PEACE TO ALL

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Many people who worked with Pope Leo XIV when he was Bishop Robert Prevost of Chiclayo, Peru, couldn’t hold back tears when his election was announced on May 8. For them, it was not just a sign that God answered their prayers for a new pope who would follow Francis’s path, but also the confirmation that they had been guided by an extraordinary leader. —CRUX, May 9, 2025

Peace be with you. 

We are suffering 
the pandemic. 
We are hungry 
and we need 
to breathe. 

We need 
oxygen tanks 
in Chiclayo. 
I will get you 
the tanks. 

We need food. 

We need to walk 
the empty streets
and knock on 
every door
and leave 

food and water.

We need to bring 
the sick to hospital 
and help them to breathe. 

This is pastoral work.
This is Archbishop 
Robert Prevost,
now Pope Leo 
the Fourteenth.

Indran Amirthanayagam has just published his translation of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books, 2025). Other recent publications include Seer (Hanging Loose Press) and The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil). He is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Mad Hat Press published his love song to Haiti: Powèt Nan Pò A (Poet of the Port). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is a collection of Indran's poems. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

UNNATURAL TIMES

by Renee Williams

KFF

After the pandemic, it’s natural to come out of hiding

to share wine with friends at a photography opening

 

to hug and greet one another after years of trepidation

to see faces and smiles and to hear that delicious laughter of life

 

to be reminded that this is the stuff that makes all the toil worth it

to gather, to enjoy art together, to see depictions of our 600-year-old oak

 

that has lived through the Spanish Influenza and so much more during its time on this earth

and is still standing, as our photos show, from spring to summer and covered in snow.

 

Later the sniffles start, sore throats appear, and the slow headaches emerge.

It cannot be. It cannot be. Allergies, yes, sinuses, of course, but no, not that, not again.

 

The test shows the faintest line of positivity… and all doubt disappears. 

Another person from the group becomes ill, and another, and another. 

 

Once more we find ourselves communicating via text, email, or Facebook Messenger

sharing our lives in the most unnatural way possible once more. 

Renee Williams is a retired English professor, who has written for Of Rust and Glass, Alien Buddha Press, and Fevers of the Mind.

KINTSUGI

by Chris Reed

Kintsugi is the Japanese art or repairing broken pottery

with epoxy mixed with gold dust.

Cracks and repairs are not hidden but highlighted,

imperfections, part of an object’s life.

Sickly yellow lights the landscape,

like a room lit by an aging lampshade.

Great smoke plumes from Canadian forests,

blanket eastern farms, cities and shores,

swallow a line of green glittering trees

and a neighbor’s brown house

as if the fires are a mile,

and not a country away.

I taste ash on my tongue,

absorb smoke through sinuses,

and wonder about the birds, recently migrated

north across Lake Erie to nest,

On the deck, potted salmon-edged geraniums,

smaller blooms of pink and white,

and spikes of lavender, sit abjectly

in the aberrant light.

Rosemary and thyme rub against

each other in a blue pot with a gold seam.

My sister, the potter who shaped the planter,

repaired it in seven days,

mixing epoxy and resins with gold dust,

painting seams, fitting pieces together,

then aging the repaired pot in a large dark box. 

The trick, she said, is to know

that it is even more beautiful repaired.

Burnt ash in the air evokes memories

of not so distant atrocities and tragedies,

yet, seems a hairline fracture

in the ongoing dropping of our world.

Pillaging of nature, wars of aggression,

greed-driven power plays,

hate crimes and death-dealing viruses,

crack the thin ceramic of creation.

Lumpy veins of gold witness

our attempted repairs.

Is there room on this spiderweb

for another seam of gold. And how to start?

Epoxies of novenas and pilgrimages

don’t work anymore.

That god has picked up his play things. 

And even if we find the gold dust,

do we have a shoebox large enough?

And will we remember the trick?

Like others who live near or in the New York City area, Chris Reed was not only concerned about the extreme air quality conditions, but eerily reminded of the empty streets during the first year of Covid, and the indelible images of the air over New York after 9/11. Her poems have appeared in Blue Heron Review, US1 Worksheets, and The New Verse News.

THE NEW PANDEMIC

by Ralph Dranow

poster available at amazon

A new pandemic is sweeping the world.

Scientists speculate it started last month

with a six-year-old girl in Indonesia,

a precocious child,

who transmitted it to her parents,

who passed it on to others.

Now it's spreading throughout the country

and other places as well.

The virus surges through the bloodstream,

infiltrating the heart and third eye,

causing people to love one another.

Politicians, CEOs of corporations, and Republicans

are furiously working to contain the virus,

claiming it's bad for business,

suggesting people wear masks and social distance.

But it might be too late.

The virus is very powerful,

seeping through even the strongest mask,

dancing through the bloodstream,

like an ecstatic child.

Ralph Dranow works as an editor, ghostwriter, and writing coach. His poems and articles have been widely published.

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.

HOW DO YOU DEFINE AN ENDING?

by Mark Danowsky

“Never-Ending Road” painting by Elizabeth Kenney

After three years, The New York Times announces that close coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic is coming to an end.

What has ended, I wonder,
And what has not?
 
So many with prolonged illness
Know the battle rages on 
 
And those soon to fall ill
And those who will fall ill
 
I count myself 
Among the lucky 
 
Recall my sureness
That I would not survive
 
Of course, few foresee
The deft hand of death 
 
His scythe, at times, the edge
Of visible—a bullet 
 
Stops the heart 
Without just cause
 
The needle droops 
In a useless arm 
 
Tires spin on ice
And metal crushes metal
 
A cloud opens up 
For tears to flood

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry. He is author of the poetry collections As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press), JAWN (Moonstone Press), Violet Flame (tiny wren lit), and Meatless (Plan B Press). Recent poems in Red Ogre Review, Green Ink Review, The Broadkill Review, anti-heroin chic, Harpy Hybrid Review, Otoliths, and elsewhere.

NOT OVER

by Dion Farquhar 

I’m Omicron, son of Delta

I skipped generations

from four to fifteen

letters of the Greek alphabet

I’ve outrun Delta

gone after 200,000 more

surpassed a million  

despite decrees, desires

for the old normal

—that hell

for everyone (but the dead)

to get back to work

forget your boosters

travel bans and masks

after all this time 

you still don’t get what global means

you may be faster

smarter now

but after two and a half years

so am I

your rich country as backward

as the ones you’ve impoverished                                                                           

but you win again, America

tally the most dead

so dream on about “herd immunity” 

your unvaxed forty percent

still my gateway

and I’m here to stay

Dion Farquhar has recent poems in Non-Binary Review, Superpresent, Blind Field, Poesis, Cape Rock: Poetry, Poydras Review, Mortar, Local Nomad, Columbia Poetry Review, moria, Shifter,BlazeVOX, etc. Her third poetry book Don’t Bother is in press at Finishing Line Press, and she has three chapbooks. She works as an exploited adjunct at two universities, but still loves the classroom, and she is active in the University of California Santa Cruz adjunct union, the UC-AFT. 

WHAT TO TELL CHILDREN WHEN ALL THE NEWS IS SCARY

by Diane Dolphin

“With war in Ukraine, editors help kids cope with scary news.” —News Decoder, February 25, 2022

We have failed you,

utterly.

 

We sold you a fairy tale: Once upon a time,

all children were created equal.

We proclaimed your bodies, your lives

as sovereign. Daughters,

that is no longer true. Black and brown sons,

we know it never was.

 

We have fiddled while the west burns,

the east floods, the poles dissolve.

We watched our elders succumb to pandemic

while we fought over masks. Lost

our children to weapons of death while

we debated the definition of

assault rifles. We wait ­–

we wait—as you are picked off

one by one.

 

Child, the barbarians have breached the gates.

The monster is in your classroom.

Dread seeps into your sleep.

Jabberwock has grown a new head,

is assembling his army of minions.

How can we possibly

console you?

 

You need to grow up,

quickly now. Leave us, the weak-willed

and stunned.

Take up your pen and shield, unleash

your small voices, amass in great numbers.

Demand we step aside.

You are your only hope.

Author’s Note: Above is a poem I wrote in response to the deluge of bad news lately, culminating in the Supreme Court Decision. The poem—and my title—is inspired by the barrage of media articles that always come on the heels of unimaginable news, and which are headlined along the variation of: "What to tell children when the news is scary." 

Diane Dolphin is a poet, writer, and former college instructor from Warwick, RI. 

UNMASKING

by Pat Snyder Hurley

Illustration by The New York Times to accompany “America, Unmasked” by Pamela Paul, May 8, 2022. Photograph by George Marks/Getty Images.

is the new undressing performed

only with those we trust no matter

how illogically

and never with strangers no matter

how perfect unless

there is indoor dining involved

and the promise of conversation

and everyone is doing it.

 

Grocery-shopping isn’t intimacy

worthy of risk, but dinner

parties are, even with friends

who went maskless at Costco

and carpooled with teens

who went maskless at school

because who would have the chutzpah

to ask.

 

And so pockets are handy

and zipper purses and

consoles in cars—

all good for mask-stashing

in case someone you know

or don’t

is wearing one

or not.

Pat Snyder Hurley is a Pushcart-nominated poet living in Columbus, Ohio, where she also writes a local humor column, “Balancing Act.”  She co-authored the chapbook Hard to Swallow with her late husband Bill Hurley (NightBallet Press 2017), and her poems have appeared in literary journals including Pudding Magazine, Poydras Review, and the Passager Journal.