VACCINE REACTIONS

by Claudia Gary

On April 18, 1955, 8-year-old Ann Hill of Tallahassee, Fla. received one of the first Salk polio vaccine shots. Credit AP via NPR.

Seeing a needle, I slid off the chair,

ran down a hallway to the waiting room,

then circled it until the harried nurse

and my mother corralled me. No amount

of coaxing to be good, no bribes of candy,

no warnings about polio could stop

my tears that day. The rest I don’t remember. 

Autonomy, “freedom,” was everything

to a three-year-old. Last weekend I saw

a needle and shed tears of gratitude.

Claudia Gary teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Natural Meter, Poetry vs. Trauma, and more through writer.org (currently via teleconference). Author of Humor Me (2006) and of chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism (2019) and Bikini Buyer’s Remorse (2015), she is also a health science writer, visual artist, and composer of art songs and chamber music. Follow @claudiagary.

WISDOM TAKES A HOLIDAY

On T***p’s Withdrawal from the Climate Agreement

by Jon Wesick

Lincoln plants cotton on the White House lawn.
Rachel Carson sprays Agent Orange.
Martin Luther King hoists the confederate flag.
Gandhi stops at a steakhouse
on his way to the shooting range.

Crick and Watson blow their Nobel Prize money
on swizzle sticks and lotto tickets.
Jacques Cousteau moves to Arizona.
Einstein downs a six-pack of PBR
before getting behind the wheel of his GTO.
Jonas Salk shares dirty needles in Haitian crack houses.

Picasso enters his finger-painting period.
Mozart releases his 99 Bottles of Beer Symphony.
e.e. cummings WRITES IN CAPITAL LETTERS.
Julia Child dazzles guests with beef jerky à l’orange.
Dave Brubeck and McCoy Tyner embark
on their International Chopsticks Tour.

Stephen Hawking competes
in the Ultimate Fighting Challenge.
Bobby Fischer takes up checkers.
Elon Musk trades space flight and electric cars
for Pez dispensers. Warren Buffet
wires money to an exiled Nigerian prince.
Jean Paul Sartre guest stars
on Jackass.

Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his story “The Visitor” for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. Jon is the author of the poetry collection Words of Power, Dances of Freedom as well as several novels.

MEASLES

by Joan Colby

Anti-Vaxxer Kristin Cavallari

A darkened room. Venetian blinds
Slatted like a stern mouth.
No reading. No coloring books
Or paper dolls. I shut my eyes
Reddened like the polka dots
Of my fevered body.
The doctor with his satchel
Of uselessness. Two weeks
Or longer. It’s the hard
Measles.

Two infant boys born before my father
Died of it. They were both named
For their own father, an unlucky
Name as it turned out—he too would die
Young in a gunfight. They called my father
A different name. So names must
Matter. My own means Gift of God
According to my mother who never wanted
Such a daughter, one spotted
With original sin, who must be
Worried over, hot and sulky in the dark
Demanding one more chapter.
My father’s weary voice as Jim
Hides in the apple barrel
Listening for the thump of a peg leg.

Once a third of the tribes crawled
To the cooling waters where they expired.
I get better. A neighbor child
Loses smartness, burnt away in a conflagration
The way conifers on the mountain
Turned into ashy witches.

There’s such a thing as herd
Immunity. The few protected
By the many. How penguins huddle
Against weather, changing places constantly
For the good of all.

Age of enlightenment.
Lords of miracle: Lister, Pasteur,
Jenner, Finlay, Reed, Salk.

Yet in the forest where the children stray
The house of the witch still beckons,
People believe in angels, in green men from mars,
That evolution is a lie, that the moon is a hologram,
That science is a devil’s plot
Against the faith of conjecture.


Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize.  Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014: Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.