Donna Farris
I Need a Beer Joint

I need a beer joint,
some place where no one gives a damn about Corona,
except the one served ice-cold with a wedge of lime.

Let me forget about face masks
and just get wasted with a friend,
as we spit in each other’s faces, talking bullshit.

I want to put some money in a jukebox
and dance so close our sweat mingles
as we twirl around on the wood floor.

It’s getting harder to watch the fear mongers
report the death toll while WFH in their underwear,
but we’re all in this together, right?

I love hearing about the deer,
antelope, mountain lions and coyotes
reclaiming their parks and jogging trails.

Who knew it would not be an act of Congress
but a microscopic germ to park our cars and trucks
giving Mother Earth a chance to breathe fresh air?

Shelter in place must be hard for the extrovert
even introverts, like me, are finding it very fucking suffocating.
that is why…I need a beer joint.

—Submitted on 05/20/2020

Donna Farris writes: I was having a particularly bad day at work—a library closed to the public. Stressed that I might be infecting my coworkers or them me. Feeling isolated, vulnerable and claustrophobic. My rebellious mind took over and I started writing this anthem. Farris lives and works in the Texas Panhandle.

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Megan Rilkoff
Change of Plans

A friend’s wedding was planned for the end of May.
A beautiful backyard wedding
At the end of spring.
Invitations were sent, flowers ordered.
Dress fitted, suit tailored.
They now hang in their bags in the closet.

They eloped yesterday
At a park in their neighborhood.
The officiant
The bride and groom
One friend each
And the strangers who stopped to watch,
who pointed and laughed and cried,
And took out their phones.
What was normal is now a miracle.

The newlyweds looked happy and sweet
As if it really was the best day of their lives.
Their guests, smiling and cheering,
Standing six feet apart.

Her sister, a nurse,
watched on Facebook Live,
From the sanitized hospital break room.
Mom and Dad tuned in from the couch at home,
To see their oldest daughter,
Married through the phone.

—Submitted on 04/04/2020

Megan Rilkoff is a middle school English teacher and emerging writer. After teaching in Laos and New York City, she now works in Central Pennsylvania, where she lives with her fiancé.

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Sally DeJesus
Nest Egg

A baker’s dozen doesn’t make this cake
stand up inside my oven mind
hot with fear overbaked
my tendency to beat myself
I can’t escape.

Today again I rise to reason
out the night sweats over broken eggs
grinding teeth
how much will we need to keep us safe?

I count blessings
I count money
nest egg folds into weighing out a sticky mix
where cookies crumble into milky ways
layered over spinning earth
another breath
I am saved
as I stir.

—Submitted on 05/20/2020

Sally DeJesus facilitates writing workshops in New York City homeless shelters and Crisis Respite Centers with grant support from Poets & Writers, Community Access, and Citizens for NYC through Poetry Speaks for Us. Her poems have appeared in River & South Review, Manhattan Linear, Metropolitan Review, and other journals, as well as in anthologies including POSTmortem (Mad Gleam Press, 2016).

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Mary K O’Melveny
A Fingertip Has One Hundred Nerve Endings

This fact might explain why I want to touch
every surface. Press hard against countertop,
doorframe, bed pillow Finger each avocado,
orange, purple onion. Fondle a pale
pink dogwood petal, trace each fine line to
its yellow center flower where hope resides.

Strangers and neighbors pass in hallways or
on sidewalks. I want to reach out, to hold
their hands, extend my arms. I believe they might
feel the same though we simply nod our heads.
I am one of the lucky ones. Each night,
my wife and I can explore each tender place.

—Submitted on 04/04/2020

Mary K O’Melveny is the author of A Woman of a Certain Age (2018) and Merging Star Hypotheses (2020), both on Finishing Line Press. With the other members of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group, she is a co-author of An Apple In Her Hand (Codhill Press 2019). Her poetry has appeared in Slippery Elm Literary Journal, West Texas Review, Into the Void, Light, Voices of Eve, The Write Place at the Write Time, and other journals. O’Melveny is a retired labor rights lawyer who lives with her wife in Washington, DC and Woodstock, NY.

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Chad Parenteau
In other news…

Jane Roe Jesus Tanka

Jane Roe Jesus asks
is it even possible
for any woman
to enter either kingdom
without their thirty silver?

Cheese Cloth Mask Jesus Tanka

Cheese Cloth Mask Jesus
says it’s just a placebo.
No cloth mask out there
can stop a hammering nail,
so why wear any at all?

—Submitted on 05/21/2020

Chad Parenteau is the author of Patron Emeritus (FootHills Publishing, 2013). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tell-Tale Inklings, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, Molecule, and Résonance. He serves as associate editor of Oddball Magazine and hosts the venerable Stone Soup Poetry series in Boston. His second full-length collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, is forthcoming.

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Susan Stringfellow
Van Gogh

I’m separate from the world
and my hair is falling out.
My slippers are askance.
The Letters of Van Gogh in my hand.
His left eye in odd angles,
and so the socket. Other eye
smooth, like any human.
Face lined in random spots,
near-vertically, same stroking
as the strong, excitable brows.
The furrow between the brows,
the bump on the line of the nose.
Nothing easy for the man,
his body lit by electricity
but forced to sit, to wait,
for some sanity, some calm,
an effort, and this pandemic,
when we are all sitting,
doing a little work, watching a little
t.v., waiting
for something to approach.

—Submitted on 04/02/2020

Susan Stringfellow holds two MFAs in creative writing, one from Carlow University and another from Chatham University, both in Pittsburgh.

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Becky Wills
the virus diaries #30

letter to grace

if it weren’t for you,
i’d never know
about the musk ox,
that it is one of
the longest surviving
creatures on earth,
and that over thousands
of years of evolution,
it has developed a method
for enduring winter
in the freezing tundra.
if it were not for you,
i would never know
that all the method is
is ‘hunker down and cope’,
that over thousands
of years of evolution,
that was the best
the musk oxen
came up with.
i know that what we are
experiencing is more than
just a seasonal rut,
but i can’t think of
better advice for us now.
if there is one thing
i do know, though,
it’s that this world
loves a come back

—Submitted on 05/22/2020

Becky Wills is a member of the Poems While You Wait Collective. She has worked as an editorial intern for DiningOut Chicago. Her work has appeared in Gigantic Sequins.

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Austin Alexis
Social Distance

Percussive silence
won’t leave me alone.
Loud in the pantry,
louder in the garage.
My solitude is enforced.
My solitude is a cloth
doused with bleach
and pressed to my mouth.
My solitude is crowded
with quiet.
The odor of loneliness
owns all my minutes.
Even when I leave
my empty house—
roam about the streets—
involuntary reclusiveness
claims my legs,
stains my clothing, my teeth,
my stretch of days
that are no longer mine
but belong to the hush
at the center of today.

—Submitted on 04/02/2020

Austin Alexis is the author of Privacy Issues (Broadside Lotus Press, 2014), winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award; Lovers and Drag Queens (Poets Wear Prada, 2014) and For Lincoln & Other Poems, (Poets Wear Prada, 2010). His work has appeared in Barrow Street, The Pedestal Magazine, The Journal, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015), edited by Joel Allegretti;  Suitcase of Chrysanthemums (Great Weather for Media, 2018), edited by Jane Ormerod, Thomas Fucaloro, and David Lawton. He received a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholarship, and teaches at New York City College of Technology.

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Marilyn Johnston
My Husband Talks About COVID-19 as If He’s Still on Patrol

Anytime going out from the base camp,
you take your chance with snipers.
You take a risk, even all suited up
with night gear, thick flak jacket
and combat boots, M16 at the ready.
It’s hard to tell the difference between
friend or foe without a scope.
How they can trick you and kill you,
even if you have your helmet in place;
even with masks and gloves, you take
a chance with the things you can’t see.
All suited up, you could take a shot
in the neck or an artery hit in the leg,
somewhere that’s vital. So you cover
and lay low, even on base, where
a rocket can zero in and find you—
fear of friendly fire. Triage will become
unreliable, once overwhelmed with
casualties. And, again, it’s a matter
of luck or fate, who lives or dies. Now,
the helicopters are circling the perimeter
and someone has to be in charge,
ready to drop the red smoke grenades
to mark the landing zone. He’s on duty
once again, waking us, as he prepares
for an enemy that refuses to show its face.

—Submitted on 05/22/2020

Marilyn Johnston is the author of Before Igniting (Rippling Brook Press, 2020) and Red Dust Rising (The Habit of Rainy Nights Press, 2004). Her work has appeared in CALYX, Natural Bridge, Poetica, War, Verseweavers, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies including Terra Incognita: Oregon Poets Write for Ecological, Social, Political, and Economic Justice (Bob Hill Publishing, 2019). Johnston teaches in the Salem Art Association’s Artists in the Schools program serving Marion, Polk and Yamhill counties.

Johnston writes, “I wrote this for my husband who views this pandemic through the lens of the Vietnam War he fought and brought home with him…as well as for other men and women who have experienced trauma, their PTSD resurfacing during these surreal times.”

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Jennifer Martelli
I Don’t Have It, Do You?

—Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes, 1982

Deep into coronavirus’s sway, I drive through the rain to my childhood home—
I am safe in my car with my husband and my son.
There was a man who joked about death and then he died of Alzheimer’s.
My mother died of Alzheimer’s and so there is no God.
That man joked for three years: jokes about fairies and kissing: things he believed
made a man less of a man, things he believed made a man a woman.
My mother forgot everything but her fear and so there is no justice.
The new owners put a stone façade over part of the old house: tonal colors my mother
would have liked. Big blocks of fake rock.
(Lentivirus: long incubation. Lent: long days. Lent: it shall be returned.)
I stay awake until first pearl light. The whole world has been cancelled and so there is no time.

—Submitted on 04/01/2020

Jennifer Martelli is the author of In the Year of Ferraro (Nixes Mate Books, 2020), My Tarantella (Bordighera Press, 2018), After Bird (Grey Book Press, 2017), and The Uncanny Valley (Big Table Publishing Company, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Rise Up Review, Superstition Review, Grimoire, Glass, and other journals. Martelli is poetry co-editor of Mom Egg Review. She co-curates the Italian-American Writers Association Boston Literary Series. Online at jennmartelli.com

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