ELEGY FOR THE LUNG

by Robert Américo Esnard

The sun streaks a dull rust 

over the Hudson, 

the dusty air shimmers metallic,

and I am overcome 

with awareness of my own blood.

 

I can feel it, not rushing, but crawling,

a slow advance. 

My whole body a fleshy host.

Incredible, 

the small power of a protein 

 

to sustain a whole body: 

to capture, 

to carry, to climb, to clear. 

We, less thankless 

more heedless. I rarely consider:

 

the shape of a fluid forms 

its function.

A tiny shift is enough to poison 

a whole body: 

to capture contagion, to carry 

 

contaminants through the blood. 

A breath of rust 

climbing as the branches burn,

a body overcome,

making a slow advance to dust.

Robert Américo Esnard was born and raised in the Bronx, NY. He studied Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Dartmouth College. His work has been published by or is forthcoming in Alternating Current Press, Alternative Field, Cutbank, Glass, Lunch Ticket, New York Quarterly, and several anthologies. He is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet.

THE MEN IN BLOOD RED POWER TIES

by Howie Good

I have seen them corrupt water and air, spew contagion when they speak, block the light from windows with their empty bulk. I have seen them gather armies of the deluded and the stupid, place the law in the keeping of shit-stained hands, turn away smirking from the motherless, the helpless, the lost. I have seen them obscenely rub up against dictators and corpses, reserve for themselves the best or the most, erase the last trace of truth with acid, chisels, and a blowtorch. I have seen them make a crisis of every loving gesture, a crime of every beautiful thought.

Howie Good is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.

SILK MASK

by Imogen Arate

Searching through soft squares
Inherited neglected
Never found occasions for outings
Though always kept
For such chance excursions

Now it’s her time to shine
After resting during uncounted seasons
Since those loving hands of one
Who also rests now
In a forgotten crypt
Saved her from other fates

But might have never dreamt
She’d hide the visage
From escaping contagion
Rather than festoon
The reserved blouse
Or sweet dresses of spring

Imogen Arate is an award-winning poet and the Executive Producer and Host of the weekly poetry podcast Poets and Muses. She has written poetry since her tween years—in four languages and published in two. Her poems “A Declaration of Loyalty” and “Sanctuary” took home the second and third prizes of the 2020 National Federation of Press Women's at-large Communications contest.  She is also the 2019 Phoenix Poetry Slam Erotic Haiku Deathmatch Champion.

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.

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.