WHAT SETTLES WHEN WE LAY OUR BODIES DOWN TO REST

by Paula J. Lambert

Source: The New York Times

Really, it’s just the claggy kind of snot struggling

to decide if it wants to stay low in your chest—

 

where your heart beats and every breath passes

through—or if, rising, clinging to the last breath,

 

it has the strength to finally release itself

to the world. We know by now what can travel 

 

on the tiny particles of our gasping exhalations: 

disease, devotion, the promise that death is no end. 

 

We might wish otherwise, drifting in and out 

of these strange dreams of drowning. We know

 

what happened in Nepal, North Carolina, Texas. 

We all might be called mystics when, prone, 

 

our bodies wrestle with desire, each wobble of faith 

in our resolve to go on a little death of its own.  

Paula J. Lambert of Columbus, Ohio, has published eleven collections of poetry including Terms of Venery, Revised (Sheila-Na-Gig 2025) and Sinkhole (Bottlecap 2025). Her work has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

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.

(RED) HEAT / HOT / HAT (RED)

by Ron Riekki

“By 2050, the Northeast can expect approximately 650 more deaths each year because of extreme heat, the [National Climate] Assessment found.” —“Dangerous heat wave brings misery to 195 million from New Mexico to Maine,” CNN, July 19, 2019

for Robert Francis, Mark Strand, Hayden Carruth, and Reiko Redmonde

Heat and the colors of heat, like coal-mine hells,
and it gets so hot that the moon looks burnt
and the horizon itself is now a broiler pan
and my girlfriend in Lille says, “The fan broke.”
What about the AC?  “What AC?  We don’t have AC.”
And she tells me a neighbor died.  I say, “How old?
as if that’s an acceptable excuse, as if degrees
represent years.  And I remember a line from
Shakespeare: “the very birds are mute.”  And
I remember a line from a newspaper article today:
“June of this year was the hottest June on record

for the world.”  Temperatures climb and I think
of the moment in Free Solo where the guy fell
and we gasped until the parachute opened up
and we aren’t the ones gasping now, but we're
the ones falling.  And when I broke my ankle
in the military, one of the corpsmen said,
“Put heat on it” and there was another
corpsman there and he said, “No, put ice
on it.”  And they argued about it while I looked
down at the purple and brown and orange
under my skin, wondering if I’d ever walk again.

Ron Riekki's latest book is Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.  On August 25, he appears at Revolution Books in Berkeley with Berkeley Poet Laureate Rafael Jesus Gonzalez and Sacramento Poet Laureate Julia Connor.