THE AMERICAN VARIANT

by Pepper Trail

It has always circulated among us

We know that, and we know

Mutations happen all the time

So what makes this so virulent

So easily transmitted

Neighbor to neighbor, father to son?

 

It is airborne, that is clear

Transmitted on the breath

On the words carried on the breath

Capable of crossing great distances

Broadcast on the seething turbulence

Filling our air, our airwaves

 

Experts speak of it with awe

The terrible beauty of its design

How it targets our vulnerabilities

Binds to our fears

Produces an inflammation

Disorderly and wild

 

There are treatments

Not painless but effective

But the problem is this:

The genius of this variant

Its most deadly symptom

Is denial of the disease itself

 

And so the epidemic rages

The world waits for the crisis

For the fever to break

To burn itself out

Or to infect every last one of us

Burn everything up, at last

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

STYMIED

by George Held

T***p wears mask in public for 1st time. The president told reporters, “I've never been against masks,” before departing the White House for Walter Reed Medical Center. Credit: Patrick Semansky/AP via ABC News, July 12, 2020

That is no planet for old men, or young –
the Earth contaminated by a virus
so deadly that in one great city
one in three hundred has become

infected and in a tiny Arkansas town
one in nineteen, and all the while
the most powerful man on Earth
wears no mask, except at Walter Reed.

Maybe a mask offers no more protection
than a rubber with a hole in it
but still, the President might wear one
at least to show concern for prophylaxis;

so those who mask up to walk to the post
office must encounter strapping young women
and men whose aplomb, arrogance, or disregard
for more vulnerable citizens

lends even a commonplace sortie
a risk like charging a machinegun
nest on Iwo Jima. But most old folks know
their time is up and dying from the virus

can be more efficient than falling victim
to a malignancy. An aged human
is but a decrepit thing, unlikely to remain
a golden bird upon a golden bough,

much less to sing to a careless emperor…

George Held, a longtime contributor to TheNewVerse.News, is sheltering in Eastern Long Island.

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.

ZOOXANTHELLAE

by Eben Gering

“We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are 'isolated.' They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere.” —Sonia Sotomayor dissenting from the majority opinion in Utah v. Strieff, June 20, 2016

There’s a soft green thing inside the stony corals
we call Fingers, Brains, Tongues, that can turn
sunlight into fuel;
this is how the corals grow—an umbilical connection
to our planet’s mothering star.

Something we’ve done to the sea
is making them leave,
and leaving
bones of living reefs
to gasp at wet lenses
that flood with a harshening light.

We know some of why
this is happening—
acidification,
a kind of infection,
climatic instability.

And we also know,
in a better world,
bleached corals can grow again.

If their symbionts return, they’ll sing
the many-colored songs
of the healthy, living
reef.


Eben Gering is an evolutionary biologist at Michigan State University.