ANOTHER RAPID TEST

by Devon Balwit

The Biden Administration to Begin Distributing At-Home, Rapid COVID-⁠19 Tests to Americans for Free. Americans can order a test online HERE

It’s just a cold, we say. We’re feeling fine.

But want to reassure, so swab away—

Another rapid test without a line.

 

The tests are nearly impossible to find.

We call around or treasure hunt all day.

It’s just a cold, we say. We’re feeling fine.

 

We hide our coughs from those who’d mind.

But none of us can forego pay.

Another rapid test without a line.

 

The law now makes tests free—how kind—

but where to find them? Hunt and pray.

It’s just a cold, we say. We’re feeling fine.

 

We’re three years into this new grind—

Vaccinated, boostered—the whole array.

It’s just a cold, we say. We’re feeling fine.

Another rapid test without a line.

 

When not teaching, Devon Balwit chases chickens in Portland, OR. Her most recent collections are Rubbing Shoulders with the Greats [Seven Kitchens Press, 2020] and Dog-Walking in the Shadow of Pyongyang [Nixes Mate Books, 2021]. 

WHAT IS THE AIR?

by Ralph James Savarese

Source: The New York Times archive

An elderly person said, “What is the air?” gasping as much

     with her arms as with her lungs.

How could I answer this woman? I do not know what it is

     any more than she.

I guess it must be a mother feeding her babes little morsels

     of oxygen. A clear, blue bib.

Or I guess it’s the wind taking a nap, the clouds a comforter

     letting dreams rain down.

Or I guess the air is itself an elderly person, death’s new

     confidante. What has it heard?

Or maybe it’s a commuter on the breathing Tube. (The rasping

     sounds like medieval German.)

“Stand away from the doors.”

Stand away from each other! The virus is sprouting in broad

     zones and narrow zones, growing among black folks

     as among white (more among black folks).

“I give them the same, I receive them the same,” a super-

     spreader says.

Perhaps the air is a bathhouse for lungs. All the panting they

     could want!

The Right once denounced promiscuous mingling yet now

     promiscuously mingles itself.

The air, madam, is an unregistered weapon. In America

     everyone carries.

Ralph James Savarese is the author of two books of prose, Reasonable People and See It Feelingly, and one collection of poetry, Republican Fathers, due out in October.

7899

by Promise Li

USS Ross firing a Tomahawk missile towards the Shayrat Airbase base. —U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Robert S. Price/Released via Wikipedia.

As of March 28, 2017 [i.e. prior to the firing of 59 Tomahawks that reached Shayrat Airbase], the U.S. and coalition have conducted a total of 19,300 strikes (11,460 Iraq / 7,840 Syria). —US Department of Defense

While the attack [in Idlib Province on Tuesday] was among the deadliest uses of chemical weapons in Syria in years, it was far from an isolated case. During the war, the Assad government has been accused of regularly using chlorine gas, which is less deadly than the agent used on Tuesday and is legal in its commercial form. According to the Violations Documentation Center, an antigovernment watchdog, more than 1,100 Syrians have been killed in chemical weapons and gas attacks. —The New York Times, April 5, 2017

They say sarin flies high,
when it touches
turns lungs into deadlocks;
instead of death,
knots cough death into tedium.

Do you remember the last time—
unacknowledged,
No: only then knots were not yet familiar
only to think they know,
but the rhythms don't add up;
fit for numbers then,
now elegies unnumbered,
and where were the answers when
gory and mute drooling cool poison,
sirens unsounded, not songs but only
tuneless coughs unmourned.

Last time
remembering to triple-knot
those shoes
as not to trip bloody.

Promise Li studies early modern literature at Occidental College and is also a socialist activist in Los Angeles.