WISHING YOU ALL A GOOD DEATH

by Catherine Gonick

Art by Clay Bennett, July 1, 2025

Millions of low-income Americans could experience staggering financial losses under the domestic policy package that Republicans advanced through the Senate on Tuesday, which reserves its greatest benefits for the rich while threatening to strip health insurance, food stamps and other aid from the poor. —The New York Times, July 1, 2025

as the deviants' suicide hotline 

goes dead, the bad vaccines

and free food disappear

along with the women

and children, leaving

only one gender 

on the sickly green earth,

and you already too ill

to fill out new forms

are free to drop, already dust

beneath the rug of our law,

as the best deaths are dealt

out casually as cards

by we who can afford

the deep cuts

and consequent

deaths that ensure

 "they'll get over it"

before you can know it

you'll all be bleeding

too fast to know what's coming

for your common-good bodies

already installed in pre-paid

unremarked graves,

wishing you all a good night

and good death

Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including The New Verse News, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Pedestal, and Orchards Poetry Journal. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. Her first full-length collection, Split Daughter of Eve, is forthcoming in June from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. She lives in the Hudson Valley, where she works in a company that slows  the rate of global warming.

CAN WE SEE THE SUN?

by William Aarnes

Beth and I are wearing masks

and, as can happen on the subway,

 

the unmasked man across the aisle

raises his voice to everyone

 

in the car to tell us that wearing masks

and getting vaccines just shows

 

we’re brainwashed by the “slime”

of lies told by the government

 

and the media.  We’ve been tricked

into believing all kinds of fictions.

 

“Take the sun,” he says, his voice

rising.  “Yes, take the goddamned sun.

 

You’re telling me you can see something

that’s ninety-three million miles away?

 

Anyone who thinks for himself knows

his eyes can’t see that far! You’d need

 

a Hubble, though that Hubble’s

just another made-up lie. Anyone

 

who’s reasonable and thinks for himself

knows he’s not seeing the sun. Read

 

your Plato and stop looking up

at the useless sky. Don’t listen

 

to those swindlers that are telling you

any different. And stop going along

 

with the idea that something invisible

can make you sick. Or just go ahead.

 

I don’t give a damn. Why would anyone               

give a damn? You’re all just pathetic!” 

As we leave the train, we don’t dare

wish him well—what would he do?—

though we want to. Beth and I wear

our masks the two blocks home.

It’s a gloomy afternoon, light rain.

And the first thing I do in the door

is—trusting the internet—open my laptop

to look up the diameter of the sun.

Then how much light the sun gives off—

enough, I’m told, to leave you blind.

William Aarnes lives in New York.  He worries about what the conservative response to COVID has done to our thinking about public health.  And yesterday his appointment to get a COVID booster was cancelled because the pharmacy had yet to receive its supply.

X

by Rob McClure

X Is The Biggest Source Of Fake News And Disinformation, EU Warns —Forbes, September 26, 2023

A great Antarctic ice-wall girds our world

and JFK Junior flies his plane there

first across Idaho, false flags unfurled,

where Bigfoot is a forest-ranger bear.

Junior’s chemtrails stream upon 51

where the freemasons faked the moon-landing 

and spaceship dismantling has just begun,

for alien tech gets swift rebranding.

Soros builds birds there, makes 5G fluoride,

listens to tunes penned by surrogate Paul

who offed Diana on that fateful ride

(9/11 sonic death-waves installed),

while adrenochrome demons mixed vaccines,

fixed birth certificates, voting machines…

Rob McClure’s creative work has appeared in many magazines—Gettysburg Review, Manchester Review, Barcelona Review, New Ohio Review.

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.

IT'S DÉJÀ VU AGAIN

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

It's déjà vu again. The Omicron—

That Covid rookie—dumps us all back at

Square one. We social-distance, masks full on,

Dictated to by rules ... A caveat:

Enactments are not uniformly tough—

Jabs may not be compulsory. If they

Are not, because persuasion's not enough,

Vax uptake is too low to save the day ...

Unshakeable aversion to the vax

And being glad that others got their shots

Goes hand in hand with dodging paying tax

And taking, all the same, from public pots.

It long precedes the age of me and you—

No wonder there's a sense of déjà vu!

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University. His acrostic sonnets have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better Than Starbucks, the Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Daily Mail, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, The New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, the Satirist, The Washington Post, and WestWard Quarterly.

D IS FOR DELTA

by Mary K O'Melveny

In math, Delta means change.

An isosceles triangle points the way

to changes in quantity:

  more sick

  more hospital beds

  more ventilators

  more dead

  more masks

  more six foot limits:

    apart from each other

    down in the ground.

 

Changes as in differences in.

  As in:

    yesterday there was reason to hope

    last week we went to a concert

    the airport was full of tourists

  As in:

    the rate of change is significant:

    red lines rise on graphs

    there are no lines of people seeking vaccines

    there are now some lines but not enough.

Changes as in variables.

  As in:

    yesterday I met you at a party

    today I am at the doctor’s office

    tomorrow my family will hold a zoom remembrance.

In science, Delta means a sometimes triangular mass of sediment.     

  As in:

     silt and sand lodged in a river’s mouth

     spit into the sea  or a lake  or a plain

        as in Mississippi    or Okavango   or Kalahari

     tides and waves create sandbars and dendritic silt

        as in the Nile   or the Ganges

     estuaries of brackish water form at the confluence of sea and river

        as in China’s Yellow River.

   Some Deltas become abandoned  

the rivers leave   discard their channels   dry up

   that too denotes movement   change. 

  That change is called avulsion:

    As in:

      the sudden separation of mass from one place to another

      the sudden separation of reason from the brain

      the sudden movement from reality to fantasy.

 

Delta can be a girl’s name:

   books of baby names call it appealing   chic  unique

       fit for a child of grace and distinction.

 This too will change. 

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

LINES

by Diane Vogel Ferri

People lined up in their cars at a food distribution site in San Antonio, Tex., in April 2020.Credit...Credit: William Luther/The San Antonio Express-News, via Associated Press and The New York Times.

My wall calendar helps me to visualize

my life, the plans I hold dear, the people

I must see so they also see me

At first the lines were through the

scribbling on my calendar,  an oddity,

disappointing at most—a temporary month

Sometimes there were two lines,

an X-ing out, a permanent loss

I catalogued the failures in my journal

Then the lines were of standing humans

waiting to vote, car-lines of hungry children

waiting for the food school had denied them

lines circling the parking lots for tests,

lines at the border, lines at the shelters,

lines at the unemployment office,

lines in the streets to confront the wizard 

behind the curtain, asking when we will be normal? 

But he was a fraud, a canceler of science, of truth

Freedom was not taken by a government

freedom was not taken at all, only

innocent lives, their coffins in orderly lines

The lines are now for a miracle,

for we who are left, whose lives have not

been crossed out, who are free to live.

Diane Vogel Ferri is a teacher, poet, and writer living in Solon, Ohio. Her newest novel is No Life But This: A Novel of Emily Warren Roebling. Her essays have been published in Scene Magazine, Raven’s Perch, Yellow Arrow Journal, and Good Works Review among others. Her poems can be found in numerous journals such as Wend Poetry, Her Words, Rubbertop Review, and Poet Lore. Her previous publications are Liquid Rubies (poetry), The Volume of Our Incongruity (poetry), The Desire Path (novel).

SWEET APRIL SHOWERS

by Earl J. Wilcox

Larry Parks lip-synching to Al Jolson singing "April Showers' in The Jolson Story (1946).

Already primed by fading February

snows, brash, thrashing March

winds, come softly sweet showers.

 

Make us mindful of your spring spirit

here where pandemic surviving souls

surely long to go on pilgrimages

 

to the beach or baseball game. O,

sweet showers fall gently today on

dogwoods and azaleas in our back yard,

 

where sparrows and chickadees still

sleep with open eyes, as in Chaucer’s

day & cardinals and Carolina wrens

 

build beautiful nests. O blithe spirit

of mockingbirds, we seek only blissful

martyrs of courageous care givers,

 

vaccines’ power and glory, blessed

assurance that this April thy showers

nourish and sustain this good earth.

 

 

Earl Wilcox dedicates this poem to the spirits of all who did not live through the pandemic to see this spring’s colorful flowers nor hear the mockingbirds sing or feel the comfort of a warm April shower.