I DO BLAME YOU

by David Radavich

 You brought us the gift

 of potential death.

 

 Not wearing a mask,

 not distancing,

 

 not deigning

 to get a vaccine.

 

 And now the whole

 family is sick—

 generations—

 

 and the threat

 has taken up residence

 in our very house.

 

 Thank you 

 for reminding us

 

 the end is not far off—

 maybe soon—

 

 disease is

 a form of politics,

 

 and we are all one

 in our shared suffering.

 

 If we didn’t believe

 in community, we do now.

 

 Let us hope healing 

 comes fast and the goat

 scapes into the woods.

David Radavich's latest narrative collection is America Abroad: An Epic of Discovery (2019), companion volume to his earlier America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007). Recent lyric collections are Middle-East Mezze (2011) and The Countries We Live In (2014). His forthcoming book is Unter der Sonne / Under the Sun: German Poems from Deutscher Lyrik Verlag.

BREATHING IN FLORIDA

by Mickey J. Corrigan

Fort Myers resident Wilson Cardenas tosses a cast net during sunset at Bunche Beach Preserve on Tuesday, June 30, 2020. Saharan dust is blanketing parts of U.S. including SWFL. Photo by Andrew West, The News-Press, July 1, 2020

The sky's a dirty white
Saharan dust brushing
through crusty air
pulsing in and out
bruised blue lungs
crablegs scuttling skin
burnt to the touch.

Weddings are off,
funerals are on again.

You breathe great again
on the sand, in bars, half-naked
bodies clumped around you
over cheap beers, laughs
strained burgundy faces
maskless, so careless.

Happy hour's brisk,
the ERs overcrowded.

Throw dust on the data,
another round to your health!
Joke about the washed out
camped in steamy hideouts
wringing scrubbed hands
germfree and chapped.

Red sunset fireworks
in a sky full of sand.

This is the kind of dirt
you throw at poetry too
making it shine darker
revealing bleak truths.


Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes Florida noir with a dark humor. Novels include  Project XX about a school shooting (Salt Publishing, UK, 2017) and What I Did for Love a spoof of Lolita (Bloodhound Books, 2019). Kelsay Books recently published the poetry chapbook the disappearing self. Grandma Moses Press will publish Florida Man later this year.

MAY DAY REVERIE FOR A PLAGUE YEAR

by Steven Croft




Let us go madcap into the outside air physicians tint
with rolling globes like schools of fish that find the darkness
of our lungs, lodge and sting there, a cyanide of suffocation.
Let us go out, walk past every microbe merciless and seeking
like a crow's flat eye

To the Exchange Club Fairgrounds where the Dixieland
Carnival has parked in silent rows gathering the field's dust
for the last two months, unpack its trucks, let the carnies
fire up the Ferris wheel and merry-go-round, share our
cotton candy, hear the cries

Of the game booths' winners and losers, fun with probability
where stakes are low, but as night wears we'll remember
the risk we've taken, repack the carnival, carry a day's memory
of joy between our hands to the solitary wards of our homes,
our national hospital we fled briefly and against all advice.


Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He has recent poems in Willawaw Journal, Sky Island Journal, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Third Wednesday, Red Eft Review, San Pedro River Review, Poets Reading the News, Gyroscope Review, and other places.

FACE MASKS

by Ed Goodell 

When I stare at your masked mouth
I think of the girls
I’d speak with on the phone
That hung from the dining-room wall
of my parents’ home.

I’m fifteen, maybe sixteen,
Pacing the herringbone floor,
Tangled up in that short coiled cord
Of youth. Not seeing mouths,
I can barely hear their words.

You have to see it to believe it,
And words without tongues
To heaven never go. Maybe
They mean it, maybe they don’t  
When they whisper, “Eddy, my baby.”

This I’ve learned: Something of the lips  
Lends substance to utterance
And unmouthed words lack teeth.
Then and now, in these viral times,
We must see the words we speak.

Day is done. Let us slip inside
Our tender quarantine.
We’ll wash our hands, remove our masks
—Don’t touch! One meter apart!—
Words, mouth, love are all I ask.

Ed Goodell is a teacher of English and journalism at Jakarta Intercultural School in Indonesia. He is sheltered at home with his son, Yohanes, and wife, Irma D. Peña, to whom this poem is dedicated.

OFF DUTY

by Ann Neuser Lederer

Photo by Carol Dorf 

A man crawls
into his own bedroom
window.

It's already night.
He might be contagious.

Soon, a tone—a lone violin—
seeps through the shut room's door.

A grandma nudges—you
can join in with your dad.

A few bars, back and forth.
An unseen whispered conversation.

In the dark of the morning
he descends.

Instead of the bus he walks.
Invisible birds announce it is day.

All playgrounds are locked, the schools deserted—
the children still safe in their sleep.

Ann Neuser Lederer's poetry and nonfiction are published in journals such as Diagram, Passages North, Brevity, 2 River Review, and UCity Review whose "noteworthy" section presents ten of her poems. Her work is also honored in Best of the Net and Ohio State University's Vandewater Poetry Award; published in anthologies such as A Call to Nursing and The Country Doctor Revisited; and in her chapbooks Approaching Freeze (2003), The Undifferentiated (2003), Weaning the Babies (2007), and Fly Away Home (2019). Ann was born in Ohio and has worked there and surrounding states as a Registered Nurse.

BREATHLESS

by Ann E. Wallace

I have spent these slow motion
weeks watching the world scramble
and panic through the 8 square inch surface
of my phone, cupped in the palm of my hand.

I hold these 8 square inches in the palm
of my hand, attached to my body
confined to the fifteen square feet
of my couch, or my queen size bed

Up a flight of stairs I cannot walk
without gasping for the air flowing
through my 1800 square foot home,
in my city filled with 270,000 other souls

All gasping for air, and all I need
is enough to pump through my 5’2”
body, not too much, but I can see
on my screen that I am not alone

In my need, and I can see why, though
it all makes no sense, my small body
panting and blacking out on my red couch
inside my red house cannot get enough.

Ann E. Wallace is writing poetry and teaching her college classes from home in Jersey City, NJ while she and her daughter recover from COVID-19. Her poetry collection Counting by Sevens (2019) is available from Main Street Rag, and her published work can be found online at AnnWallacePhD.com. She is on Twitter @annwlace409.

SIX FEET

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley and co-edits One Sentence Poems. Her chapbooks Various Lies, Lion Hunt, and Water Weight are available from Finishing Line Press, Plan B Press, and Right Hand Pointing respectively.

FIERCE FRAGILE SEASONS

a poem in four parts
by Jill Crainshaw

I

mama cardinal studies me as i stand
in rain-wet morning sunlight

i see fire flash in her feathers
when she flits and flashes

from fencepost to flaming forsythia
nesting in preparation for whatever

springtime color waits to touch the earth

II

sepia-soaked scrapbooks ensconce
human fragilities exposed

i study faces retreating from
fiery colors of aliveness buried

in catacombs where mortal coils
were torn away too soon from butterflies

waiting even now to meet the sunrise

III

night settles down into streets emptied
of laughing children and lingering lovers

spinning cocoons to hide fragile dreams
while the world shuts out a sinister stalker

a brave pinion pushes open a window
slips a lonely song into the silence and hope

throbs in voices that swell together on the breeze

IV

backyard cardinals carry
springtime rhythms in their beaks

wrens domicile in the abandoned eaves
of the church belfry next door

and we humans study yet again how to
weave into our nests fiery threads of hope

longing to color unsettled nights with song


Jill Crainshaw is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and a liturgical theology professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.