CAN WE SEE THE SUN?

by William Aarnes

Beth and I are wearing masks

and, as can happen on the subway,

 

the unmasked man across the aisle

raises his voice to everyone

 

in the car to tell us that wearing masks

and getting vaccines just shows

 

we’re brainwashed by the “slime”

of lies told by the government

 

and the media.  We’ve been tricked

into believing all kinds of fictions.

 

“Take the sun,” he says, his voice

rising.  “Yes, take the goddamned sun.

 

You’re telling me you can see something

that’s ninety-three million miles away?

 

Anyone who thinks for himself knows

his eyes can’t see that far! You’d need

 

a Hubble, though that Hubble’s

just another made-up lie. Anyone

 

who’s reasonable and thinks for himself

knows he’s not seeing the sun. Read

 

your Plato and stop looking up

at the useless sky. Don’t listen

 

to those swindlers that are telling you

any different. And stop going along

 

with the idea that something invisible

can make you sick. Or just go ahead.

 

I don’t give a damn. Why would anyone               

give a damn? You’re all just pathetic!” 

As we leave the train, we don’t dare

wish him well—what would he do?—

though we want to. Beth and I wear

our masks the two blocks home.

It’s a gloomy afternoon, light rain.

And the first thing I do in the door

is—trusting the internet—open my laptop

to look up the diameter of the sun.

Then how much light the sun gives off—

enough, I’m told, to leave you blind.

William Aarnes lives in New York.  He worries about what the conservative response to COVID has done to our thinking about public health.  And yesterday his appointment to get a COVID booster was cancelled because the pharmacy had yet to receive its supply.

AMERICA IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE MUELLER REPORT AND THE ANGRY TWEETS THAT FOLLOWED

by Ariana D. Den Bleyker

Graphic: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES NEWS/GETTY IMAGES, TWITTER via Elite Daily

I.

She swallows the news, a lump in the back of her throat,

watching all the armies who rally to save her gather,

seemingly defeated, their hopes hanging 

upon the delicate flesh of failed ghosts.

Balance of possibilities can go either way:

with just a whisper of wind, touching hand giving strength

to moments of truth swinging gently, leaning, anchored, swaying, 

rediscovering & restoring, though always permanently rooted. 

A new furnace burns brightly, metal ablaze, wrapped in red heat;

sweat pouring, glistening brighter than molten steel, boiling her people

until the day is done & lions roar by the hearth-fire. 

The sun briefly shines, allowing moments for thoughts

& strange songs of what will happen 

tomorrow that may never be real.

II.

She grits her teeth & makes a home far away—

deep within caves within caves, farther back until blue becomes blackness.

She returns to her mother, to nothing,

for inside Plato’s ultimate form illusions of illusions demystified & ugly

rely on her starkness—this & all that she saw

when he crawled in her bed unworthy of sitting by her side,

her form easy enough to reach, as if an object of his desire

left alone to bruise & soil while lying beneath the earth,

left with angry words unable to differentiate

the stomping with supposed compassionate feet, 

the head held down feeling no regrets. 

III.

She can see the revolution from her window,

the small orbits, when they turn away & return 

& sometimes a star falls, a blazing fire shot down,

a demigod dying & it comes down on her—

the thing that once was but is now lost inside her,

borrowing girder, salvaging safety for others, 

relieving the pressure amid weary shoulders grasping

for strength, taking refuge in sacrifice & pain

of her people giving what they’re willing to never receive,

as they walk breathlessly into the ether,

surveying the fact or fiction placed in their hands.

Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of three collections, including Wayward Lines (RawArt Press, 2015), the chapbooks Forgetting Aesop (Bandini Books, 2011), Naked Animal (Flutter Press, 2012), My Father Had a Daughter (Alabaster Leaves Publishing, 2013), Hatched from Bone (Flutter Press, 2014), On Coming of Age and Stitches(Origami Poems Project, 2014), On This and That (Bitterzoet Press, 2015), Strangest Sea (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Beautiful Wreckage (Flutter Press, 2015), Unsent (Origami Poems Project, 2015), The Peace of Wild Things (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Knee Deep in Bone (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2015), Birds Never Sing in Caves (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), Cutting Eyes from Ghosts (Blood Pudding Press, 2017), Scars are Memories Bleeding Through (Yavanika Press, 2018), A Bridge of You (Origami Poems Project, 2019), Even the Statue Weeps (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2019), and Confessions of a Mother Hovering in the Space Between Where Birds Collide with Windows (Ghost City Press, forthcoming 2019). She is also the author of three crime novellas, a novelette, and an experimental memoir. She hopes you'll fall in love with her words.

THE SHIP OF FOOLS

by Darrell Petska

In Plato's Republic a ship of fools sailed—
can you see one now, just rounding the bend?
Already the ship lists heavily, its new captain
unskilled and lacking in sailorly knowledge.

Will the ship capsize? Chaos sweeps the deck,
its sailors bumbling their jobs as the ship veers
first toward one shore, then the other. From on high
descends a flurry of orders to right the vessel,
but their predicament grows worse by the moment.

Each sailor, believing to have the answer to their peril,
snitches and backstabs, crying foul of the rest.
Blood and curses fly, their captain at the helm inept,
or disinterested. Erratically onward they sail,
mutinous words like life jackets tossed about.

Someone barks an order—another sailor
no more skilled, rising up to wrest command,
but little does it matter: onto its side rolls the ship,
its unruly crew leaping overboard—
the captain fleeing in a lifeboat lugging gold.

Once tall and stately, the ship takes on water,
some fortunate ballast preventing its quick demise.
Will a wiser captain and crew come to the rescue?
Or will this ship, and its storied past, be remembered
for those who so miserably sailed it last?

Darrell Petska's writing appears in The Missing Slate, Whirlwind, Verse-Virtual, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, previously in TheNewVerse.News, and numerous other publications. Darrell cut short his career as a university editor to be the arbiter of his own words. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.