BUSINESS

by Jan Gross

2020 Hindsight by Rob Rogers at The Nib.

Buyers beware! 

We could lose our bid on the sale  

Citizens no more, but customers   

Truth no longer told, but sold

Off to the inside traitors  

   

Bought out by big business  

Walled in by Wall Street  

Gutted by greed  

Dealt out of the deal  

  

His bottom line rules mighty  

Regulations, taxes damned   

Hail to the profit margin!  

Protect the family brand!   

   

Fake the facts!   

Hype the hoax!  

Let hackers and trolls   

Surf coast to coast  

  

Masses trumpet triumph  

Chanting hate inspires  

Winners one and none  

Where QAnon conspires  

  

Monuments stage his glory  

A country’s reality show  

A bible brandished on high  

God’s Truth trampled below  

  

Heroes stripped of honor  

Fawners scale the ranks   

On all sides fine people  

Hateful words just pranks   

  

Covid breathes calamity  

Choked by one man’s vanity  

Old age best begone!  

Make way for the strong!  

  

Refuse to don your face masks  

Cures are easily taken  

His own comeback is clear proof  

Of experts long mistaken  

  

He’s fair as honest Abe was  

Not a racist bone in sight   

With insults heaped on icons   

He helps boost his loser’s plight  

  

Dissenters face dismissal   

Detractors face defeat  

The bar of justice lowers  

Tips the balance for deceit  

  

Clear the way for order!  

Twist the arm of law!  

Protests pave the future  

Marchers won’t withdraw   

  

Black and white, or red and blue  

Dividing lines he always drew  

Will this storm bring rainbows 

With hope to start anew?   

  

Battle lines are hardened  

The bitter end draws near  

  

Time to line up    

Time to fill in  

  

Ballots to mail or not   

Votes to cast once or twice  

  

Votes to buy   

To buy us time  

  

Time to keep us   

Here long enough  

  

To see   

… to see the turning of the tide   

        … for the tide has got to turn.  

Author’s Note: This poem echoes James Baldwin’s plea to settle for what a vote can get you… maybe not a job, or a loan, or a major reform, but “it may keep [us] here long enough … to see, and use, the turning of the tide—for the tide has got to turn.”  (Written prior to the 1980 presidential election in “Notes on the House of Bondage” and quoted in Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.)   

Jan Gross is waiting for the tide to turn. She is Professor emerita at Grinnell College, and is co-authoring a collaborative poetic memoir about interracial friendship, Black & White and In-Between. 

SENDING POSTCARDS

by Julia Lisella

It’s all history now,

even my walk to the mailbox

to drop the shiny cards into the blue box

little teeth at the edge of the slot – I can hear them

grinding & scraping as I push the cards in

10 at a time. Because

Covid 19 pandemic

because Breonna and George are dead

because T***p lied his ass off

we know this is true all the time, but now?

And I think this is why

I walk to the mailbox

with 50 postcards and I worry

the people who get them won’t

understand my handwriting

when they read “Dear Friend”

they’ll know we are not friends but

Friend please vote, friend

the anxiety of thinking

you won’t vote

makes my fingers ache

the anxiety of thinking

in the quiet, the basil bloom

of evening, the petulance

of late summer, the walk now

more or less guarded

Mostly anxiety I do not think

in prose but in the murmur of fear

the stuttered life of

catch in the throat

the imbalance of what can’t be

how is it now that the shiny postcards

urging

sit at the bottom of a large blue box—

what faith I once had in the box

How I once believed anything in it

would begin its great journey

Will anyone of you 50 desperate cards

released reluctantly by my fingertips

(afraid to touch the box) the confluences

of emergencies

we have acclimated to

will any one of you reach the street

the court, the place, the road, the Tampa,

the Ft. Lauderdale, the Ft. Myers so many forts

the ranch house the apartment building the PO Box

and journey how? and when if it arrives

on your counter, thrown in your car

stuck under a welcome mat?

I press the pen into the card

to make the name and wonder

will it be you, you one soul

who will get my card and lifting it

above the garbage will see and notice

the wobble of my D or F or

the note I squeezed into the left side

of the card, the funny way I write my E’s, my V’s and M’s

you can’t tell apart

you, someone will know I walked down

the quiet Covid street

I pushed the cards through the slot

dear friend released from prison who is not

a murderer or a rapist dear friend who was

desperate and forged a check dear friend who was

naïve and dated a con artist and a drug dealer

Dear friend still alive, released they say

and living in Sunny Florida, please don’t

get sick, please find a job

please vote.

Randy Hudnell raises four fingers to represent Amendment 4, which restored the right to vote to most former felons in Florida who'd completed their sentences. Credit: ALEX PENA/CBS NEWS, October 26, 2020

Julia Lisella’s books include Always (WordTech Editions, 2014), Terrain (WordTech Editions, 2007), and the chapbook Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004). Her poems have most recently appeared in Ploughshares, Paterson Literary Review, Mom Egg Review, Nimrod, Exit 7, and Ocean State Review. She writes on modernist women writers, teaches American literature at Regis College and co-curates the Italian American Writers Association (IAWA) Reading Series in Boston. 

COVID ABATTOIR

by Philip C. Kolin

Above: Family members of JBS USA meat packing plant employee Saul Sanchez watch as his casket is lowered during his funeral after he died of Covid-19 in Greeley, Colo., on April 15, 2020.Jim Urquhart / Reuters via NBC

“Meatpackers deny workers benefits for virus-related deaths, illnesses.” 

—NBC, September 29, 2020

Upton Sinclair is roiling in his grave.

Things have not changed in Packingtowns

across America. Covid has just made them worse.

The virus works well in these damp, cold, sun-

blocked meat processing plants where droplets can settle 

and slay much longer. Gigantic fans whirl and spread 

saturated foul air as workers breathe each other's

infected coughs and sneezes.  Loud machinery demands

they must talk louder and farther to announce Covid's arrival.

All in cramped spaces.

Packed shoulder to shoulder, workers have to

butcher in non-stop 10-12 hour shifts, no plexiglass

or strip curtains between them. Processing lines

move at race car speeds, leaving workers even  more

vulnerable thanks to exhausted breath, great Covid hosts. 

It's a lung-breaking job. And sharing knives

and hammers means shaking hands with coworker Covid.

Like the animals they eviscerate and de-hide,

these meat processing workers leave the plant

with slaughtered lives, their lungs and hearts offal.

It's a jungle in these plants.

Philip C. Kolin is the Distinguished Professor of English (Emeritus) and Editor Emeritus of the Southern Quarterly at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published more than 40 books on Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, African American playwrights as well as ten collections of poems. His most recent books are Reaching Forever: Poems in the Poiema Series of Cascade Books and, forthcoming from Main Street Rag, Delta Tears.

OCTOBER 17, SWEETEST DAY

by Ron Riekki

or, this year, Sweatiest Day, how hot 

 

the goddamn gowns and gloves are in- 

side the war of the COVID wards, how 

STUPID are the anti-maskers, the 27— 

at my current count—White Housers 

positive, and here I’m a pessimist, 

seeing the ramifications, seeing the 

ventilators, seeing the conventions, 

 

packed with people; or maybe it’s 

 

the SWATest Day, the ICEist day, 

these days of mass pollution/mass 

arrests for immigrants just trying 

to go to mass, or to work; or may- 

be it’s the Sleepiest Day, the mass 

hypnosis of this world, being told 

that this virus will just "go away," 

 

told by someone who, by the way, 

 

could get re-infected, someone who 

just had a runny nose, but now who’s 

running for President when he has 

never yet actually been President, 

or been presidential, just swinging 

pendulums in front of our eyes, 

telling us we’re feeling sleepy, so 

 

sleepy; or maybe it is, as I said, 

 

the Heat-est Day, the Hottest Day, 

the hottest October 17 that’s ever 

been recorded, because, sadly, 

that’s the theme of this year, how 

there haven’t really been any holi- 

days this year, just evil-days, sad- 

days, maydays, doomsdays, play- 

 

days where kids can’t touch, birth- 

 

days where we can’t hug, because 

we’re on an expressway to hell if 

we don’t stop the way we treat 

the world and the way we treat 

each other, if we fall for the tricks 

that led us to this collapse, the tricks 

of 2016 where the U.S. was covered 

 

in red.  Honestly, aren’t you, too, tired? 

Ron Riekki's latest books in 2020 are Niiji (Cyberwit, co-written with Sally Brunk), i have been warned not to write about this (Main Street Rag), and The Many Lives of It (McFarland).

HUMPTY DUMP T

by Mickey J. Corrigan

A microscopic view of 293T cells derived from embryonic kidneys, which several companies are using to develop Covid-19 therapies. The treatment for Covid-19 received by Mr. T***p—a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies he described as a “cure” in a celebratory video posted on Twitter—was developed using human cells derived from a fetus aborted decades ago. Photo credit: Juan Mabromata/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The New York Times, October 8, 2020

I wasn't born yesterday

I wasn't born at all

sacrificed for the future

sacrificed on the steel table

a precious budding knot

of unfolding potential

of stem cells used

to create the line

to create the path

to saving human lives

not mine I was just 

enough for the 293T

enough for the Per.C6

cells from the laboratory

cells from the dark years 

in secret dingy rooms

brave men in white coats

brave women in masks

brave enough to help

young girls weeping

salty ocean tears, all

in fear for their future

in fear for their lives

I didn't have one

so decades later—

decades of growth

decades of greed

decades of bloat—

he could be saved

he could live on

breathless and hardened

fat egg that won't break

perched on a wall of power

on a balcony above us

casting aspersions and lies

with elite impunity

with no responsibility

no respect for ideals

the common good 

I gave my life for

what he disregards—

laws made to be broken

laws like offshore trawlers

laws to be scoffed at—

lives cut short by whim

lives cut short by him

but not his

life

saved by others' sacrifices 

like mine

like yours

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes Florida noir with a dark humor. Novels include  Project XX about a school shooting (Salt Publishing, UK, 2017) and What I Did for Love a spoof of Lolita (Bloodhound Books, 2019). Kelsay Books recently published the poetry chapbook the disappearing self. Grandma Moses Press will publish the poetry chapbook Florida Man later this year. 

MASQUERADE

by Susan McLean

Muffled like bandits on a raid,

our faces wrapped from chin to eye,

we aren’t intent on ambuscade,

just hoping not to kill or die.

Yet everywhere we see displayed
the nonchalance of passersby,

signaling that they’re not afraid—

their confidence a bare-faced lie.

Susan McLean is the author of two poetry books, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of the Latin poet Martial, Selected Epigrams. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, a hotspot for COVID-19.