THEY PROPPED THE DEAD MAN UP: AN ALLEGORY

by Sandra Anfang

We were waist deep in the big muddy

and the big fool said to push on. 

—Pete Seeger, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”

A man I used to know

who knew a man I used to know

told me a story about

the old man’s funeral.

How they propped him up

in his single bed like a child’s

dressed him in his favorite

cowboy shirt, hat, & boots.

How their feet carved circles

in the small front room

of his cabin, how they passed 

around the punch, dished up

the casseroles, poured the wine.

All the while, he lay in his bed

in the corner, where it had been wheeled

watching them enjoy the feast.

He didn’t miss a beat.

He looked great—alive as you or me

said the man I used to know.

Maybe a little ashen.

“They propped the dead man up”

cycles through my brain

like a country refrain.

If they hadn’t heard the story

of how his Kawasaki overshot

the freeway bridge, a suspected 

heart attack the cause

you might have thought he was

enjoying an afternoon nap.

This scenario would not

be hard to replicate:

(an old man waving from

the window of an SUV; 

the steel-spiked wall of his dissembling).

During the parsing of the meatloaf

the news, the deviled eggs

they propped the dead man up 

and life continued

more or less

as it had before.

Sandra Anfang is an award-winning poet, poetry teacher, and editor. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including San Francisco Peace and Hope, West Trestle Review, Spillway, and Rattle. Her two chapbooks, Looking Glass Heart and Road Worrier, were published by Finishing Line Press in 2016 and 2018, respectively. Xylem Highway, a full-length collection, was published by Main Street Rag in 2019. Sandra teaches with California Poets in the Schools and hosts Rivertown Poets, a monthly reading series, in Petaluma, California. She is spending her sheltering-in-place days writing poetry and haiku, taking long walks, and texting for MoveOn.org to defeat t***p.

GOOD THINGS HAPPEN IN PHILADELPHIA

by Jen Schneider

President Donald T***p closed out his first presidential debate with Democratic nominee Joe Biden on Tuesday night by repeating on national television his false claim that poll watchers had been blocked from observing the first day of in-person early voting in Philadelphia. “Today there was a big problem,” T***p said in the closing moments of the debate. “In Philadelphia they went in to watch. They’re called poll watchers. A very safe, very nice thing. They were thrown out. They weren’t allowed to watch. You know why? Because bad things happen in Philadelphia, bad things.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 29, 2020

Opinions simmer. Warm, savory, inviting. Nonna’s pork and cheese meatballs, fresh of tomatoes, garlic, and onions. Tossed in Italian market spices. Sidewalk chalk and porch stoop chatter inspire debates on Pat’s versus Geno’s and rails that carry hundreds of years and thousands of stories. Cobblestone streets where 200-year old trinities and 100-year old row homes rub shoulders with brothers, sisters, Quakers, and strangers turned family. Generations nestle among soaring metal, as Betsy Ross, Ben Franklin and Independence Mall beckon. Welcome, America. Stair wells heat, bagels boil, and scallion flavored cream cheese fuels. Reading Terminal bakers, Convention Center makers, and Didone type LOVE serve pride of place, Always. Cannoli’s, cheesesteaks – extra onions, thank you – and scrapple, a double. Plenty to share, as Philadelphia’s city limits - and pride - extend for Rocky miles. In a quickly evolving world, farewell Franklin Press, each neighborhood block is Distinct. Unique. Proud. Gritty.

Our City. Our Place. Always Good. 

as voice pebbles rise and fall.

Feet crunch on asphalt

Good will overcome

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.

MASQUERADE

by Susan McLean

Muffled like bandits on a raid,

our faces wrapped from chin to eye,

we aren’t intent on ambuscade,

just hoping not to kill or die.

Yet everywhere we see displayed
the nonchalance of passersby,

signaling that they’re not afraid—

their confidence a bare-faced lie.

Susan McLean is the author of two poetry books, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of the Latin poet Martial, Selected Epigrams. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, a hotspot for COVID-19.

THE OAK AND THE REED

 by Judith Terzi

1906 illustration by Benjamin Rabier for “Le Chêne et le Roseau”

a very, very loose translation of "Le Chêne et le Roseau" by Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695)

So an oak says to a reed, "No wonder 

you hate Mother Nature. A tiny bird's 

a tremendous weight for you. Tremendous

weight. If a little breeze ripples a pool,

you have to bow your head. Me, I can 

almost touch Mount Everest. Amazing. 

Not only can I block the sun's rays, I can 

make it through the worst hurricane. Really, 

really amazing. For me, that north wind's 

just a tiny breeze. People say it's a zephyr. 

People say. I think they call it a zephyr. 

Terrific wind. Look, if your people would 

have been born in my neck of the woods, 

you wouldn't suffer so much. Believe me, 

my spread could defend you, but your 

kind comes from the wet, lowly other side 

of the wind's tracks. Nature's unjust

toward you and yours. Very, very unjust."

"Hey, I get where you're coming from," says 

the reed. "But get over it. I deal with wind 

much easier than you. I bend, I never ever 

break. Up until now, you've done ok––gotten by 

without breaking your back. But hang on!" 

Just then, a fury of a north wind was whipping up 

its breath. The oak holds tight. The reed bends. 

Le roseau plie. The wind doubles down. So bad 

that the oak is uprooted. Oak––with its head nearly 

touching the sky, feet digging into the dead.

Author of Museum of Rearranged Objects (Kelsay), as well as of five chapbooks, including Casbah and If You Spot Your Brother Floating By (Kattywompus), Judith Terzi's poems have received Pushcart and Best of the Web and Net nominations and have been read on Radio 3 of the BBC. She holds an M.A. in French Literature and taught high school French for many years as well as English and French at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria.

POETIC JUSTICE

by David Southward

Mother Nature has a way

of teaching all who underplay

her lethal power, not to do it.

How? She simply puts them through it.

 

Thus, when her emissaries sent us

germs to baffle an apprentice,

he who most pooh-poohed the virus

(heaping scorn on scorn to tire us)

 

soon bowed down to violent grace

and in a mirror saw the face

of vanity—its purse and pout

contorted by a creeping doubt.

 

 

David Southward teaches in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of Apocrypha (Wipf & Stock 2018) and Bachelor’s Buttons (Kelsay Books 2020), and winner of the 2019 Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry.

SCHADENFREUDE

by Kate Bernadette Benedict

Think of it as the finest of desserts,

a cake of red velvet or German chocolate,

the delectable finale to a wretched meal, 

one bitter course after another,

vinegar in our flutes instead of wine.

How the sweetness makes everything right!

How it neutralizes that slosh of acids

a supper of suffering inflicted.

Relish it slowly, bite by exquisite bite.

Lick the icing from your fingers.

It's a miracle of a confection, it's never done,

the cakes just keep coming.

There's more for everyone.

Kate Bernadette Benedict of New York City is the author of Earthly Use: New and Selected Poems.

MARKS OF WOE

by George Salamon

William Blake's "London."

In the reign of a pandemic

We turn our back on other

Calamities, close our eyes,

Barricade ourselves in safe

Spaces. Above in the ozone

Clouds simulate a scornful smile.  

George Salamon has recently contributed to The Asses of Parnassus, One Sentence Poems, Dissident Voice, and The New Verse News from St. Louis, MO.

AS THE ANGELS PASS

by Alejandro Escudé

The coronavirus builds a far-reaching ladder-like apparatus from core helical amino acids (green) in its spike protein that latch on to its host cell, leading to infection. A computer model is simulating these dynamics on Longhorn, the subsystem of the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Credit: Numan Oezguen, Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine. —Phys.Org

I’ve been trying to write you, Covid-19.

The suddenness of the tree is more tree-like

after you and yesterday a woman told me

she preferred taking the elevator alone. 

I didn’t look her way when she said that, 

too tired to acknowledge the statement. 

The CDC says that the air is a ladder full 

of virus, but I already knew that, having 

climbed it like Jacob up to heaven and 

having seen the angels traveling up and 

down it wearing white satin masks, six feet 

apart from one another as they pass, the ladder

wide enough to allow for their wingspans.

I tried not to look at their eyes, furrowed

brows like their human counterparts, a bottle

of sanitizer at the base of the shaky steps.

I’ve been trying to write you, Covid-19.

Write you into the day after tomorrow

and write you into yesterday, when I found

myself in an auditorium with teacher

colleagues listening to the priest lead us 

through a mass as the rain fell and no one 

knew the sequestered work that lay ahead, 

how our hands would turn into hearts, 

sweaty, red, pulsing, our minds become 

oceans of solitude. I’ve been trying 

to write you, Covid-19. Letters afloat 

in the air like germs, words freshened 

by fear. If I write fast enough Covid-19, 

I figure maybe I can stay ahead of you 

as you swim the air, aloft, riding our 

anxious breaths, the teeth-life of humor, 

the tongue-bond of our historic griefs.

I’ve been trying to write you, Covid-19,

as you scrape clean our liminal spaces, 

wicked seed, atomic salt pillar, icepick.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

IN THE QUIET OF COVID THE WHITE-CROWNED SPARROWS

by Hayley Mitchell Haugen

A new study found that sparrows in San Francisco altered their birdsong to sound more appealing to mates after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the city. When the pandemic hit—and vehicle traffic slowed down—researchers found that noise levels in San Francisco and other urban parts of the Bay Area reduced by nearly 50%. The shutdown, they wrote, effectively reversed "more than a half-century rise in noise pollution." The birds, as a result, began singing more quietly, hitting lower notes and improving their vocal performance. Elizabeth Derryberry, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Tennessee, told Agence France-Presse that the birds "sounded better, they sounded sexier" to mates. —USA Today, September 25, 2020

In the quiet of Covid the white-crowned sparrows

are tweeting more softly—three times less loud—

than before their urban streets cleared

of the morning mayhem, the rush and tumble

of the human lives they once pitched

their calls above to be heard. Suddenly,

the airwaves unpolluted, their songs’

distance double, clarify, elevating their health,

attracting new mates. Why is it so quiet,

the people say. Where are all the birds?

Listen, they are still here with us, changing,

as we have, singing a new tune.

Hayley Mitchell Haugen is a professor of English at Ohio University Southern in southeastern Ohio. Light & Shadow, Shadow & Light from Main Street Rag Publishing Company (2018) is her first full-length poetry collection, and her chapbook, What the Grimm Girl Looks Forward To is from Finishing Line Press (2016). She edits Sheila-Na-Gig online and Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN FROM THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE?

by Joan Mazza

If you were raised by and/or married to an abuser,

I know you are suffering tonight. I see you. I feel you.

We are going to rise up and take the mf down.

      —Pam Houston, public Facebook post, Sept. 29, 2020

Didn’t watch, didn’t listen. I went to bed early,

held on to the clarity earned by a day of writing,

reading, an online poetry class. I drank a lot

of water, pondered what I’ll eat for my next meal,

folded clean sheets, made notes for poems. I wasn’t

online during the chaos and shouting, refuse to expose

myself to a bully’s tactics of distraction and lies—

dominance devices with attacks on the other’s

character that show the lack of dignity and inability

to reason. In the morning, I watch one clip before

I’m fully awake, read Facebook full of horror

at this clown of hokum who signals to racists, white

supremacists, and the Proud Boys to be ready to foment

a civil war. Sometimes it takes only one morsel of food

to know it’s poison. Sometimes one sentence makes you

back away and lock the doors of your heart and head. 

In peace and security, ten days ago I voted.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist and psychotherapist, and has taught workshops nationally with a focus on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), and her poetry appears in Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The MacGuffin, and The Nation. She lives and isolates in rural central Virginia.

CALLING IT

by Thomas R. Smith

Just to see and hear him on a screen

hurts the soul.  Stench of abuse.

The Abyss hijacks the microphone,

no muting the rant the psychotic

can’t switch off in his head.

The assault on truth is physical:

the viewer’s knees tremble, breath comes

up short.  Lies fly out of the mouth

in black streams.  They are his children:

father of lies, lord of the flies.

Damaged horror child exposed.

The networks call it a “debate.”

Burroughs called it “naked lunch.”

Yeats called it “rough beast.”  I call it

“rape in an abandoned  house.”

Thomas R. Smith is a poet and teacher living in River Falls, Wisconsin. He teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. His most recent poetry collection is The Glory (Red Dragonfly Press).

OCTOBER 2020

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Embers fly from a tree as the Glass Fire burns. St. Helena, CA, September 27, 2020. Credit: Noah Berger/AP via The Washington Post, September 30, 2020

After a couple of weeks of relief
From fire and smoke and intense heat
We are the recipients
Of a brand new Red Flag Warning
Tinkling on our phones:
Extreme temperatures. 
High winds.
Wildfire danger all over
This parched paradise.
Lucky us.
Meanwhile, the Orange Exhibitionist 
And his tiny-minded acolytes
Grow nuttier and more authoritarian
By the day
Saying now they may or may not
Support a peaceful transition
Of presidential power
Come November.
And we still have a hard time
Believing that there are any
Other than the severely disoriented
Who will give the guy their X. 
The guy whose response
To the current conflagrations
Has been as ignorant 
As a sack of ash and cinders,
Whose response 
To the great plague 
Still bedeviling us
Has been to sow disinformation,
And create chaos
By attacking scientists and science,
By failing to establish
A coherent Federal response,
By claiming that the pandemic
Is no big deal,
That it will soon vanish on its own,
Thereby assuring that the USA
With 5% of the world’s population
Has had 20-25% of COVID fatalities.
We’re #1!
And it ain’t over yet.
So here we sit gazing out the window
At the masked families
Strolling up the street,
At the trees swaying energetically
In a stiff breeze,
Emergency evacuation packs
Stacked by the front door,
Listening for sirens,
Checking the internet
For the latest inferno info,
Counting the hours until 8 A.M. tomorrow
When it is predicted
That conditions will allow us
To bugle the colors down the pole
And we might just be able
To relax our shoulders for a moment or two
As we exhale a fervent prayer
For cooler temps, buckets of rain
And a November worth writing home about.

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poems have appeared in many print and online journals. His most recent books are To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World and Cancer Cantata. With his wife Cynthia, he produced the award-winning documentary film Outside In and, with the MIRC film collective, made the film Por Que Venimos. His interviews with soldiers refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan were made into the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California. He podcasts at: thirdactpoems.podbean.com .

IN THE ASH

by Sandy Sortwell Makau

Flames from the Glass Fire consume Chateau Boswell Winery. St. Helena, CA, September 27, 2020. Credit: Noah Berger/AP via The Washington Post, September 30, 2020. 

Burned remains float over the mountain ridge, houses, old cars, furniture and dreams, reconfigured into gray soot, travel to the valley floor on the wings of scattered ash to rest on my back porch.

The air quiet, oppression settles on every surface a reminder of the fire’s distant destruction, how lives suddenly transform from hope, to fire, to smoke, to ash.

Trapped in my air tight house surrounded by a white fog of smoke; its haze deceives me. Through my kitchen window, I see a cloudy winter day until I open the door, the smoke bullies me with its toxic fumes, it taunts me with the threat of more fire to come, saying to me ‘maybe when the wind changes tonight I will come for you too.’

I walk across the porch, the wind billows swirling like a desert windstorm trying to lift. My footsteps sink into the ash like freshly fallen snow making a path barren and gray. The destination unknown.

The mountaintop has shown me its sadness in the ash today.

Sandy Sortwell Makau lives in Butte County, California–30 minutes from both the Paradise 2018 Camp Fire and this years Bear Fire above the town of Oroville. She is surrounded by fires nearby in northern California, in southern California, and across the border in Oregon. Friends of hers have lost everything in these fires. She is a freelance writer and poet.

ASH

by Katrinka Moore

Smoke rises over a vineyard as the Glass Fire burns. Calistoga, CA, September 28, 2020. Credit: Noah Berger/AP via The Washington Post, September 30, 2020.

Slow-dying ash    still mostly

thick and green    though now                        

the leaves are yellowing                                 

 

The high bare limbs     a haunt

of choice for goldfinches    who

facing east     warble as the sun

 

appears     a deep red sphere    

crosses the sky shrouded

in haze     Come night                        

 

the stars and even Jupiter

are dim     Three thousand

miles away     wildfires

 

rage another morning     Here   

bright singing birds    the glow

of early     color-shifting     fall

Katrinka Moore's latest book is Wayfarers. She lives in Schoharie County, NY.