NOBODY SAID FLEAS

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Could America’s pandemic response be any more medieval? 

—Dana Milbank, The Washington Post, June 30, 2020

The Great Mortality produced, when it came,
a five-year torment for the Gothic mind.
Wise men—there were not wise women then—
proposed these causes: conjunct planets, corruption,
close-by swamps, over-consumption of fruit, dung.
Further, they condemned corpses rotting in ditches
or in makeshift graveyards. Folk understood their murrain
as the footprint of God’s fury, a penalty for their lapses.
Nobody said fleas. Nobody said rats.
If a citizen sprouted buboes there were nostrums:
banishing foul “vapors,” balancing ill “humors,”
drinking urine, yours or others’, holding a dead snake
or a live hen against your afflicted skin, burning spices,
using potions: Unicorn or theriac, Four Thieves Vinegar
or if you were well off, powdered emeralds.
The pious tottered along scourging themselves.
Most cures contained a fair amount of opium.
To stop the spread of plague without a remedy,
the Fourteenth Century would separate the sick from well
for 30, then for 40 days under the law of quarantine.
The US tried isolation for a month or two, then gave it up.
Despite the pestilence, news from the government was
they were on it, but since it exploded as a novel virus,
what could they promise? After that, they faked the data,
muzzled experts, gas-lit, spread the blame, and when their
constituents asked, without a remedy, how do we survive
contagion? Their answer was, wear masks, stay home
or keep six feet apart. However puzzled, folk understood
they must persist in using the regime's meager directions,
or perish en masse. Proving our regime no more advanced
than our forefathers, salvation just past what politicians
can imagine, just past their careless, medieval reach.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks. Her poems have appeared on line and in anthologies.

RAPTURE: A SORT OF SONNET

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Oregon wildfire, September 6, 2017. Photo source: NBC4i

I often think of immolation when the wind
gets up to no good as is does here
in the mountains and reminds me how wildfires
take California, the gulf rains take Houston,

how puffery takes over Washington with
no particular purpose. I have a gracious
plenty of canned goods set by in case
Al Gore is right when he shows me pictures

of what can only be the End of Days—
fires and drought enough to raise a hallelujah.
I’m glad for the heads up and good on Al.
It’s eschatology no matter what you suppose.

The end will come, if you pick science or religion—
either the Rapture or the god dammed secular flame.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle live in the Ozarks where she #Resists Arkansas politics and politicians. She is the author of two books and five chapbooks.

IN FAIRY TALES

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Piñata by Dalton Ávalos Ramírez.

There could be a stranger with a poison apple.
There could be a girl who flies to an island.
There could be a maiden in love with a monster.
There could be a bluebird, a blue belt, a blue light.
There could be a chicken that predicts the end of the world.
There could be an enchanted pig.
There could be seven henchmen men scattered across three decades.
There could be a puppet with a nose that grows when he lies, and he lies anyway.
There could be a celebrity who runs for office.
That big name could know nothing of geopolitics or governing.
That man could make a mess of our habitats.
That man . . . but no, the tale is too far-fetched.
And how could we tell it to the children?


Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the  Ozarks where she Resists Arkansas politics and politicians. She is the author of two books and five chapbooks.

BORDER/NO BORDER

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

A woman traveling alone with her infant, seeming to understand that she will be arrested, walks toward Canadian police on the far side of the border from Champlain, NY.  Photo by Kathleen Masterson/VPR via NPR, February 17, 2017

Members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police help a family from Somalia on Feb. 17, 2017 along the U.S.-Canada border near Hemmingford, Quebec. (The Canadian Press/AP) —The Washington Post, February 23, 2017

While some refugees are also crossing into Manitoba and British Columbia, according to the Canada Border Services Agency, some 452 people made refugee claims in Quebec in January alone, after being arrested for illegally crossing the border on foot with their strollers and suitcases in tow. Paradoxically, since the Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the U.S. came into force in 2004, people entering from the U.S. can only claim refugee status in Canada if they cross outside the designated ports of entry—in other words, illegally. —Montreal Gazette, February 16, 2017

Trudeau: Canada will continue to accept asylum seekers from US 

—The Hill, February 21, 2017

She stands at end of Roxham Road
At the unmarked Canadian border
A Road Closed sign, then
15 feet along a well-walked path

border/ no border

The woman clutches
the handle of a rolling suitcase
Her baby wrapped
in the other arm

Across the border/ no border

Mounties in uniforms
Ma’am they say, ma’am
she does not understand
she is holding her son

border/no border

ma’am they say
we have to arrest you
if you walk across
at this here

border/no border

the men do not pull their guns
the guns gleam
in their leather holsters
car seat in a Mountie cruiser

Guns/ no guns

The woman steps into the cruiser
a border-jumper choosing not to live
in fear of what comes next
in crazy country, still she hesitates

border/no border

before she hands the baby
to a Mountie. In Canada
after 24 hours she’ll be released
or seen by a judge.


Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks.

ELECTION: 2016

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

They’re handing it out—whatever it is.
And we’re taking it—exile, house arrest,
a wall, mass deportations, the molded,
melded, stretched and excised truth.
I hear some are taking it and buying the hat.
We might as well paint the country alizarin.
Other names for alizarin are Mordant Red
and Turkey Red. We should certainly paint
the country alizarin. Eventually,
we will want to get back to forming our
days with our hands. We will be unable
to move our fingers. Then we will want
to hear the new lies, the small stories
of the worms’ triumph. It will be too late.
I tell myself, “don’t borrow trouble. We
still have months.” I tell myself “you
can move. A month is an augenblick,”
I tell myself “it can’t be that bad.”
I say “not here, it can’t happen here.” I wonder
where to live next. Taut faces surround me.
In every group, a mother who says,“hush,”
a mother who says “everything is fine.”
Around me, children are blown to mush.
I am a mother. Don’t we say dumb stuff?


Author’s gloss: augenblick—the blink of an eye

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and write in the Ozarks. She is the author of two books and three chapbooks, most recently Persephone on the Metro. See her work in Concis, Rat’s Ass Review, Mom Egg Review, and the Kentucky Review.

ELECTION:2016

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Dora vs. Trump Cartoon by ELISE MCCOMB, age14, ROSEVILLE, MINN. (New York Times 2015 Cartoon Contest)

There are only seven plots, we’re told,

        and blunder is this world’s first and second.

                The desire for triumph shoulders at

                        the mother-belly of moral vacuity although,

                                mercifully, not quite hard enough to squeeze out

                                        yet. My friends who are conscientious objectors

or Buddhist, my friends who are in the intellectual closet,

                 even my apathetic friends are all

                         on Short Pierre Street waiting to see

                                 what happens. Because it has been so unbearable,

                                         we have borne it for 18 months—

the N words sprayed on one of our two city busses,

        the theories of corruption, actual corruption. And now,

                after arguing and lamentations, we are a chorus

                        of the damaged, counting their wounds, storing up

                                  experience for a later excuse to whine, Cabo,

                                         Toronto and stark survival on our minds.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and write in the Ozarks. She is the author of two books and three chapbooks, most recently Persephone on the Metro. See her work in Concis, Rat’s Ass Review, Mom Egg Review, and the Kentucky Review.

A PLAGUE ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Piles of dead bodies steam. Cremation reeks
like an all-day bar-b-que.We shift disease
from one mouth to another, one penis,
one vagina to another. We wait for plagues
to pass—Zika, insane cows, the bloody spume
of Ebola and long guns. Contagion will be
the end of us, or else we'll be ill all over
from the atmosphere, from the lead water.
Perhaps epidemics, pollution and violence
will slump, new drugs, new hope emerge.
But they seem out of reach in these first days
of the celebrity Republic when we are cajoled
to believe medicine or the administration
will lessen the lesions, the tension of being
a high risk population under the politics of dying.


Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She apologizes for her state's administration.

PREDICTION

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Coral reef scientists estimate that mass bleaching has killed 35% of corals on the northern and central Great Barrier Reef. After months of intensive aerial and underwater surveys, researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies have released an initial estimate of the death toll from coral bleaching. The impact, which is still unfolding, changes dramatically from north to south along the 2300km length of the Reef. “We found on average, that 35% of the corals are now dead or dying on 84 reefs that we surveyed along the northern and central sections of the Great Barrier Reef, between Townsville and Papua New Guinea,” says Professor Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University (JCU). “Some reefs are in much better shape, especially from Cairns southwards, where the average mortality is estimated at only 5%. —ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, May 30, 2016

A child, I dreamed of a metropolis of no kind I knew.
I can figure it out later, I said. Then came the boutique shoes.
What did I understand about those except to say no?
Over the tulle, I turned up my nose.

I spoke from the temple of childhood, from the fever-dream of growing up,
predicted no water to drink, more lost land, moaned, it will all
be gone soon—Saks Fifth, the city pool, the Port O’ Call, ousted
like Clyde Beatty's circus and its lions--to make room for other recreations.

In my first home, they taught fashion which is disguised prejudice
and manners which are mostly separation and meanness.
But what is my recollection? I was all mouth and adolescence.
I had yet to learn only compassion with gravy on its chin will sustain us.

And could I have dreamed an ocean stilled by its freight of CO2,
its islands of plastic? No. I could never imagine saltwater
stretched over  uncountable suffocated lives could not
foretell the piled and boundless bones of coral ravaged by a yacht.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and write in the Ozarks. She is the author of two books and three chapbooks, most recently Persephone on the Metro. See her work in Concis, Rat’s Ass Review, Mom Egg Review and upcoming in the Kentucky Review.