MYTHINFORMATION

by Philip Stern

written in serious wordplay

Now the emergingcy

is over,

caution and funding

are over.

 

Yesterday, one of our leaders went mything.

He said it was a hoax.

Then said

it would not blast.

 

Then sold equine and oquine

and proposed bleach

to the fringe bleacher seats

at his attent show.

 

He watched as

the wildfirus burned

ungoverned,

saw it sprinkle hot ashes

 

on refrigerated

covid wagons

circling hospitals

where breathless bodies stiffened.

 

Yet mythed messages still burn,

about dangers of masking

and vaccines that damnage DNA,

still cause national dysfusion.

 

So do we now just forget

that we gallowed

over one million deaths

to happen?

 

Philip Stern is 95, had a poem published in The Atlantic in 1957, wrote pop songs in the 60s, and started writing poetry again after retiring from college teaching.

REMNANTS

by Liz Ahl

“The U.S. national emergency to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic ended Monday as President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan congressional resolution to bring it to a close after three years — weeks before it was set to expire…” —NPR, April 11, 2023

                                                

 

Still, these tattered masking tape traces 

on the scuffed tile floors, hieroglyphs  

of our attempts to demarcate safe zones  

of coming and going through  

the narrow public vestibules. 

 

The box of “take one” surgical masks 

still perched on its pedestal at the entrance, 

offers only its lonely cardboard; empty, 

too, each strategically placed 

hand sanitizer dispenser, which exhales  

a sad, shallow breath when pressed. 

Some smudged plexiglass remains, 

having been more difficult to erect 

and therefore more bother to remove. 

 

Outside, the windswept tumbleweed 

of a facemask, its torn elastic bands 

flapping their tired fronds against 

the asphalt with the other winter trash. 

 

Refrigerator trucks rededicated 

to the chilled storage and transport  

of anything but the human deceased.  

Small town campus ice arena 

bearing the slightest scars of cot-legs 

and privacy screens, the strange dream 

of soldiers fading to fragments. 

 

A ghost of myself, figment out of phase, 

measures distances, haunts the far edges  

of what bustles and churns, a clamorous  

bullying desire for “normalcy” 

almost passing for “normalcy.” 

 

And of course, the counted dead, 

the dead uncounted. The brutal 

and insufficient arithmetic. The long  

and the short, the landmine damage 

lurking in bodies, biding time 

until the next innocent footstep. 

And of course, the virus, not cc-d  

on the report of its demotion 

from emergency to some other rank, 

still lingers on the perpetual threshold: 

overstayed guest or one just arriving? 

It’s hard to know any more, if we ever could, 

the coming from the going.  

Liz Ahl is the author of A Case for Solace (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022) and Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017). Recent publications include a poem about Buzz Aldrin in the anthology Space: 100 Poems (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and poems in recent issues of TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, and Revolute. She lives in Holderness, New Hampshire.

AFGHANISTAN

by Robert Halleck

I didn't like "These Boots Are Made For Walking."

I loved "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?"

It needed to end.

I'm going into the garage

to find my old shirt

that says

Robert Halleck is a member of San Diego's Not Dead Yet Poets, a Vietnam War veteran, and a man who continues to write poetry to help him understand life.