Ethel Gofen

North of Oxford – Spring 2021 Pandemic Issue #7

Dreamscape by Maria Keane http://www.mariakeane.com/

Thanks to the poets for contributing to The Pandemic Issue #7 from North of Oxford and Maria Keane for graciously providing her art. In order of appearance we present: Ray Greenblatt, Robbi Nester, Tim Suermondt, Charlie Brice, Wayne-Daniel Berard, Eileen R. Tabios, Stephen Page, Joan Mazza, Faith Paulsen, Marion Deutsche Cohen, Maria Keane, Wesley Scott McMasters, Megha Sood, Judy DeCroce, J. H. Johns, Charles Rammelkamp, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Linda Nemec Foster, Stephen Mead, James Walton, Antoni Ooto, Ethel Gofen, Michael A. Griffith, Ken Soyow and Bartholomew Barker.

Ray Greenblatt

2020 Summer

The boardwalk stretches away

straight and empty as if

a landing strip waiting for the first plane.

Mr. Peanut exits his shop

squinches in his monocle

twirls his cane and peers

around in disbelief.

And yet the tantalizers

of caramel corn

and pizza slices

float on the air uselessly.

In the casino

the roulette wheel still spins,

fanned cards lie on the green felt.

While on the wide deserted beach

the gulls seem to hoot and hoot

derisively.

This is the dream of a million minds

thinking now in terms of six paces

thinking that their words are muffled

with winding cloth.

Covid Days of the Week

minute a bug bite

an hour a mud ball

in the eye,

but a day

. . . wednesday, thursday, friday, saturday . . .

we lug like a tombstone

tall dense mossy

gray grainy granite

obit etched,

until the end of the week

to add to the foundation

upon which we build

a wall of months

so high and gray

it obscures the sky

Ray Greenblatt is an editor on the Schuylkill Valley Journal. His book reviews have been published by a variety of periodicals: BookMark Quarterly, Joseph Conrad Today, English Journal, the Dylan Thomas Society, and the John Updike Society. His new book of poetry, Nocturne & Aubades, is newly available from Parnilis Press, 2018. Ray Greenblatt has two books out for 2020: UNTIL THE FIRST LIGHT (Parnilis Media) and MAN IN A CROW SUIT (BookArts Press).

Robbi Nester

Tu B’Shvat During the Pandemic, March 2021

I have been watching out this window, waiting for

everything to change, if only for a moment,

a day, a week. Now, outside my window, three slender

trees, young girls swaying on the sunny path, have

begun to bloom, buds bursting in the spring’s first warm

sunlight. The trees take on soft edges, branches raising

garlands to the sky. Soon, next month maybe,

blizzards of white petals will fall to the grass, and trees

unfurl their leaves. Let the bees enter the vaulted

chapel of each blossom, drink from each raised chalice,

bless us with the sweetness of continued life.

Robbi Nester, like so many, is just beginning to emerge from sheltering in place and finding it more challenging than she imagined. She is author of 4 books of poetry, who used much of this year to write and host readings, as well as editing an anthology, The Plague Papers.

Tim Suermondt

The City is Returning

Easter, 2021

But the city is returning

only because more and more

people are—not in a torrent yet,

some streets still looking a bit

lonely, but the signs are there,

like the bridges across the river

that were shrouded in a Covid fog,

the bridges coming to life

in a flow of sun and gulls and human

traffic. I want to wave to and embrace

everyone, but I keep myself dignified

as best I can—there’s much living

to be done for those who made it,

over sorrow and resilience, to this day.

Tim Suermondt’s sixth full-length book of poems “A Doughnut And The Great Beauty Of The World” will be forthcoming from MadHat Press in 2021. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, december magazine, On the Seawall, Poet Lore and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

Charlie Brice

Mugsi Doesn’t Wear a Mask

But I do because of the pandemic.

Mugsi doesn’t because she’s a dog,

a black standard poodle that

we don’t cut up to look like the freaks

owned by rich ladies in Manhattan.

On our walk we come across masked strangers

who always appear menacing,

but who invariably wave because

they are my neighbors and

we all like one another.

They remove their masks and I recognize them—

a sheen of familiarity that brings relief.

It’s always good to see what’s behind a mask,

even if the mask is an illusion of civility,

something that covers brutality and barbarism,

even if what is unmasked is the bare bottom

of our culture, the butt end of racism,

the guttural groan of fascism.

Mugsi wiggles her tushie while she walks,

smells everything available,

is very intense, but always has time

to wag her tail if we meet

a crossing guard who might

have a treat for her.

Mugsi never holds a grudge even

when it rains or snows too hard

for me to give her a walk.

She always forgives me.

She loves to sit in my chair

when I’m not in it,

and she knows exactly where she

wants a scratch.

Charlie Brice is the winner of the 2020 Field Guide Magazine Poetry Contest and was awarded third place in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His fourth poetry collection is The Broad Grin of Eternity (WordTech 2021). His poetry has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Chiron Review, Pangolin Review, The Sunlight Press, Sparks of Calliope, and elsewhere.

Wayne-Daniel Berard

Mars

The unhypocritical

virus says “aren’t

I lovely? Velourishly

spherical don’t you

adore my red fleurettes?

Don’t I deserve to live

just as much as you?

Person, it’s nothing

personal I can’t just

change lifestyle eat

plants eschew carbon

(not that you would)

you are my incubator

and the purpose of

viral sex is procreation

if the mother dies

you know how that is

impregnating your paradigm

because you can’t give it

up even if it kills you allow

me I learned from the best

worst case we sleep our

smallness in your big sleep

and catch the next meteor

to the next world wasn’t

that your backup plan too?

See you on Mars, mamma.”

Wayne-Daniel Berard, PhD, is an educator, poet, writer, shaman, and sage. He publishes broadly in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. His poetry chapbook, The Man Who Remembered Heaven, received the New Eden Award in 2003. His non-fiction When Christians Were Jews (That Is, Now), subtitled Recovering the Lost Jewishness of Christianity with the Gospel of Mark, was published in 2006 by Cowley Publications. A novel The Retreatants, was published in 2012 (Smashwords). A chapbook, Christine Day, Love Poems, was published in 2016 (Kittatuck Press). His novella, Everything We Want, was published in 2018 by Bloodstone Press. A poetry collection, The Realm of Blessing, was published in 2020 by Unsolicited Press. Noa(h) and the Bark, was published in 2020 by Alien Buddha Press. Wayne-Daniel lives in Mansfield, MA with his wife, the Lovely Christine.

Eileen R. Tabios

The Covid-19 Hay(na)ku

There are other

ways of

dying—

But when it

occurs, we

wonder

even when we

sometimes must

forbid

ourselves from asking

such insensitive

questions

The Lockdown Tanka

But the near-strangled

planet shook off its blanket

of smog—the canals

reveal frolicking fish—we

see scales and eyes as sapphires

Eileen R. Tabios has released over 60 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in 10 countries and cyberspace. In Spring 2021, she released her first novel, DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times (AC Books, New York). Her award-winning body of work includes invention of the hay(na)ku, a 21st century diasporic poetic form, and the MDR Poetry Generator that can create poems totaling theoretical infinity. More information is at Eileen R. Tabios

Stephen Page

A Virtual Constitutionalist Convention

A honey bee hovers around yellow flowers

Growing out of Teresa’s vertical garden.

In the rectangular cement planter that divides

My office and the living-room patio decks

Newly planted lavender stands tall

Vibrating gently in the breeze

Between red daylilies

And clusters of blue columbine.

Last night I watched a virtual convention

Where people talked disdainfully about Dictator Reginald.

They spoke about his autocratic, manipulative, bullying tactics,

His lies, his divisiveness, his homophobia, his racism.

Of course, the DR trilled epitaphs and threats at them

And is still trying to dismantle the United Colonies Postal Service.

The mandarin-haired DR sits in is square office watching TV

While the plague outside attacks his voters.

The Orchids

My wife is preparing French toast,

While I sip coffee in front of the sea

That for the last five years

Reached farther inland every high tide.

A sparrow lands on the patio deck,

Hops over closer and tilt his head while studying me.

On the coffee table behind me,

The orchids which have for four years

Had only been wire-supported stems

This morning blossomed with purple-streaked petals.

Last night, on the international T.V. news channel,

Non-mask wearing Nationalists sat side-by-side in droves

To gaze up at the non-mask wearing Dictator Reginald

Screaming “A phantom virus! Climate change is fictional!”

“Make our colonies great again!” he bellows,

While wild fires rage on the split screen.

Life with and Without Father

I love opening an old book

And am struck with sunlight

While standing in an attic

On a wood floor,

The air swirling with flecks of dust.

I am driving Father’s white pickup

On a state highway

No traffic

The open road

Trees lining the ditches.

I am at a baseball park

Lying on the outfield grass

The afternoon sunlight bathing me.

My father died

Of a heart attack

While seated in a hospital admissions

Room, while ambulances were lined up

For blocks outside the hospital.

Today Tyrant Reginald said, “I have learned

A lot about COVID-19,

The old-school way.”

Our Own Demigod

And all this time I thought

That Tyrant Reginald was just

A dictator, but it turns out

He is a God, immune to the virus.

Yesterday, he sucked all the air around him

And raspingly declared, “You have nothing to fear,

Unless you are already dead! Go back

To work, go back to school, go

Eat inside restaurants, don’t

Wear masks!” His bleary eyes

Stabbing into the camera lens.

Then he turned around,

Grabbed a golf bag,

And bordered Sea Soldier 1.

Stephen Page is part Apache and part Shawnee. He was born in Detroit. He is the author of four books of poetry, several stories, essays, and literary criticisms. He holds degrees from Columbia University and Bennington College. He is the recipient of The Jess Cloud Memorial Prize, a Writer-in-Residence from the Montana Artists Refuge, a Full Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, an Imagination Grant from Cleveland State University, a First Place Prize in Poetry from Bravura Magazine, and an Arvon Foundation Ltd. Grant. https://smpages.wordpress.com/

Joan Mazza

Ode to Variants

You who insinuate yourself into every

living thing, you who invade and commandeer

the cell’s machinery to reproduce yourself

by the billions, with only a simple nucleic acid

in an envelope of lipids and protein,

let us praise your innovations. Proficient

at disguise, you are a survivor, evader

of antibodies, antivirals, phagocytes,

and cytokine storms. Ever mutating, you

sidestep human high tech assaults like

black belts in karate. Though invisible,

your morphing army marches forward,

adjusts to human precautions of masks

and distance, ever more contagious, more

virulent, resistant. O, mighty miniscule

life form, you never surrender. Ignorant

and mindless, without intention or will,

you keep us locked up, ever on standby.

You live by the command, Adapt or die.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam). Her work has appeared in Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia where she writes a daily poem. www.JoanMazza.com

Faith Paulsen

Another Poem About Light

Homesteaders now, before going out,

we strap on our paper masks. Beyond our walls,

just steps away, the wind’s ashes toll like a bell:

The faraway dome is breached.

Rushing home, we slam the door

shed our shoes, their mouths open.

We are hungry—

We have nothing to eat or breathe that isn’t

tainted. We begin to think that the bad spots

are cherries. In cupped hands we hold

our losses.

One house has plenty of eggs. The other has all

the apples they need. You buy half the beans

in the market. We tell each other we can

make something out of this. Just then

a girl in a red satin headband recites a poem about light

and in spite of jinx and dread, we begin.

String teardrop bulbs from the streetlights,

dangle from windows our brave-enough flags.

Night comes,

a snow lantern, lit from inside.

III

Let us wake up now and eat rice with orange peel.

Let us spread our

bread with honey.

We will not live through. We will live

during.

We will sing a capella the chorus of light

not at the end —

but in —

the tunnel.

Faith Paulsen’s work has appeared in many venues including One Art, Ghost City Press, Seaborne, and Book of Matches, as well as Thimble Literary Magazine, Evansville Review, Mantis, Psaltery and Lyre, and Terra Preta. Her work also appears in the anthologies such as 50/50: Poems & Translations by Womxn over 50 (QuillsEdge). She has been nominated for a Pushcart. Her chapbook A Color Called Harvest (Finishing Line Press) was published in 2016. A second chapbook, Cyanometer, is expected in 2021. For more information, please check the website at https://www.faithpaulsenpoet.com/

Marion Deutsche Cohen

The Abandoned Muscles

The Excel Physical Therapy mailing tells us that achiness is common during

quarantining.

I do my exercises every morning.

Make sure to do a few extra wriggles in extra directions.

I walk 4,000 steps a day, 500 at a time all throughout.

I play my piano, Beethoven’s late sonatas, arms all over the place, am even beginning to

trill with my left hand.

I move my writing muscle, Zoom muscies, cimbing stairs muscles, dancing muscles.

sex muscles.

But there must be muscles I’m forgetting.

Outdoor muscles, Reading Terminal Market Muscles, grocery cart muscles, thrift-

shopping muscles.

Muscles that are protesting

giving me gentle reminders

appearing in dreams

trying to move the way they’d move in reality

and therefore moving too much.

Clenching too much.

Cramping too much.

Aching too much.

Angry muscles, muscles turned mean.

Obsolete muscles that won’t go away.

Physical

Am I only imagining that I’m finally feeling my age?

Sinus crap, jaw pain, clenched back, the possible recurrence of trigeminal neuralgia?

And now I can hear my heart beating.

It sounds like water dripping from my childhood drainpipes.

Sometimes it wakes me up.

Or maybe it’s only the nightmares.

Different nightmares from before.

That people refuse to stay six feet away.

They come at me, hands dripping with droplets.

In one dream there was an orgy of them.

Or it’s past the equinox but the days are getting shorter rather than longer.

Every late-afternoon the darkness begins sooner than the late-afternoon before.

And my husband tells me his nightmare.

The door to our house was put on backward

locked from the outside so anybody could get in

and he needed the key to get out.

The locksmith arrived right away but then took away the entire door

said he couldn’t get back ‘til next week.

All week long outside kept seeping in.

Inside was disappearing.

There was no such thing as inside.

Marion Deutsche Cohen is the author of 32 collections of poetry or memoir; her newest poetry collection is “Stress Positions” (Alien Buddha Press), and her latest prose collection is “Not Erma Bombeck: Diary of a Feminist 70s Mother” (Alien Buddha Press). She is also the author of a book of #MeToo poems, two controversial memoirs about spousal chronic illness, a trilogy diary of late-pregnancy loss, and “Crossing the Equal Sign”, about the experience of mathematics. She teaches a course she developed, Mathematics in Literature, at Drexel University’s Honors College. Her website is http://www.marioncohen.net

Latern by Night by Maria Keane http://www.mariakeane.com/.

Maria Keane

A Reckoning

I beg

to hear the river rushing

an incessant rocking

down a deep corridor

where darkness—

its there

I am tied to it.

Not even wings can free me

from the black

for a reason we suppose—

is for the good.

Night blooming trees

feed a need to breathe.

Their perfume

saturates the senses

splinters a fracture

to eliminate hysteria.

Walking through a web

I break, unraveling

the first silence

under the sole edict

of sound.

I see it now

and quench some dark history

in the presence of anxiety.

I will walk in shadow,

hold on to murmers,

listening for you to arrive,

You reduce the havoc of the trees

repair my will

to believe

all things are only in the moment.

Wesley Scott McMasters

A Haiku for a Pandemic

It is so quiet;

or have I grown tired

of the same voices?

Wesley Scott McMasters teaches and lives just within sight of the Great Smoky Mountains with his dog, Poet (who came with the name, he swears).

Megha Sood

Unclaimed Freedom

The cerulean tinge peeking through the barbed wires

a gaping hole, like an open, stretched out calloused palms

seeking empathy in hunger, in pain

color tinged rays making their way

through the mishmash of thick wires

I squint my eyes to even the shades

Even then I can see the mesh obstructing my vision

there is too much restriction these days

the invisible virus boisterously ruling our lives

Holding lien to our breaths

making us beg for the next one, a novel privilege

I want to rip apart this entrapment

Pry it open the obstructed view of the open skies

Let the fraying ends come loose

Shifting wings like a soaring eagle

in the vast cerulean skies

laced with mellifluous melody,

I want to taste freedom through my squinty eyes

I know this calling,

I can feel the warmth in my bones

the sorrow draining from every iota of my existence

I take the clamps, cut the wires

one joint at a time

slowly but surely

Making way for my petite body

to pass through the thin gaps

of this corrugated mesh

and claim the freedom

which is truly mine.

Megha Sood is a Poet, Editor, and Blogger based in New Jersey, USA. She is a Poetry Editor at MookyChick(UK), Life and Legends (USA), and Literary Partner in the project “Life in Quarantine” with Stanford University, USA. Works widely featured in journals, Poetry Society of New York, Kissing Dynamite, and many more. Author of Chapbook ( “My Body is Not an Apology”, Finishing Line Press, 2021) and Full Length (“My Body Lives Like a Threat”, FlowerSongPress,2021).National Level Winner Spring Mahogany Lit Prize and Three-Time State-level winner of NJ Poetry Contest.Blogs at https://meghasworldsite.wordpress.com/ .Tweets at @meghasood16

Judy DeCroce

A Repeat of the New

“It’s happening again, because it’s new to them.”

—Antoni Ooto

A reply

natural in the hum

beginning with the concrete

and then a buzz annoying

a mystery in context

for such a transparent idea.

Strangeness is marching

through a metaphor none saw coming.

Is it danger or a riddle?

(hard to know)

The moment shakes us in

and we grab its edges.

Along the way

ideas stand and rearrange.

It’s happening again…

because it’s new to us.

Judy DeCroce, is an internationally published poet, flash fiction writer, educator, and avid reader whose recent works have been published by The BeZine, Brown Bag Online, North of Oxford, The Poet Magazine, Amethyst Review, The Wild Word, OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters, and many journals and anthologies.

J. H. Johns

“There was a Time Before the Time”

There was a time

before the time

when things changed;

slowly-

then instantly-

we went

from

the momentary past

being an instant away

to that same past

which became

a historical memory;

so quickly;

so instantly;

what used to be

our present

dissolved

in a viral concoction

that was out to kill.

There was a time before the time.

J. H. Johns “grew up and came of age” while living in East Tennessee and Middle Georgia. Specifically, the two places “responsible” for the writer that he has become are Knoxville, Tennessee and Milledgeville, Georgia.

Charles Rammelkamp

Coronavirus Cooties

“Daddy, Ian said I had cooties,”

Stephanie pouted to her father

about a kid in her first-grade class.

Amused and gratified to hear

the term still in use,

generations later,

her father asked,

“What are cooties?”

“They make you fat,”

Stephanie answered without hesitation,

disgusted by the fact,

body-type issues infecting

even elementary school children.

Originally World War One soldier slang

for body lice in the trenches,

cooties had mutated over the years,

just like any other virus.

In her dad’s day, girls gave boys cooties,

boys gave them back to girls,

like an unacknowledged venereal disease,

polio in the 1950’s,

AIDS in the 1980’s.

What next, in 2020?

The Bald Guy with Long Hair

I was in the Documentation Department

at Infodyne, in the late 1980’s,

working on operations manuals.

“Go talk to Woody,”

my supervisor advised when I went to him

with a question about COBOL coding.

“The guy who works with the mainframes,”

Paul clarified when I confessed

I wasn’t sure who Woody was.

“He’s always in here talking to Joyce,”

he went on, as if I knew

the people my colleagues consulted.

“The bald guy with long hair,”

Paul finally explained, a poker player

producing the ace up his sleeve.

“Oh!” I exclaimed.

Now I knew exactly who he was talking about,

the skinny guy with the shiny pate

and hair down to his shoulders,

a Fu Manchu mustache.

Why do I remember this now?

It’s been four months

since my last haircut,

wary about going into a barbershop

in this age of COVID.

That could describe me:

the bald guy with long hair

(not to mention eyebrows like caterpillars).

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books and Catastroika from Apprentice House.

Conversations

Conversations by Maria Keane http://www.mariakeane.com/

Thaddeus Rutkowski

Cold Day Outside

I see my homeless friend

sitting on a step and smoking a cigarette

on an unpleasant day.

The air is filled with water, and it bites.

“Where’s your mask, man?” I ask.

“I’ve got a mask,” he says. “But I’m outside.”

He’s right. “The virus doesn’t travel well through air,” I say.

Then I ask, “How long have you been here?”

And he doesn’t answer.

He looks like I caught him doing something he shouldn’t.

“How many hours?” I ask.

“Five,” he says.

Indeed, he should not been sitting outside,

in the cold and rain, for five hours.

It is not natural.

I give him a bill, and he says, “Bless you.”

But I’m not the one who needs blessing.

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of seven books, most recently Tricks of Light, a poetry collection. He teaches at Medgar Evers College and received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Linda Nemec Foster

Pandemic Litany: The White Chair of Absence

If death has a color

it would be white, the color

that reflects and scatters

all visible light:

this chair, this chair

becomes my mantra–

white chair of solitude

white chair of isolation

white chair of the absent father

white chair of the abusive mother

white chair of the forgotten–(say it)

white chair of the forgotten child

white chair of the silence that comes before

white chair of the cry that comes after

white chair of solitary confinement

white chair of the hole in the gut

white chair of the bone-white fist

white chair of the shroud

white chair of the wedding veil

white chair of the dark secret

white chair of the white lie

white chair of the what now (what now)

white chair that doesn’t leave

white chair that doesn’t arrive

white chair of the recurring dream

white chair of the yes

white chair of the no

white chair of the maybe

white chair of my birth

white chair of my–(say it)

white chair of my death

and the wind in the long grass

above my white bones

is the only voice I have

Linda Nemec Foster has published eleven collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk, Talking Diamonds, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (2019 Michigan Notable Book). Her work appears in numerous journals: The Georgia Review, Nimrod, New American Writing, North American Review, and Verse Daily. She’s received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and awards from Arts Foundation of Michigan, National Writer’s Voice, Dyer-Ives Foundation, The Poetry Center (NJ), and Academy of American Poets. Her new book, The Blue Divide, is forthcoming from New Issues Press (2021). The first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College.

Stephen Mead

Blue Mask Seas

(for my Friend, Tom Stephany, taken by Covid on World AIDS Day 2020)

They are so easy to picture:

that ridge for the nose a wave’s curve

& the surrounding white outline being froth’s tips

creased pleat upon pleat…

Even the hue is a Madonna’s robe gentleness sky-expansive

though these horizons are grayer, often opaque,

a chloroform of loss stopping things up.

Face without a body, not modeled in the round

is how one dictionary describes that eye-less paper relief

there on the parking lot paving, blowing now across the sidewalk

& into the weeds lining the pharmacy’s brick exterior,

its chained-up trash can overflowing with refuse,

all the six-pack plastic for a tortoise’s intestines.

This stray one didn’t make it to that heap anyhow, whether a careless

sort of pocket-escapee or dropped on purpose as a take that

Mother Nature. Caring is sharing. May others be touched

as you have touched me.

Come, don’t be cynical about how so many are angry

& searching for a companionable mob to show that their great misery

is oh so inconveniently displeased about shops & salons, (the nerve of them)

wanting their employees protected when Privilege

is now a Liberty Fight to carry Uzis through marches for Peace

to keep mutating and spreading genome A to genome Z.

No one is tear-gassing that, pleading “can’t breathe”

like in the sterilized wards the size of stadiums if put together

globally – see – waving white flags to reflective face shields,

goggles & layers of gowns stretched into latex, the gloved touch

an antiseptic cry of good-bye mirrored in beeping equipment,

the hissing, decompressing & pumping ocean of lives

named or unnamed in today’s pandemic headlines

tomorrow’s may forget once vaccines return normalcy,

that other great body, blood-red, industrious, tidal & churning

or is that just the fear, blue mask asks blue mask,

that the human species has learned nothing

James Walton

Tsundoku

(the condition of acquiring reading

materials but letting them pile up

in one’s home without reading them)

They are laid out for this Sunday

stations between lockdown dates

and if an ear is pressed to them

words singing out of lethargy

rise out of loose leaf castings

from waiting rooms across the city

a fall of sound as another bearer

signals to lounges kitchens hallways

that awakening hope of release

in the chugging unopened language

where skimmed pages delayed

hanging on by the faded light

of patience stretched amongst the piles

convey the railway alphabet

a slower mystery of words

stops to start again ticket less

written as we are by each other

for carriage into other lives

James Walton is published in many anthologies, journals, and newspapers. He is the author of four widely acclaimed collections of poetry. ‘The Leviathan’s Apprentice’, ‘Walking Through Fences’, ‘Unstill Mosaics’, and ‘Abandoned Soliloquies’. His fifth collection will be released shortly.

Antoni Ooto

We’ll Remember…

“Stop the Steal”

that day—when the weight of the mob

breached the barricades.

When anarchy broke through,

scaling the walls,

crushing, storming The Hill,

bludgeoning police,

a shot fires into a woman

as the incensed mob screams on

scouring the hallways

crazed,

battering doors, disrupting the senate

through a “test by combat”

encouraged by our tyrant and his cronies

All this—

a performance of “might makes right”

as proudly grotesque figures

carry away trophies.

This was the worst and the least of our nature—

it was the winter of a nation coming apart

before a cell phone lens…

revealing no enemy but ourselves.

(January 6, 2021)

Antoni Ooto is an internationally published poet and flash fiction writer. Well-known for his abstract expressionist art.His recent poems have been published in Amethyst Review, The BeZine, Green Ink Poetry, The Poet Magazine, North of Oxford, The Wild Word, and many journals and anthologies. He lives and works in upstate New York with his wife poet/storyteller, Judy DeCroce.

Ethel Gofen

Coronavirus Haiku

Coronavirus:

Epic pandemonium,

Pandemic upset.

If you’re feeling scared,

Change those letters to sacred;

See it in each soul.

Vaccines have arrived.

Herd immunity awaits.

We shall overcome!

Ethel Gofen is a poet, author of two books in the series, Cultures of the World, for which she wrote the volumes on France and Argentina in 1990 and 1992. She and her husband both survived Covid-19 in May 2020.

Michael A. Griffith

Mercy

What kills you fastest,

the fleece in your lungs or thorns

in your throat? Choking and the loss of vision

as constriction becomes everything.

Worms and fireflies swim across darkened eyes.

Everything becomes constriction.

Your hands not your own, your spine a jellyfish.

Pinprick of a voice over you: No,

everything is not alright.

Heat—wet, oppressive, surrounds you.

Heat—no air worth breathing,

what air is to be had? Gulping

is never enough, gasping is never a help.

Python oozes heavy around your chest.

Surrounding you, the urinal smell,

as the tube is taped to your lips

in a machine’s tinnitus whine.

A sting to your upper arm—

and constriction becomes mercy.

Michael A. Griffith teaches at Raritan Valley and Mercer County Community Colleges in central NJ. He is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, Bloodline, Exposed, and New Paths to Eden. Mike hosts a monthly poetry workshop through the Princeton Public Library. Recent work appears in Kelsey Review, 13 Myna Birds, Impspired, Page & Spine, Haiku Journal, and North of Oxford.

Ken Soyow

Deadly Virus

She cried when I left,

each time knowing it could be the last.

She used to keep meticulous records,

said the woman who did her taxes.

It’s sad watching her grow old, said a friend,

as my mother limped past with her walker.

I was there in March, as the rope tightened —

screening, testing, restrictions,

daily notices of what they’d do

if any cases in the county,

if cases among nursing home staff

or among residents —

I cut my visit short, skipping coffee

Friday morning for fear of a lockdown.

When are you coming back? she asked,

left alone with her caregivers

planted in front of the TV.

When the pandemic is over.

When they let me in, I said.

Pick me up and take me home, she said.

You are home, I said.

The furniture looks familiar, she said,

but this isn’t home.

Are you coming to visit today?

No, I’m six hundred miles away,

and they’re not allowing visitors, I said.

Maybe your brother could pick me up.

She sat in her wheelchair, often napping.

She dreamt her dead husband was calling

from the doorway.

It was a stroke, the doctor said.

Ken Soyow is a retired physician, living in Massachusetts.

Bartholomew Barker

A River Flows Through Us All

I was talking with this fish

the other day while I rested

on the banks of the Eno River.

She’d noticed a change.

The water was clearer,

the air quieter

even the bugs tasted better.

She felt lucky—

Lucky to be alive

in this glorious time.

She had no word for virus,

so I explained that my people

were sick and dying.

She sympathized— wished

the best for me and my school

and as she swam away she remarked,

In the weeds or over rocks—

by the shore or in the darkness—

a river flows through us all.

My Hermitage

– or How I Started a Pandemic

I last touched

a germ-covered body

over a year ago

and I am finally blossoming

into my hermitage

with a beard longer

than Longfellow’s.

I was bored with bookstore readings,

stale coffeeshop open mics,

workshops in sterile libraries

and tired of everyday showering,

putting on both socks and shoes,

the horror of going outside

in fetid heat or brittle cold.

So, with candles and wine,

I cast a spell of words,curling forth the RNA—

Rhythm, Neologism, Anaphora—

to spread through journals

and blogposts, infecting

my innocent readers.

All so I could languish

in these long nights,

sit in darkened rooms alone,

listen to Gnossiennes

and write, write, write

until the antibodies

kick down my door.

Bartholomew Barker is one of the organizers of Living Poetry, a

collection of poets and poetry lovers in the Triangle region of North

Carolina. His first poetry collection, Wednesday Night Regular, written

in and about strip clubs, was published in 2013. His second, Milkshakes

and Chilidogs, a chapbook of food inspired poetry was served in 2017.

Born and raised in Ohio, studied in Chicago, he worked in Connecticut

for nearly twenty years before moving to Hillsborough where he makes

money as a computer programmer to fund his poetry habit.

www.bartbarkerpoet.com

Hot Sauna

Hot Sauna by Maria Keane http://www.mariakeane.com/

Summer 2020 Pandemic Issues

North of Oxford – The Pandemic Issue #5

https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2020/08/11/north-of-oxford-the-pandemic-issue/

North of Oxford – The Pandemic Issue #6

https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2020/08/11/north-of-oxford-the-pandemic-issue-6/

Spring 2020 Pandemic Issues

North of Oxford – The Pandemic Issue #1

https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2020/04/19/__trashed-2/

North of Oxford- The Pandemic Issue #2

https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2020/04/25/north-of-oxford-the-pandemic-issue-2/

North of Oxford- The Pandemic Issue #3

https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2020/04/25/north-of-oxford-the-pandemic-issue-3/

North of Oxford – The Pandemic Issue #4

https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2020/04/27/north-of-oxford-the-pandemic-issue-4/

Stay Safe – Vaccinate – Mask Up

Diane Sahms and g emil reutter

http://www.dianesahms-guarnieri.com/

https://dianesahmsguarnieri.wordpress.com/

https://gereutter.wordpress.com/about/

North of Oxford – The Pandemic Issue #6

“Windowbox Flowers and Rain Barrel” by Mary M. Michaels https://marymmichaels.weebly.com/

Thanks to the poets for contributing to The Pandemic Issue #6 from North of Oxford and Mary M. Michaels for graciously providing her art. In order of appearance we present: Henry Crawford, Megha Sood, Sheila Allen with Emily Jensen, Kerry Trautman, M. J. Arcangelini, Stephen Bochinski, Christine Riddle, Maria Keane, Marko Otten, Patricia Carragon, Jonel Abellanosa, Reizel Polak, Lois Perch Villemaire, Stephen Page, John Stickney, Ethel Gofen, Nan Ottenritter, Larry C. Tolbert, Kirsty A. Niven, Roderick Deacey, Gwil James Thomas and JeanMarie Olivieri

Henry Crawford

View From The Refrigerated Truck

The one below me died last Thursday.

They took him to the ICU the day before.

Put him on a ventilator.

Next to me a woman I remember

from the waiting room. The steel doors opened

to a blast of sunlight and cold vapor.

Stacked her in the first

vacant space.

My wife caught me coughing.

Drove me down in our yellow Honda Civic.

She knew this woman.

They’d gone to junior high together.

There’s room for another body

on my left. I saw a technician sneezing

as they were hooking up my drips.

It might be nice to see her again

but not here.

I’d tell her watch out. It’s not the dying

but the dying alone. Not the pain but the

knowing. Not the void but the temperature

that gets you.

Henry Crawford is the author of two collections of poetry, American Software (CW Books, 2017) and the Binary Planet (Word Works, 2020). His online poems are available at Henry Crawford Poetry, Online. He is currently the host of the online series, Poets vs The Pandemic.

Megha Sood

Insane “New” Normal

Like a blind cave

brittle rib cage hosting the infection

an unwanted guest:

the virus opens its mouth

its glistening black teeth

in the dead of the night

devours everything

precious and beautiful

cleaves the life out of the soul

leaves you gasping;

with bated breath and a jarred mind

you are left alone

in a vacant mind

lying on the death bed

reminiscing the day love embraced you

around a summer bonfire

now loneliness bounces off

sepia-tinged walls

death draped in pristine

white sheets sitting

at the foot of the bed

scoops its share masticating life

leaving you rotten like an empty room

with chipped off walls

forgotten and waiting for its due

vacant mind begets explanation

in the hollowness of the night

when the wheezing and choking

cleaves your soul

leaves you asunder

It rattles your mind

you struggle with the existential truth

as this insane “new normal” renders

dying alone a new meaning.

A Condolence Call

Grief sits like a day old soup in my kitchen unless the anger stirs it

rattles and boils it. Grief rises to the surface and chokes me

I hear the loss of a mother. My friend’s mother, over the phone

It’s a condolence call yet I can’t seem to join in his grief

Sudden loss disjoints your body, the pieces don’t seem to fit anymore

Body and language are extricable. Our tongue moves in the way

our body can’t decipher in grief. I can’t seem to form a legible sentence

our conversation keeps coming back to the grocery, the loneliness of

being stuck in a condo looking over the lush green deserted parks.

I don’t want to bring back the conversation of the dead and dying.

The whole thread of conversation is about feeding the ones we love.

Loss is pouring through the thin sluices of this city. Every damn day.

Which starts again the same way it ended yesterday Or was it tomorrow?

With sidewalks pitted with the bones of the dead.

I can’t seem to fathom the desperation and anger in his voice of not being

able to visit her mother during her last times, the pain and the grief carry over

like a failing enjambment from one meaningless conversation

to another till we ran out of the small talk. The silences between

the pauses take the shape of the unsaid condolence, as I slowly hang up the phone.

There is no defined language for grief. Lesson learned.

This City Weeps. This City Wails

The infection moving crisscross

jumping street and avenues

the Broadway Boogie Woogie

straight out of a Mondrian

A labyrinth of bones buried

under the sidewalks

Once lined with laughter

Now pitted with fear

Parks morphing into graves

Dead outgrows the living

Sky shredded with elegy

People drowning their grief

Looking out from the balcony

The incessant clapping

Can’t douse the cacophony of death

Of screaming hearts and sobbing souls.

Anger and grief filling the sewers

the putrid smell carried by air

Heavy with grief and sorrow

Nothing heavier than the pain of dying alone

As the infection moves through the

City wailing like a widow

The contagion like grief

Anointing every soul it touches

Earmarking it for death

The night whimpers

under its own breath.

This city wails. This city weeps.

Conjecture

What roses are blooming outside the four walls of my room with no name?

The seasons pass without waving goodbye. There are only enough things I choose

to ignore this year

Hunkered inside my room, I am counting hollow shadows crossing the streets

Tender sapling breaking open through the moist crumbled earth

Douse with the monsoon rains. Empty seasons passing outside this walls

like the phantom shadows beside a moving train, a fallacy of time passing.

Days rolled into nights like incessant numbers on my calendar.

A hamster on a wheel life with memories etched on our dead and the dying

Counting the loss by every passing day I wonder, what lilies are blooming in the square today?

Loneliness begets acceptance, bodies shriveled like raisins craving for the warm acceptance.

What buds have birthed in the small garden, I wonder.

Some losses are too heavy to count, some debts are too big to pay.

All my passing seasons are now a conjecture of my empty mind

Trapped inside the sepia tinge walls of my high rise, burgeoned by the grief

Like a father blackening his elbows on the window sill

counting his breaths like long scratches on a prison’s wall.

Megha Sood is an Assistant Poetry Editor at Mookychick.Over 450+ works featured in literary journals and numerous works in print anthologies by the US, UK, Australian, and Canadian Press. Blogs at https://meghasworldsite.wordpress.com/

Sheila Allen with Emily Jensen

Silent Killer

-For Mark Romutis

Warnings were sent and then ignored

Washington heard not a single word

And blindly life continued on

While a silent killer was coming, going strong

He said,

We‘re all united together

We‘re all working so hard together

It will be a great victory soon

But the truth sings a different tune

There was no caution from our leader here

Except to pose and place blame here and there

But the enemy was in the air

And was on us, in us, hiding everywhere

He said,

We‘re all united together

We‘re all working so hard together

It will be a great victory soon

And so his voters listened well

And took no heed, even rebelled

And brothers, husbands, and sisters fell

While the virus raged on, raging hell

He said,

We‘re all united together

We‘re all working so hard together

It will be a great victory soon

We need a leader to help us heal

A ruler who listens, and deeply feels

Who makes science and facts the ideal

To bring our country back to life again

And THE PEOPLE now say

We‘re all united together

We are all working hard together

It will be a great victory soon

These are lyrics written after my brother died on April 12. – Sheila Allen

Kerry Trautman

Introvert Quarantined

It should be heaven here at home with people I

love and made, bright things I

chose to line my walls and shelving. Instead

I long for Manhattan, for the N train to 42nd

rattling grime and garbagey curbsides.

My children seem to multiply,

husband a coworker making smalltalk while the

breakroom microwave hums.

I miss too-loud bar cover bands, guessing stories

of strangers at parties where I only

know two people and just want to lure the cat

from under the bed or join it. Windows glass

is cold to touch, trees beyond still brittle grey,

my kitchen has only canned beans, tuna and stale

crackers, apples we start to reach for then

change our minds. I want a restaurant menu

with ingredients I need to Google, a wine list

like Morse code I close and ask

for water, waiter judging my shoes other

patrons chatting relaxed with their

bulbous wines. Here between my walls everyone

knows me too well, has heard me fart as I hop up

the stairs, watched me sew and re-sew

holes in the knees of my pajamas. I know

whose footsteps are coming, whose sneeze that was

which cupboard door just

opened and didn’t close. Slip me into the queue

for TSA, someone’s Samsonite knocking into

my heels, someone’s hummus assailing my

sinuses. Press me between two strangers in airline

seats with an inch-wide hard armrest

pretending to separate my belly from theirs. Thrust

my body out at the cold

air of the world.

Quarantined Together

You and I argue the politics on TV—

the paper-shuffling sound bites

like a slipcover slid over

a holey plaid sofa,

and I wish the remote control could

click me views into

other living rooms.

Do wives there finish their sentences

without repeated shouts like

linguistic backs of hands?

Do husbands there listen, nod

I see your point?

I want to hold

the volume-down button

and TV graph lines dip

downward in a breath of relief

like bicycle coasting

with legs yawned wide

away from pedals.

I avoid you, avoid the suit

behind the crested podium

like the oak tree at the park

with a two-foot hornet’s nest.

There must be characters somewhere

who are better scripted,

Someone is getting this right.

I need clairvoyance like a

glow-in-the-dark telephone

I can pick up to hear

my neighbors cleaning their garage

with harmonious chatter,

or my two poet-couple friends

versing on twin manual typewriters

beside billowing curtains,

or the young couple marrying

in the stone church downtown

with only the priest and their parents

six-feet apart in the pews.

I need a TV channel to tell me

who will live to feel

the heat of summer, and who

will have to trust their memory

of waves pulling wet sand

around their toes

in a fever dream while blinking

their last blinks.

If I turn the TV off

I am an ostrich.

On mute I could listen

instead to Debussy or Dylan

but maps would still glow there—

reddening circles radiating

from major cities

sprawling by the hour.

There must be something to press

to my ear.

I’m willing to hear

all I’ve done wrong

and what could have

switched it right,

willing to beg forgiveness and

burn bridges before

I flush red and burst

on a map of Ohio

but first I need to shout

into something

built to receive my voice.

Kerry Trautman’s books are Things That Come in Boxes (King Craft Press 2012,) To Have Hoped (Finishing Line Press 2015,) Artifacts (NightBallet Press 2017,) and To be Nonchalantly Alive (Kelsay Books 2020.) She is a poetry editor for Red Fez. Tired of tiny Zoom faces, she longs for in-person poetry.

M. J. Arcangelini

Pandemic Ghazal

pacing the yard just past dawn. Birds chattering,

free to fly wherever they wish.

Television talking heads spewing numbers,

pointing to charts, somehow translates into lives.

Mask as fashion statement. Sequined mask. Flag mask.

Mask as political position. Frightened old masked man.

What are your symptoms this morning? What?

You don’t have any? Look again. Look again.

Talking to shadows. The empty guest chair.

The solitary bed. Swapping photos with Onan.

Even the recluse gets lonely when he’s

denied what he had chosen to forego.

M.J. Arcangelini has resided in northern California since 1979. He has published in a lot of little magazines, online journals, & over a dozen anthologies. He has five collections, the most recent of which is “A Quiet Ghost,” Luchador Press 2020. Arcangelini has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Stephen Bochinski

The thing is it is dark

bringing a flashlight won’t help

it is too artificial for places like this

besides you must perceive

with senses other than sight

when darkness descends

eclipsing even the rays of the sun

and you find yourself alone

the only source of illumination

your dream seen with liminal eyes

and the subconscious self a sensory organ

with which it is possible to perceive

the vast beauty of our collective soul.

Rooted

It is impossible to flee

to some other country

the borders are all closed

as are the locked doors

of our individual abodes.

There is no escape

in climbing out the window

out the screens of televisions

or the glow of our devices

no more hiding in the attic

with our memories and our memes

or the darkness of our basement

to sit out the great depression

of our anxieties and despair.

It is the return to somewhere ancient

over the threshold of a primal door

to weep the tears for all those years

that separation wrought

to tend to the tender places

we all were cut to our psyche’s bone

where the ancient healing rituals

forgotten by our elevated selves

are remembered in our beloved earth

where the tree of our nature is rooted

where together we withstand the storm.

Stephen Bochinski has been writing since taking an evening creative writing course at a local community college in the mid-nineties while working construction during the day. He has since retired from construction and continues to write while living in Oceanside Ca. and walking on the beach.

Christine Riddle

Sheltering in Place: Week 5

In the pre-dawn stillness I imagine I can hear the Earth’s heartbeat

pulsing in harmony with the cosmos, reliably in orbit,

unfazed by this pandemonium. Meanwhile, I’ve been flung off course,

diverted onto a foreign trajectory, destination uncertain.

I mask, I distance, but mostly I shelter in place

and wonder what’s to become of us.

Other crises arrive in a spectacle: tsunamis, wildfires, Twin Towers.

But this time there was no seismic shift, no arsonist, no terrorists.

This one crept in quietly and scattered like mercury uncontained.

Like fog at sea it knows no bounds, its reach is limitless.

Its victims transformed into weapons.

Whether human creation or Nature’s spawn it lives among us now.

And I must accept that the unthinkable is reality,

that we were so smugly unprepared,

that we are all vulnerable.

In the pre-dawn stillness, birds still sing.

Christine Riddle’s poetry has appeared in Moments of the Soul, Ink to Paper, Prize Poems 2020, and will soon be published in Tennessee Voices an Anthology. An essay appears in Far Villages.

Maria Keane

Containment

Blackened flowers

tangle in weeds.

Crimes become catacombs of amnesia.

Time lapses, behavior struggles for the

flavor of freedom, the right to claim

air to breathe, enduring the

struggle to stay alive.

Scarred wings of memory

struggle for liberty, all movement

shocked by a third rail of dying.

Keane’s published poetry, has been the recipient of several literary grant residency awards by the Delaware Division of Arts. Her poetry has received national honors by the National League of American Pen Women. A book of poetry, Being There (includes illustrations by the author) was published in October, 2018. It was awarded a First in the Creative verse/ book award by the Delaware Press Women Her visual art was awarded a Professional Fellowship in Works on Paper in 1997 by the DDOA and the NEA.

Marko Otten

rainforest lockdown

we have known rainforests

visiting them partly for our pleasure

we penetrated them deeply keen on their mysteries

every time I thought I’d come out a better person

returning home wiser like mister natural

a week after reinstated lockdown

we tried to venture into the inner city

to skulk around at night

the only people under blue towers and

most silent raining

streets glistening under lampposts and neon lights

suddenly plain to see: a wilderness exposed midtown

wilder than what we’d seen anywhere ever before

retreat

confused guessing

wait a minute: wasn’t that a cab few blocks down?

yes we did see one

maybe not

something was moving

or driving around

or did you

for a moment I just…

retreat

no better person to return home

unexplored wild calling

Marko Otten is a Dutch poet who reads and writes poetry in English. The expressive powers of the language got him hooked. Marko Otten is a published historian and a supervisor in education. He graduated at Groningen University (1982 with honors) and took classes at New York University and at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. He is married to Anne. Their children Judith and Martijn married and settled in Zutphen and Barcelona respectively.

Patricia Carragon

send me an angel

(inspired by Klaus Meine and Rudolf Schenker of the Scorpions)

wisdom comes with maturity but it’s hard to be wise

when your nation caters to avarice and ignorance

you never saw the storm seize the new year

& like the government life shuts down for struggle to thrive

anxiety doesn’t believe in social distancing

sends cryptic messages between you and your mask

you did your best prayed for that miracle

that fell prey to lies & deceit

open your eyes your angel left for another zoom call

stay locked in your quarantine

watch gray feathers etched in red blow off the fire escape

the trapper & the furrier

(inspired by regina spektor)

2020 a strange strange year

like a time bomb waiting for breaking news to strike

beasts in filthy cages

pellets and food pets from puppy mills

children sleep in soiled cages

family separation asylum still out of reach

dystopian predictions dystopian facts

big business declares war on its workers

unions wages healthcare live at triage

newspeak from the white house

twists failure into praise fiction into history

our self-proclaimed leader plays mobster roulette

the press elections & laws face execution

he gives carte blanche to an alien dressed as the flu

& the sick keep getting sicker

with too many fevers chills coughs & losses of smell & taste

death toll rising ghost towns replace cities

bodies overflow morgues the homeless live underground

tests & cures not fast enough

business as usual for corporate generals

2020 a strange strange year

people shut indoors waiting not knowing what to believe

their time bombs not knowing when to explode

Patricia Carragon latest books from Poets Wear Prada are Meowku and The Cupcake Chronicles, and Innocence from Finishing Line Press. Ms. Carragon hosts Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology and is an executive editor for Home Planet News Online. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Jonel Abellanosa

Dirge in the Time of the Pandemic

The dark is mastering me, peace of mind

a measure it plays as if it desires personhood.

I give the twelfth hour a simple name –

“Midnight.”

Curtains hiding glass panes hint blue,

place in my mind where time doesn’t pass,

no need for anything to be done, no need for

accomplishments.

Light flashes outside, and I know the sky

over my heart speaks no thunder.

When the moon leaves, I resume my part

in the world.

Living has become so hard, loved ones

families lose like notes a mournful song

leaves to silence. It doesn’t have to be

this way

but in the world that holds echoes

“Greed” is more powerful than the powerto end the music that keeps repeating.

Jonel Abellanosa lives in Cebu City, the Philippines. He is a nature lover, an environmental advocate, and loves all animals particularly dogs. His poetry and fiction have appeared in hundreds of literary journals and anthologies, including Windhover, The Lyric, Star*Line, Fox Chase Review, Poetry Kanto, Marsh Hawk Review, That Literary Review, Bosphorous Review of Books and The Anglican Theological Review. His poetry collections include, “Meditations” (Alien Buddha Press), “Songs from My Mind’s Tree” and “Multiverse” (Clare Songbirds Publishing House), “50 Acrostic Poems,” (Cyberwit, India), “In the Donald’s Time” (Poetic Justice Books and Art), and his speculative poetry collection, “Pan’s Saxophone” (Weasel Press). He loves to self-study the sciences.

Reizel Polak

Delivery during Quarantine

This unexpected sight the sad

park benches unfriendly to elderly

to pause take pleasure in the shrubbery

the whistling birds yellow tape crossed over

armrest to armrest defends against

a tranquil freedom to sit in the company

of others to talk tell a joke and yet

every one has begun to know

to stay apart cover-up one’s mouth

one’s nose still the eyes can speak

I see another pedestrian walking this way

your face I think looks gloomy your glance

far away I nod I smile with my eyes

in this square I pass through and out of

an eerie-quiet air the hedgerow birds

sing out of sight double whistles

I wish I knew to name these voices

such comfort I admit to love deeply

the sound of the birds calling to each other

the sound of creation every new day

and here what comes along ahead tugging

on a leash a little dog turning back

to glance at me where I follow its owner

at a distance along this path descending

to the grounds of willow trees what odd

connection this dog wagging its tail

seems to awaken between my human element

& animal life another pedestrian this way

you nod I nod as we slip past

each other to my errand on nearly-

abandoned streets residents as separate

distinct unique on this extraordinary ride

on Earth bound-up in the presence

of the Unknowable to see best we can

entering the written pages of history to come

I am a member of The Academy of American Poets. My poems have been published in Midstream, Ibbetson Street Press, Greville Press Pamphlets U.K, others, and one pending publication in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Lois Perch Villemaire

Peanut Butter

I have a mild sore throat and feel lightheaded.

Tightness in my chest and congestion.

Back of my hand to forehead.

Feverish?

Oh please.

I can’t have the virus.

I could develop respiratory issues,

Have to be hospitalized,

And need to go on a ventilator.

They say only 20% survive

being on a ventilator.

They say a symptom of the virus is

losing sense of smell.

I march to the kitchen pantry,

Pull out a jar of peanut butter,

Unscrew the top,

inhale deeply through my nose.

Ah, yes, I definitely smell peanut butter.

Thank goodness.

Lois Perch Villemaire lives in Annapolis, MD. She is inspired by life experiences and enjoys writing poetry, flash fiction, and memoir. Her work has appeared in Potato Soup Journal, The Drabble, FewerThan500, Pen-in-Hand, MWA Journal, and Global Poemic. She blogs for annapolisdiscovered.com and annapoliswellnesshouse.org

Stephen Page

Grocery Shopping

I am sitting in our dull-gray

Pathetically petite rental car

With the cracked windshield and tiny

Unhubcapped tires,

(Last Friday Teresa smashed our sleek

White SUV that drives like a yacht

Gliding over calm waters)

Alone, my mask around my neck,

Waiting for my her

To finish grocery shopping

(Only one family member

Is allowed entrance at any time).

When will I ever learn?

I have been here before,

Thousands of times

(Though mostly before the mask),

Hungry, thirsty, hours

Passing by,

Worrying if maybe she had fallen,

And medics are attending to her,

(I don’t have my phone, and she left hers

For me to hold onto)

But knowing that most likely

She was wandering inside the clothing stores

Inside the shopping mall

That just reopened,

Only to know, that as I don my mask and enter

A hunting/fishing gear store that opens

From the parking lot, that she will

Reappear outside as soon as I enter,

Looking for me,

Searching the parking lot

For me and our ugly rental car.

I purchase a camouflage backpack,

A 9 mm pistol, a hunting knife,

and a hand-size stun device.

I stuff the three defense/attack components into

The outside pocket of the pack,

And as I exit the store,

There she is, wandering the lot,

Her arms stretched, her shoulders hunched, holding

Bags filled with things

Only she thinks we need,

Having no idea that she is late

For an appointment with our lawyer

Concerning the accident, or that I

Had been waiting for hours.

I am past starvation and dehydration,

But I smile behind my mask

As I walk toward her.

I gently lift the packages from her surgical gloved

Hands.

Stephen Page is part Native American. He was born in Detroit. He holds degrees from Palomar College, Columbia University, and Bennington College and is a rancher in Argentina . He wears a mask whenever he ventures outside and socially distances. He loves his wife, spontaneous road trips, long walks through woodlands, and making noise with his electric bass.

John Stickney

Somewhere Among Us a Virus is Taking Notes

(after C. Simic and Z. Herbert)

This virus

is the perfect

student

Unlike you

it is careful

of boundaries

Exact marks

entered

in the margins

It sees you

eyes

calm and clear

And

at the end

of term?

A report card

filled with the

“Highest” marks

(inspired by the push to open US Schools)

My Bookshelf Background

Broadcasting here

From within

A definite space

Of relatively

Small intent –

Oh, ain’t we

Just all

So well read

(inspired by the backgrounds of experts featured on TV through the magic of Zoom)

Look To The Sky

Because the mice escaped the lab

with the ability to control similar sized minds,

they have roped themselves to the backs of ravens

and plan an aerial assault

on your cupboard filled with

Cheetos,

Cheese Curls,

Cheez-Its,

Cheese Nips,

Cheddar Bunnies,

Cheez Wiz

and those delicious,

cheesy

Goldfish.

(inspired by the Pandemic Fifteen caused by snacking)

John Stickney is a poet/writer originally from Cleveland, OH, currently living in the coastal area of Wilmington, NC.)

Ethel Gofen

If the symptoms of Covid-19 you feel

Here’s a doctor’s plan to help you, I’ll reveal:

Inhale, hold your breath five seconds, then exhale.

Do this five times in a row and do not fail.

On the sixth breath end it with a cough galore.

Then repeat this whole breathing routine once more.

Next lie on your stomach, pillow at your head.

Don’t lie on your back but on your front instead.

Spend ten minutes taking breaths slightly deeper

Than normal. (Later you can be a sleeper).

This allows your smallest airways to get air.

J. K. Rowling claims this method gave her care

When she had the symptoms though never a test

For Coronavirus this plan is the best.

Ethel Gofen is a retired freelance writer, author of two books as part of a series, Cultures of the World, for which I wrote the volumes on France and Argentina in 1990 and 1992. Ethel and her husband and both had Covid-19 in May although I had no symptoms.

Nan Ottenritter

street garden

cathedral-like canopy above

black asphalt below

kids in the street

chalked glorious flowers

blooming where they are planted

as a child

in the garden,

nowhere to go,

on my own for

what-to-do,

i remember possibility.

quarantined today

in the garden,

nowhere to go,

some to-dos,

i sing the purple iris,

the bird rejecting thistle,

downing suet.

a sense of possibility

flirts, hovers.

i await its landing.

The beforetime

is over, she said.

I knew what

she meant, having

stopped imagining

a going- back,

a return to normal.

In the beforetime,

stock portfolios and

stocked kitchen shelves

shielded me.

The presence of others

was mostly a comfort,

working invisible magic

in my heart.

In this middletime,

I hunker down,

grow a garden,

grow myself,

with only a wire to the world,

a good book.

I am finally

in and of place.

Nan Ottenritter is a poet and musician living in Richmond, VA. Her works have appeared in the Artemis Journals: Women hold up half the sky, TheNewVerseNews, Poets Reading the News, Life in 10 Minutes, the 2019 Poetry Society of Virginia Anthology, and As You Were: The Military Review.

Larry C. Tolbert

To Accept Once and For All

I open with praise for

Our dark-skinned

Brothers and sisters

Your dogged

Determination

To be free,

Watching family

And friends

Strange fruit indeed

One by one cut down

From trees,

Snarling dogs

Water cannons

Never good news in

Police rifle reports

Rest in peace

Silenced freedom’s friends

You, not Jesus, died for our

Original sins

I praise the

One in six people

Our founding fathers

Labeled dark-skinned

Alienable exceptions

Within a

White constitution

At our country’s

Inception

I praise your

Black constitution

For enduring the

Resulting

Unimaginable

Abuse

Your free labor fueled

An economy to

Unholy heights

Drove a nation’s soul

Along sharp saber’s edge,

Unfathomable

Pools of blood,

Unmeasured

Depths of shame

Your road to hell paved

With such good intentions

Of ill-bestowed certain

Self-evident truths

—All men created equal

With unalienable rights,

Among those

Life,

Liberty, the

Pursuit of happiness—

I close with this prayer,

May we all awake

Sooner and better from

This 2020 nightmare of

Worldwide disease,

Economic collapse,

Inept, venal leaders and

Social unrest to

Unite and achieve at

Long last call

Long-sought

Justice on race in

A world

That works

For all

To accept once and for all

What has always been true

That—

Unalienable rights

Denied

Become wrongs

To accept once and for all

What has always been true

That—

We are “E Pluribus Unum”

“One from many”

Black, brown, yellow

Red, white, and blue

To accept once and for all

What has always been true

That—

We are all one race

The Human Race

Me And You

Larry C. Tolbert is a writer and poet with master’s degrees from the University of Illinois and San Francisco State University. Raised by grandparents on a Southern Illinois farm, he has lived in Northern California his entire adult life. His work has been published in Birdland Journal and ESCOM Journal (College of Marin).

Kirsty A. Niven

Setting

Pink clouds brush the slates of tenements,

a sugary blush, candy floss breath –

the world is a bleary-eyed painting,

the street a Dundonian Hopper.

The only eye that sees me here,

a glass square with lace eyelashes.

Tear stain speckles mark the glass,

machine gun sputters in a speakeasy.

Dust fills my lungs like an hourglass.

My plaster skin dries in the heavy air,

the steady descent to forgotten stone.

The centre remains a hollow.

A cavern with an echoing scream –

dropping downwards into an infinite abyss

judged by stabbing stalactites

for another isolation infused ramble.

Finality falls over the chimneys.

Kirsty A. Niven lives in Dundee, Scotland. Her writing has appeared in anthologies such as Landfall, Nocturne and Of Burgers and Barrooms. She has also featured in several journals and magazines, including The Dawntreader, Cicada Magazine, Dundee Writes and Causeway/Cabhsair. Kirsty’s work can also be found online on sites such as 45 Magazine, Ponder Savant and Nine Muses Poetry.

Roderick Deacey

A Virus Among Us

These days, we live in hope – we can’t be sure –

the damage is extensive, I’m afraid!

Things won’t return to how they were before

So, must we wear these masks for evermore

like characters in some bizarre charade?

We hope not, but we really can’t be sure.

We dine well-spaced outside the café door

and pray no-one is sick where the meal’s made.

Is their home-made bread as good as before?

Shall we drink till we can think no more?

Turn back the clock and let our worst fears fade?

Hopes can come true, can’t they? We’re not so sure.

Each day we count our dead and keep the score;

this cruel curse is like a deadly blade!

Things can’t go back to how they were before.

The mighty plague has dragged us to the floor!

So shall we rise up once more, undismayed?

That’s our hope, but we know one thing for sure –

we won’t go back to who we were before.

Roderick Deacey is a performing poet based in Frederick, MD, appearing regularly in the DC area with his bass-player and drummer. His book of beat poems, “neo-beatery ballads” was published in 2019. Deacey won the Frederick Arts Council Carl R. Butler Award for Literature in 2019.

Gwil James Thomas

Now That The World Has Changed.

If there’s one thing that the world

isn’t short of at the moment

it’s Coronavirus poems –

but now that the world has changed,

that’s not hardly fucking surprising either.

I remember one wild and lost year

constantly finding fresh trouble,

whilst clinging to my past –

until one day I finally

opened my eyes to the world

around me and decided that

it was time to move on,

but as I did I also found the world

had moved faster than I’d remembered

and I’d wanted it to somehow

slow down for a little while

so that I could catch back up with it –

then recently it did and now

everyone’s wearing hazmat suits,

turning on one another

and slowly going bat shit crazy.

Meanwhile, I sit here counting pennies,

whilst waiting to pen the next poem –

telling myself that this shit storm

simply is what it is until somehow,

someday it’ll be no more.

Some Things.

Back home again,

I saw an old

hometown hero

pull up to the lights –

he’d been another

regular in the

local pub

and to be blunt

I was surprised that

he was still alive –

but he’d lived more

lives than most

had anyway

and he leaned out

of the window,

complaining to me

about the crazy tenant

in the bedsit below his,

before then telling me

that he was off

to buy some booze

and I realised he’d

told me the exact

same things

before I’d left town

two years ago

and I watched as

he pulled off

with Free Bird

playing through

the same broken

car stereo –

glad that some things

since this virus arrived,

had stayed the same.

Gwil James Thomas is a novelist, poet and inept musician. Originally from Bristol, England he’s also lived in Brighton, London and Spain. He’s a Best of The Net and Pushcart nominee whose written work can be found in numerous publications. His most recent chapbook’s here: www.analogsubmission.com/chapbooks/gwiljamesthomas-cocoontransitions

JeanMarie Olivieri

Grocery Shopping

Trapped

in the car

waiting for the parking lot

to empty just a bit

My local grocery store

is an older, smaller model

than her suburban sister-stores

yet it seems now to hold

the entire neighborhood ̶

a potentially lethal block party.

I will not be trapped

by fear.

I mask up and enter.

Looking Forward

Crowd surfing at Burning Man

New Year’s Eve in Time Square

Championship playoffs

Too much time alone

I’m dreaming of places

I never wanted to be

Standing in this desert

hope like water in my canteen

I am squinting into the future

looking at life beyond six feet

All I see is you

Molt

Weeks turn to months.

I have been confined too long.

Seeking solace in the night

I molt my skin

don a discarded shell

and dig a home into wet sand

careful to escape the boiling pot.

Sometimes my skin thickens

my feet harden into hooves

and I race the veld with my herd.

On clear nights with a full moon

I spread my wings and soar

a sleek predator

bringing fast death to small animals

before roosting in my nest

to awaken with feathers by my bed.

JeanMarie Olivieri is a mostly retired business writer who mostly writes poetry. She has been published in online journals and several anthologies. She is a co-organizer for the Living Poetry Meetup group, and an editor for the Heron Clan Poetry Anthology series. Follow her at https://jeanmarieolivieri.wordpress.com/

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Summer Pandemic Issues

North of Oxford – The Pandemic Issue #5

https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2020/08/11/north-of-oxford-the-pandemic-issue/

North of Oxford – The Pandemic Issue #6

https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2020/08/11/north-of-oxford-the-pandemic-issue-6/

Spring Pandemic Issues

North of Oxford presents The Pandemic Issues.

North of Oxford – The Pandemic Issue #1

https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2020/04/19/__trashed-2/

North of Oxford- The Pandemic Issue #2

https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2020/04/25/north-of-oxford-the-pandemic-issue-2/