LINES

by Diane Vogel Ferri

People lined up in their cars at a food distribution site in San Antonio, Tex., in April 2020.Credit...Credit: William Luther/The San Antonio Express-News, via Associated Press and The New York Times.

My wall calendar helps me to visualize

my life, the plans I hold dear, the people

I must see so they also see me

At first the lines were through the

scribbling on my calendar,  an oddity,

disappointing at most—a temporary month

Sometimes there were two lines,

an X-ing out, a permanent loss

I catalogued the failures in my journal

Then the lines were of standing humans

waiting to vote, car-lines of hungry children

waiting for the food school had denied them

lines circling the parking lots for tests,

lines at the border, lines at the shelters,

lines at the unemployment office,

lines in the streets to confront the wizard 

behind the curtain, asking when we will be normal? 

But he was a fraud, a canceler of science, of truth

Freedom was not taken by a government

freedom was not taken at all, only

innocent lives, their coffins in orderly lines

The lines are now for a miracle,

for we who are left, whose lives have not

been crossed out, who are free to live.

Diane Vogel Ferri is a teacher, poet, and writer living in Solon, Ohio. Her newest novel is No Life But This: A Novel of Emily Warren Roebling. Her essays have been published in Scene Magazine, Raven’s Perch, Yellow Arrow Journal, and Good Works Review among others. Her poems can be found in numerous journals such as Wend Poetry, Her Words, Rubbertop Review, and Poet Lore. Her previous publications are Liquid Rubies (poetry), The Volume of Our Incongruity (poetry), The Desire Path (novel).

MICAH IN THE MIDST OF THE PANDEMIC

by Katherine M. Clarke

Micah

Our puppy arrives, six pounds
of squirming golden fluff chirping and burrowing
under my arm, trembling against my breast.

I reach back to my mother’s knee to find
what I’ve forgotten I know, singing
knick-knack paddy whack give the dog a bone

and nestle him into his crate with Mr. Krinkle
whose face he chews off but who still obligingly rustles,
offering rope hands and feet to gnaw on in the night.

As pandemic chaos reigns outside, love grows inside,
my beloved Lily handling and tending this small body
bursting into life, insisting on what he wants and needs

tired or not, frightened or not, a life counting on her.
She walks softly in stocking feet to feel him underfoot
to know when he races over her toes to hide.

Scooped up Micah rides high along her arm,
a pasha attended by his servant.
Firsts abound—sleeping through the night,

tasting snow, eating grass, throwing up.
Accepting a collar and lead as she hustles
him out the side door to the yard.

Victory, cheering, applause. Relief for both.
No need for social distance as the lord of all wriggliness
plays with Delores, a stuffed sheep, and Road-Kill Buzzy,

the flat woodchuck toy. A spiky rubber teething ring
on the shower curtain spread over the living room rug
as if a sphere of the virus had leapt from the television

screen filled with images of tents and stadiums for hospitals
warehouses loaded with coffins, trucks filled with bodies
while we shelter at home, grateful, joy strewn all around.

Katherine M. Clarke is a professor emeritus of Antioch University New England. Her essays and poetry have appeared in Writing it Real, Breath and Shadow, Wordgathering, Oasis, The Sun Magazine, and Northern New England Review.

TO BELIEVE IS SIMPLE

by Mara Adamitz Scrupe

A man            is asked. He replies. One day my children's.          Children
will be a minority. In their own.              Country. Thus             taken. This country.
Taken away. There is history.           To consider.   Black haired. Black eyed.Souls.
Like any. Others.         Spoke to     animals. Shoulders to wheels.  Took them.  
In.        On.       Their shoulders. Took    their.   Names.       White man’s.
Names.    The man.        Worries. About      whiteness.      Purity.          

The outside.               Not the inside.

Schedules. Tables. Graphs. Comparisons.   Color. Material.          Or immaterial.
Or mostly. Having to do with           shape. Head.          Or nose. How deep set.
Slanted. The eyes.        Purity. At stake. Negroes. Slavs.    At the bottom. Was. Is. At
stake. Little. Brown. Bottom people.   Bottom. Of the heap. Or behind   walls. Or
thereabouts. Presumed        intelligence. Or. Lack.  Our grandchildren’s.
Inheritance. Systems. Selections. Cranial          measurements. Adjudications.

Phrenologically          speaking.

Tests administered.            Which people. Took.    Anything. Would. Do. Anything. Only.
Let. Me. In. Others had.   Reasons. Reason. On             their. Side. They said. They
say. Ratios are off. The names. Impossible. Everything. Everything.    Things end.
Ending. With a vowel.   Strike it.             The ships.  Coffins. Teem. Not satin-
lined. Rafts. Not immutable. Not sad. Beyond. Beyond          sadness. Beyond tears.            
A thing of the world. This.    World.             To be              endured.       Anything else. Is.

Wreckage. No room for.        No                   room.

Beginnings. Begin. A woman            starts              toward. Concrete block. Shower
head. Bath. Bathe. A woman wants. Starts        toward. Walk. Bathe. Believe. In this
simple. A thing. Thing.         To enfold. Behold. It’s. Simple.      Take these clothes. Yes.
Mine. But I. I give.   Them. If I       can. Have. Search my            pubis.
Filth. Disease. I will.    For simple. For example. For begin. Beyond. For. My.
Daughter. Sister. Try  to hold. Back. But to believe. Is. Simple.  A bath. Clean.   Bathe.


Mara Adamitz Scrupe is a poet and visual artist. In 2014 the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (NFSPS) named her the winner of the Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition Prize for her first volume of poetry BEAST which was published by the NSFPS Press in 2015. She is also the author of a chapbook entitled Sky Pilot published by Finishing Line Press. In 2015, Scrupe’s poems have been shortlisted or named finalist for several national and international literary awards including the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, Australia; the Canterbury Poetry Festival University of Kent Prize and Poet of the Year (UK); the Wenlock Prize in Poetry (UK); the Auburn Witness Prize in Poetry (Auburn University); the Janet B. McCabe Prize for Poetry (Ruminate Magazine); the Oberon Poetry Prize (Oberon Poetry Foundation, New York); and the Tomaž Šalamun Chapbook Prize (VERSE Literary Journal University of Richmond, Virginia).

SPENT

by Winston H. Plowes





An omen lost at birth.
This island on the edge of light and secrets.
This stretch of sound
less-visited, still and unclaimed.

A hart guarded
like a freshly cut trench
surrounded by layers of love.

Something in the tiny pine coffins
sounds like summer had stopped beating.

Lifeless in part,
afraid of burying the detail.


Author’s Notes: This is a transcription of a found poem in the erasure style where all the above words appear in an article in The Times (of London) on 17th January 17,  2014 "New Yorkers demand access to mass graves on convict island". Original article by Will Pavia addresses the concern over access rights to bodies of young children buried by convicts on Hart Island.

Editor’s Note: More information at The Hart Island Project.


Winston H.Plowes writes his words on a narrowboat on England’s inland waterways. His compositions have been widely published, hopefully making people pause and ponder the magical details of life.

MARS

by Howie Good

The god of carnage has grown

a balding man’s stringy ponytail.

Red, he says, means danger.

He shrugs his cruelly thin shoulders.

A tractor stands abandoned

in a field of what looks from here

like black puddles of blood.

The future will burn a full 40 days.

We will walk beside our coffins.

Starvelings will stare out

from behind barbed wire.

Mothers will shriek. There will be

nice grass in the cemetery.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Cryptic Endearments from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. He has a number of chapbooks forthcoming, including Elephant Gun from Dog on a Chain Press. His poetry has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. goodh51(at)gmail.com.