TO BE, OR TO BE?

by Judith Terzi

A pale blue shirt against pale skin. Crosshatch

tie. Fauci looks tired as the anchor fires away 

questions. He speaks about testing, transmissibility, 

quarantines, & whatever else he must summon

up the vigor to explain, as the science flows

like the rain this morning, mud gushing down 

roads where fires once roared. How many times

the doctor clarifies, like a Spanish teacher

must explain the differences between ser &

estar––to be, or to be. Hundreds of repetitions

throughout one class, millions over a semester.

Like Fauci, the teacher maintaining patience, 

calm, civility. The doctor is tired. Use estar. 

Está cansado. Fauci is a cool dude. Use ser.

Judith Terzi is the author of Museum of Rearranged Objects (Kelsay) as well as of five chapbooks, including If You Spot Your Brother Floating By and Casbah (Kattywompus). Recent poems appear in Atlanta Review, The Examined Life, Moria, and MacQueen's Quinterly. A poem, "Ode to Malala Yousafzai," was included on a "Heroines" episode of BBC/Radio 3's "Words and Music." She taught French for many years in Pasadena, California, as well as English at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria. A new chapbook, Now, Somehow, will appear in 2022.

STURGIS HERE WE COME

by Jan Chronister

“If you are a Covid-19 coronavirus and happen to miss Lollapalooza, don’t fret or make crying, boo-hoo motions with your spikes. There will be other upcoming opportunities such as the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally 2021 which is set to begin next week, August 6 at Sturgis, South Dakota and continue through August 15. The Sturgis Rally website says, ‘We’re spreading out wings.’ With over 500,000 people expected, that may not be the only thing that’s spreading. As I covered for Forbes last September, one study estimated that the 2020 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally caused over 260,000 new Covid-19 coronavirus cases. While you shouldn’t bank on that specific number since the study had a number of limitations that I described, it wouldn’t surprising if the 2020 Sturgis Rally did contribute to the SARS-CoV2 surges seen last Summer.” —Bruce Y. Lee, Forbes, July 31, 2021

Doesn’t matter that we did this

last year, spread the virus

cross-country. Doesn’t matter

that we will gather in bars, 

spew saliva while we shout

face to face, maskless.

Doesn’t matter that

we are unvaccinated.

What matters is that we are free,

our hogs roar down the highway,

jobs and offices forgotten. 

Doesn’t matter that small

businesses just barely caught up,

will have to close again,

students, teachers, parents

left wondering how to cope.

Consumers plan to stock up

on toilet paper, coffee, flour. 

None of this matters.

No libtards can tell us

what to do. Fauci

is evil. Masks

don’t work. The virus

was engineered by globalists

to thin the herd.

We’ll survive—

doesn’t matter who else dies.

Jan Chronister recently resurfaced and is mad that we may all have to don masks and lock down to survive. She is grateful her home is in the country in northern Wisconsin, her freezer is full, and she can always work on poems while isolated.

HOLDING OUR BREATH

by Lynnie Gobeille

Image source: Benenden Health

I just sit where I’m put, composed

of stone and wishful thinking 

—Margaret Atwood, “Sekhmet, the Lion-Headed Goddess of War”

This year’s tree is fake, like so much of 2020’s News.

Last year’s was real—but died a short tortuous death 

four days out- fully  decorated- needles dropping onto my hard wood floors

hauled back to Home Depot.

Where I begged for a refund of my money.

 Yes, I has used coins  I had saved in a plastic jug all year just for this one purpose—

 A REAL tree—hauled home by me—placed there – in all its Glory.

Now Dead… 

But that was last year—Pre 2020.

Today? My fake tree is up—my Mother’s Ornaments placed   “just so”

another chance to recreate memories.

How foolish we Humans are.

We  think—

God will forgive us for our sins.

We hold our collective breaths as Fauci says-

He will not be with HIS family this year.

We sigh—

If he can do it? 

So can you & i.

After all these years—Lynnie Gobeille is STILL passionate about poetry.

WHEN TWO'S A CROWD

by David Thoreen

Cartoon by Kuper

A fool and his facemask are soon parted.
Gather ye toilet paper while ye may.

The early bird gets the hand sanitizer.
What’s good for the goose is social distancing.

The road to Hell is paved with delayed interventions.
Give Mike Pence his due.

A rose garden is a rose garden is a rose garden.
Give me liberty, or give me quarantine.

Better to light a candle than to curse the virus.
You cruise, you lose.

You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an alternative fact.
A sneeze in line saves time.

Zoom each day as if it were your last.
Don’t shoot Dr. Fauci.

David Thoreen teaches writing and literature at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts.  His poems have appeared in Great River Review, The Journal, Natural Bridge, New Letters, Slate, and other journals.

POSTHUMOUS EXISTENCE

by John Hodgen

Were we not paying attention, attention-deficited even then,
even before the term was wheeled in on some gurney
with a wobbly wheel? Brooklyn Hospital, so overrun,
where Fauci was born, where Whitman volunteered,
his beard as face mask, tending Union soldiers,
bringing peaches, poems, writing letters for them,
urging them to believe that a woman back home
would still marry them when they came home,
marching Johnnies through the rye,
missing a leg or an arm or an eye?

And Keats, quarantined in the harbor in Naples,
not nearly the quaranta giorni, the full forty days,
on the Maria Crowther, six weeks out from Gravesend,
typhus all around, bobbing like rhythm, like synaesthesia
in the bay. Keats, mortality weighing “heavily” on him,
“like unwilling sleep,” Keats half alive,
“half in love with easeful Death.”

Did we not see it, fully take it in,
poets and plagues interwoven, the world caving in,
the burst of tubercular blood in Keats’s handkerchief,
Whitman’s soldiers (“warriors,” T***p says) who survived,
stood, hobbled and grim, and married just as he told them
they would, writing back years later to tell Old Walt,
fierce believer in grasses, sheaves and hymns,
that they had named their children after him.

Or is it simply that we have lived too long
to have seen it again?

And who moves quickly now, masked, from bed to bed,
giving succor, solace, taking selfies with the nearly dead
to share with the families prevented from being there,
with Poe’s masquers, red death, double ventilated with dread?
What nurses, doctors, poets glide among us again,
like shepherds, pastorals, like trashbagged antibodies,
nearly invisible, shining with novel, singular grace?

John Hodgen is the Writer-in-Residence at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. Hodgen won the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry for Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). His fourth book of poetry Heaven & Earth Holding Company is out from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and his first book In My Father's House has been reprinted from Lynx House/University of Washington Press. Hodgen’s fifth book The Lord of Everywhere is just out, also from Lynx House/University of Washington Press.

THESE FRAGMENTS I HAVE SHORED AGAINST THE VIRUS

by Eric Weil


 

with apologies to T. S. Eliot

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is a viral month, breeding
Contagion out of the air, mixing
Distance and desire, streaming
Dull shows with spring pollen.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.


II. A Game of Chess

The Lectern he stands at, like a burnished throne,
Glows in TV lights, where the ass
Between the flags flings his fruited lies
While gilded sycophants peep out
(And Fauci hides his eyes behind his wing),
Doubles the flames of narcissistic rage.


III. The Fire Sermon

The hospitals are broken, the last surgical masks
Fray and sink into wet piles.

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d.


IV. Death by Water

Phlebas the Epidemiologist, a fortnight dead,
Has missed the nurses’ cries, ironic memes,
Corpses lain in reefer trucks.

O you unmasked who shop and cough to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once healthy and hale as you.


V. What the Thunder Said

After the ICU lights on sweaty faces
After the agony in sterile places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and hospital hall
They who were living now are dead
We who are living now are dying
With a little patience
Shantih   shantih shantih

Eric Weil stays inside in Raleigh, NC. He's a retired English prof who has three chapbooks in print: A Horse at the Hirshhorn, Returning from Mars, and Ten Years In. Other poems have recently appeared or will soon appear in Red Planet Review, Free State Review, Pinesong, Kakalak, and Ponder Review.