MORTALITY EVENT

by Erin Murphy

Scientists Still Searching for the Pathogen Behind the East's Songbird Epidemic: In a new report, experts ruled out a range of causes, but they still recommend taking down feeders until the source of the disease is identified. —Audubon, July 8, 2021. Photo: A young Blue Jay admitted to the Blue Ridge Wildlife Center in Virginia with an unknown illness. Credit: Blue Ridge Wildlife Center via Audubon.

Songbirds stumble,  

crusty eyes gunked shut  

with conjunctivitis.  

 

Out of an abundance  

of caution, we remove  

feeders where they cluster  

 

like us to cluck about  

the latest scuttlebutt.  

Hands gloved, we dump  

 

the double-bagged dead,  

muttering that it’s redundant.  

We who have too much  

 

do not fund hungry children  

but grumble when unable  

to fuss over cardinals  

 

in lush gardens. We suffer  

from an abundance  

of abundance. 

Erin Murphy’s latest book, Human Resources, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Diode, The American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her awards include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, The Normal School Poetry Prize, and a Best of the Net award. She is Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review and Professor of English at Penn State Altoona.

WHEN NOTHING IS OKAY

by Jen Schneider

From San Francisco to South Carolina, a spate of shootings claimed the lives of people celebrating or just taking a drive over the Fourth of July weekend. Chicago saw one of its bloodiest holiday weekends in memory, with 17 killed and 70 wounded by gunfire. The incidents come amid fears the coronavirus pandemic, protests against racism, rising gun sales and an election year could make for a particularly deadly summer. —AP, July 6, 2020.

“Baby, I think I’m in trouble”
“It’s going to be okay.” 

The words fluttered off pale, water-starved lips that puckered and pursed at a rate quicker than my brain neurons could process what had just happened and what was about to occur. Beeps and blips punctured the air. My heart first guided, then pulled, and ultimately produced speech. Mine.

“It’s going to be okay,” I repeated. In case he didn’t hear it the first time.

Uttered in a place and a time where there was no room for reason, and no chance to undo what was already done, I spoke. Again.

“You’re alright.”

As I heard myself utter letter after letter and form a string of syllables meant to carry but only served to tangle. The sounds of my own voice echoed in the broken chamber of my mind.

Ten, nine, eight. My breath paused and his became more labored.

One final squeeze—hard, then harder, harder still. His. Then nothing.

Formerly intertwined fingers fell limp. My own muscles turned to stone as tears fell.

I continue to whisper—It’s going to be okay.

As reality took on new life. Repetition does not—will not—cannot
turn a lie into truth.

Nothing is going to be okay.

Thick arms clothed in heavy blue cotton touched, then grasped, my shoulders.
“M’am. Let’s go. Step back.”

I resisted. Turning right, then left. Right again. Only nothing was right. The sheer lacey fabric of my skirt tore as my knee shifted and my body gave way to the organized resistance. The skirt was a gift. He bought it for me on a whim, after he caught my gaze settle on the window mannequin. So different from my usual taste. Far beyond our usual budget. His eyes twinkled as I unwrapped the red satin bow, lifted the cardboard box top, and fingered the pink and purple tissue paper. Finally, finding the skirt.

I know not why I chose today to pull the skirt of my closet hanger that day. The weatherman forecasted falling temps. The skirt called to me, nonetheless.

He was pleased. All those years and I could still make him smile without even trying.

“Looking good, girl.” he stated and then let out a long, low whistle. “Let’s get out of here.”

We took the apartment steps by two and ventured downtown.
Walking. Talking. Laughing. Until the pop.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Silence.
Hustle. Bustle. Quick. Tape
wrapped wounds as
blood continued to spray.
“Baby?” Silence.

What then does one do
when the world stops
beating yet the sun
continues to rise?

Sheer cotton fabric
soaks tears
of love and loss.

I close my eyes
and see the world
only as I wish
it to be.

Jen Schneider is an educator, attorney, and writer. She lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Philadelphia. Her work appears in The Popular Culture Studies Journal, unstamatic, Zingara Poetry Review, Streetlight Magazine, Chaleur Magazine, LSE Review of Books, and other literary and scholarly journals.

CHICKEN

by Susan Vespoli

“The body of someone who has died from a suspected opioid overdose. In January, 2017, there were sixty-five overdose deaths in Montgomery County [Ohio]. At times, there has not been enough room at the morgue for all the bodies, and the county coroner has been obliged to rent space from local funeral homes and lease refrigerated trailers for more space.”  From “Faces of an Epidemic,” The New Yorker, October 30, 2017 issue. Photo by Philip Montgomery; text by Margaret Talbot.

    “I didn’t cause it, can’t control it, can’t cure it.” —Al-anon slogan

I tried to write a poem
about how the opioid epidemic
had stolen one of my children,
now an adult,
and how it threatens
like a terrorist
to take another,
about how there’s nothing
a mother can do but watch
the way a body thins, how teeth dissolve,
how beings disappear
from behind their own eyes:
the brown or green irises darkening,
the eyeballs resting
in more hollow sockets—
but the words, lines, stanzas
of my poem attempts
were all failures.

So instead I will tell about a golden hen
that appeared in my backyard
like magic
to stand on her four-prong-star feet,
her body an oval covered with feathers
a strawberry blond fluffy as fur
backlit by the sun
when she bent to sip water
from the pale green bowl
I’d placed beneath the Palo Verde tree.
At first she strutted like a little queen
around the center of the grassy expanse
surrounded by oleanders,
sort of haughty, wide-eyed, solo,
but then she began to trust me,
sidling up to my ankles,
saying bwak, bwak, bwak
like she had some news to share
and I grew to sort of love her.
Then one day, as it happens,
I looked for her and she was gone.


Susan Vespoli lives in Phoenix, AZ where the opioid epidemic is alive and well. Her work has been published in a variety of spots including Mom Egg Review, TheNewVerse.News, Write Bloody, and dancing girl press.

ACUTE

by Barbara A Taylor




acute trumpitis  
the doctors’ surgeries
are overflowing

"Each day demands that I write and that my fingers touch and feel the earth." Barbara A Taylor's free verse poems, renku, haiga, haibun, award winning haiku, tanka, and other Japanese short form poetry appear in many international journals and anthologies on line and in print. She lives in the Rainbow Region, Northern NSW, Australia. Diverse poems with audio are here and here.

SMACKED DOWN

by Bill Sullivan

Congress has historically treated drug abuse as a malady afflicting mostly poor, minority communities, best dealt with by locking people up for long periods of time. The epidemic of drug overdose deaths currently ravaging white populations in cities and towns across the country has altered this line of thinking, and forced lawmakers to acknowledge that addiction is a problem that knows no racial barriers and can be best addressed with treatment. —NY Times Editorial, Jan. 25, 2016. Photo: A 20-year-old heroin addict agreed to go to detox through the Gloucester [MA] Police Department Angel program in January after he overdosed. Credit: Katherine Taylor for NY Times, Jan. 24, 2016

blue nails  ashen skin
                                           pin size pupils
barely a breath
                                           another flat line looms
his savior if found
                                           a narcan syringe
white brown or black
                                           a teen or thirty something
or an aging boomer
                                           who went from prescriptions
pushed by physicians
                                           to bags of scag

he might collapse
                                           on a city street
or in a country lane
                                           be clad in a suit
or laborer's boots
                                           be an absent father
or live in lover
                                           once a dreamer
or a pragmatist
                                           now possessed
he rides a demon horse
                                           over a cliff
will it be a hospital
                                           or the morgue
for the man
                                           with the opioid eyes

for years jeered
                                           as a crackhead
or junkie
                                           he was left to die
or tossed into a cell
                                           but when the disease
infected the suburbs
                                           the country lanes
the club house
                                           and the gated estate
it was rehab for the addict
                                           progress no doubt
but too late for the poor
                                           who had no care or aid
who filled a grave
                                           or crawled around
a prison cave


Bill Sullivan is from Rhode Island where in the past five years over a thousand residents have overdosed on opioids, mainly heroin.  He is the co-author two books on twentieth century poetry, co-producer of two films and his poems have appeared in a number of on line and print publications.  His latest publication is Loon Lore in Prose and Poetry.