Red, for Valentina Blackhorse

VINCENT HOSTAK

May 21, 2020

On April 23, 2020, Valentina Blackhorse died of complications from COVID-19 only a day after testing positive for the presence of virus. The Navajo Nation is particularly vulnerable to the virus.  She was an advocate for Navajo culture, won high-profile pageants, and was an expert jingle dancer.  She spoke fluent Diné, and dreamed of having a role in tribal council.

Red is the color of the scar

Red is the color of sacrifice

Sun in July that scalds the mesa’s head

The blooms of fire in the cholla bed

Red is in the sands

Slurries in arroyo flows

In gemstones from the mines

Red, on signs along the gurney trails

Red, alarms when breathing fails

Red.

Red, the color of sumac fruit

Red, the thread in saddle blankets

The banding on a male owl’s neck

The calling sound of death on deck

Red coats a painted butte

Falls from wintering desert oaks

Covers the dry creek floor

Red, in the folds of your jingle-dresses

Red, the sick your dancing blesses

Red.

VINCENT HOSTAK is a poet, essayist, filmmaker, and podcaster.  A longtime resident of Austin, TX, he resides now in Colorado, a hog’s hair away from wilderness. His poetry may be found in the print journal Sonder Midwest (#5).  His podcast on refugee resettlement in America: https://anchor.fm/crossingsrefugees.  Writer's blog:  https://vincenthostakdigital.com/.

Rehumanization - A Covid-19 Analysis from a PhD Student Slash Writing Professor (and her boyfriend, sort of)

SUNNY ANNE WILLIAMS

May 21, 2020 

“To love is to recognize yourself in another.” -Eckhart Tolle

When the government mandated that there could be no gatherings of more than ten people, my boyfriend commented that there would be a lot fewer mass shootings now. He spends many evenings complaining about the attention-seeking selfies that people post on Instagram. He has always complained about this, but it’s gotten worse in the pandemic. He’s only working three or four hours a day now as a travel agent, so he has more free time to judge selfies. He disregards my attempts to impart to him that he can just stop looking. That’s what we do when we’re uncomfortable, isn’t it? We just stop looking. “Apathy and disregard are mechanisms of dehumanization,” I might write in a research essay. My boyfriend goes back to his video game.

We’re both fortunate to be able to work from home. I’m a PhD student and rhetoric professor at a university, so I am currently holding virtual office hours to give pep talks to my stressed out, barely coping students who are too young to know that this feels like 9/11 in so many ways, and therefore, haven’t yet developed the essential American coping skills that I am bequeathing to them. I hope these skills will get them through their final research essays this semester. Then it’ll be summer, and I’ll be unemployed and sitting in my house, still afraid to go out, reading books on literary theory and listening to my boyfriend complain about selfies.

I watch Some Good News every week and feel an amalgamation of hope…: People are out there doing so much good for each other, noticing the weak and the needy and stepping up to serve them. We often see this rehumanization during times of crisis. I wish we saw it all the time. It’s beautiful and uplifting and redeeming. It’s what we truly are when we stop forgetting what we truly are. 

… and impotence: I am simply sitting in my home, snuggling my two cats, safe and privileged, not taking any chances. Except for this one.

“This is going to last long enough to lead to some kind of new way of thinking,” predicted David Lynch in a recent interview.

Classism has become increasingly evident during the pandemic. Our plutocracy has been caught with its pants down. Much like the people on my boyfriend’s Instagram, apparently. We’re all in this together, “they” say, but in reality, we’re all having very different experiences. The one thing that unites us is that each one of us is as likely to catch this virus as the next. It is an equalizer, a great reminder of our connectness. It is a chance to rehumanize each other after decades of dehumanization that has slowly been destroying us. It is a chance for a new way of thinking.

Dehumanization has been on my mind for a long time. CNN lists the first mass shooting in the United States as occurring in New Jersey in 1949, though Wikipedia notes four mass shootings in the 1920s and a few every subsequent decade until the 21st century, when things really went gangbusters. But you should never cite Wikipedia. My point is that the number of mass shootings has increased exponentially in the past two decades, with 10-12 shootings per year. Guns have been around since the birth of this country, so what has changed? “I contend that dehumanization has a direct effect on the frequency of mass shootings,” I might claim in my essay.

My grandfather’s mother died in a church mass shooting in the tiny town where I grew up, Daingerfield, Texas. My grandfather wouldn’t talk about her murder. But he would tell me that I looked like her – 4 foot 10, ginger-haired, “but you’re not fat enough yet,” he’d lament. He died in 2008 and didn’t live to see that I look even more like her now. When I lived in London, I discovered a cousin in Wales. This July, I was planning to return, as I do at least once a year, to the country that I consider home to determine how much my Welsh family might look like my murdered great-grandmother. But alas, pandemic.

“Social media’s role in enabling and encouraging us to dehumanize each other can be witnessed in the psychology of mass shootings,” the essay might continue. Then I would cite innumerable psychologists and journalists who keep asking what causes the shooters to commit these heinous crimes, all while the American people grow numb with compassion fatigue at the endless lists of dead students and great-grandmothers. The lists are just names on a page. Kind of like the screen names and avatars we see on social media. My boyfriend might proclaim that the selfies attached to these names only serve to dehumanize further, to assign judgments and labels to the names, who are no longer considered people.

Most people don’t think you’re a people. Did you know that? To them, you’re a screen name or an avatar or a selfie. To the government, you’re a social security number and the product of your proletarian labor. Of course, you and I know that you’re a complex human being with important thoughts and feelings, who loves and is loved, who feels pain and loss and joy and hope. So how can we convince these people to rehumanize you and give you back your human value, and why is it absolutely imperative that we do this?

When they point the gun, mass shooters don’t see people. They see names, numbers, avatars, selfies. “By giving us access to the majority of the world’s population, social media allows us to compartmentalize the people to whom we are digitally connected, thereby increasing emotional distance in a way that generates dehumanization.” That might be my thesis statement. I would utilize Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism to support the idea that we other anyone who differs from us in any way, leading to varying degrees of categorization, xenophobia, and apathy. Then I might add that a virus, just like a shooter, doesn’t care about your ethnicity, your political or religious leanings, or how much money you make. To the virus, there is no other. It sees us for what we truly are: the same.

As the coronavirus death toll rises, we see lists of names, just like we do every time there’s a shooting. The difference now is that the killer is as dangerously close to you as it was to those dead names. Suddenly, those names are rehumanized by the realization that we are unavoidably, biologically, spiritually ONE.

In a society that values capitalism and individualism over human lives, are we capable of recognizing and seizing the opportunity presented to us by this pandemic? The American people have been given a chance to change, to rehumanize. Maybe we already are. There are those who say that when we practice social distancing, when we shut ourselves away in our homes for what could be months, when we wear masks to protect each other, it is a great performance of love. We are acting out of love for our grandparents, our parents, our students, our neighbors, our auto-immune compromised friends, all of our loved ones, each other.

We are relearning, re-awakening the collective memory of humanity, realizing that each other has breath, sharing the same oxygen, and the suffocation of that breath by a deadly virus is the suffocation of us all. We are rehumanizing. We can choose to remain in this state of knowing, to decide not to go back to “normal.” We can keep rising, hand in hand (metaphorically, of course; do not touch each other!) with our fellow human beings. ”To return to dehumanizing each other would be a tragedy as great as the lives we are losing every day, and it would ultimately lead to more lives lost,” my essay might conclude.

SUNNY ANNE WILLIAMS is a PhD student and professor at UT Dallas, where she specializes in literature, theory, and philosophy. Born and raised in east Texas, writing since the age of three, she made the cliched move to escape it all, to live in Canada and England, to pursue an acting career in Los Angeles, to dance and sing and wander. In the end, it all brought her full circle, back to Texas, back to writing, where she belongs.

Virus

LARRY D. THOMAS

May 22, 2020

Sub-

micro-

scopic germ.

Raindrop-pulsed.

Donged

with bird cry.

Though it multiplies

exponentially

in a living

cell, we still debate

whether it's even

a living organism.

In its paradise

of dormancy,

swathed in the chartreuse

gauze of shade

deep in the untouched

sanctum of the rain,

it looms

a dark confidence

in the violence

of potential,

braced for disturbance

to plague the human race.

LARRY D. THOMAS, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, was privileged to serve as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate. He has published several award-winning and critically acclaimed collections of poetry.  Thomas will be the featured poet in a forthcoming issue of the Delta Poetry Review.

Blue

BENJAMIN NASH

May 22, 2020

We waited outside the grocery

store in a line like they used

to do for toilet paper in the

old Soviet Union or in Cuba,

I saw a blue canoe tied on to

the top of a car in the parking

lot and I thought it would be

nice to float down the river

in silence without any fear,

a hundred years ago they

could still hear them hammer

the nails into their pine boxes

with their blue bodies still

a little alive with dying,

I saw the graves lined up in

a row in the rural cemetery,

it makes you sad and I know

my father is hiding in his

house and I am right on the

edge of old age myself now,

they die alone in a hospital

without a hug or a last kiss,

the virus brings suffering

and sorrow and you begin to

understand what the soul is,

at least the bluebonnet won’t

make you sick if it touches

your face and neither will the

sun or the sky up above you,

nor will the people you know

waiting for you and your

blue face holding them at last.

BENJAMIN NASH is an Austin poet with work published in Texas Observer, Blueline, Pembroke Magazine, Pilgrimage, and elsewhere.

1961 in the TB Vaccination Line

ALAN BIRKELBACH

May 24, 2020

My mother told us stories of when she lived

in London during World War Two.

In the middle of ironing shirts,

the air raid sirens, mounted

on the churches and power poles,

would tear the moment like paper.  You had to stop

everything, put the iron on the stove to cool,

and run to the underground shelters.

Even there and then, under the concrete,

you could hear the buzz bombs coming,

A queer kind of angry-bee rattle.

Mothers held their children’s ears.

The worst, she said, was when the silence started.

The fuel on the bombs ran out.  Then it was counting

Ten seconds.  She remembered people

numbering on their fingers

waiting for an impact,

imagining cracks in the cement,

wondering what windows might be broken,

what brick walls might have tumbled into the street.

In 1961 we stood in the silent line

that snaked down the street and around the block

to get the free tuberculosis vaccinations.

All the mothers had grips like vises

on 5-year-old hands.

I had only a vague notion of fear

or about what tuberculosis was.

My mother told me

there would probably be a scar

on my arm.  I could be afraid

but not cry she said.  It would

all be over soon and I would be fine.

Now, today, the lady I travel with

makes me wear a handkerchief

to protect me when we go shopping.    

It makes me look like a bandit.

I can’t breathe, I say,

but I still do it. She is wiser than me.

She fought cancer twice

and is still around to carry the memory.

I remember she has a scar

on her upper left shoulder.

She is only trying to protect

what is in hand.

I see something in her eyes and learn

a new way to breathe, remember my old scar.

Ten seconds hang like stone between us.

There was the same drawn look

in my mother’s face,

filled with the syllables she dared not voice:

Let the silence pass over us. 

Let it be meant for someone else.

ALAN BIRKELBACH is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the Academy of American Poets.  He is the author of 11 books of poetry.  He is the 2005 Texas State Poet Laureate.

Praise the Grocery Worker

KATHERINE HOERTH 

May 24, 2020

named David, working on a Sunday morning,

loading bags of groceries into cars,

the careful way he handles loaves of bread,

cartons of eggs, and jugs of milk, the graceful

way he slings a case of beer up on his shoulders

as they ache, he carries it as though

it was the world. For now, it’s cool, but soon

he knows the sun will fire up and sweat

will river down his face like yesterday.

His chest, his only shield against what’s coming,

heaves beneath his scarlet cotton t-shirt.

He marches through the busy parking lot,

his feet already swelling from the toil

of the day although his shift will last

for hours and hours yet. He doesn’t care.

He has more important trials ahead,

like making sure my apples don’t get bruised.

While sitting in the safety of my car,

I wonder if he wears a smile beneath

that stained bandana covering his face.

His eyes reveal a kind of faith, not fear.

I know it’s not enough to keep him safe

from the goliath of a virus that he faces

every single moment of his shift, 

a stone of sanitizer in his pocket. 

KATHERINE HOERTH is an assistant professor of English at Lamar University and editor-in-chief of Lamar University Literary Press. In 2015, she won the Helen C. Smith Prize for the best book of poetry in Texas for Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots. Her work has been published in journals such as Valparaiso Review, Summerset Review, and Southwestern American Literature. In 2020, her fourth poetry collection, Borderland Mujeres, will be released by SFAU Press. The book is a bilingual collection of poetry and art created with poet Julieta Corpus and artist Corinne McCormack Whittemore. Katherine is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and lives in Beaumont.

Cinquains for Quarantine

 MARILYN WESTFALL

May 25, 2020

Bevies

of doves shelter

beneath pyracantha,

blending with shade and river stones,

egg smooth.

Berries

hang in clusters,

eruptions like fire bursts

long contained, miniature suns

to eat.

Leaves wave.

Birds tuck their heads,

pelted by gusts of dust

and petioles torn from honey-

locusts.

Sky turns

adobe brown. The sunroom’s panes

shudder. I remain still,

an onlooker,

nothing

to fear,

calm shadow of a pruned locust.

Come closer. Peck and preen.

I won’t harm you.

Come close.

MARILYN WESTFALL earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from Texas Tech University. Her recent poetry appears online in Califragile and is forthcoming in The Rappahannock Review. She has been anthologized by Dos Gatos Press, Mutabilis Press, and was included in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VIII: Texas.

Are We Not Safe Here?

DARIO R. BENIQUEZ

May 25, 2020

(Mayan legend of the worry people)

My friends worry obsessively.

They worry about the end of the world,

harmonic convergence, Mayan Cosmology, my retirement.

They persist on building bomb shelters,

steel reinforced concrete bunkers, with a water supply

to last one hundred eighty days, can foods: Goya, De Monte,

frijoles, habichuelas, ten-pound bags of Mahatma rice, a shelf

with a RCA transceiver to pick up strayed communities.

They worry about me. Where’s my bunker? Don’t I care?

We can be attacked any minute. Anthrax, biological weapons

are everywhere; an earthquake can strike anytime, a tsunami

can send us scampering to the hills.

Then I think, I could be squashed by a baby grand piano falling from the sky,

this minute or be infected with a rogue virus, but I don’t.

They worry for me, my friends. I worry for them, the worry people.

I carry them with me all the time, and at night, I place them underneath

my pillow and let them do the worrying for me.

DARIO R. BENIQUEZ was raised in Queens, New York. He is an Army veteran, and lives in San Antonio, Texas. He is the facilitator of the Gemini Ink Literary Arts Center Open Writers’ Workshop, which is free to the San Antonio community. He holds an MFA from Pacific University, Oregon, and an MSIE from New Mexico State University. His latest publications can be found in The Brave: a collection of poetry and prose; Voices de la Luna: a quarterly literature and arts magazine; and elsewhere.

The Best Seat

V. PAIGE PARKER

May 26, 2020

the one in the last row

the one in the middle

the one that does not recline

the one next to the bathroom

the one for twelve hours

the one that the poor old woman

in the airport could not take to Dublin

the one that almost did not exist

until an extra flight was added

the one that was quickly sanitized

upon boarding

the one that countless people wanted

but could not get

the one that was hoped for

in the face of fear

the one escaping the coronavirus

the one on the last flight

out of Egypt

V. PAIGE PARKER is a married homemaker with five children, living in San Antonio.  For the past two years she has served as the Vice President of SAPA – the San Antonio Poetry Association.  She won first place in SAPA’s April 2020 “Poet’s Choice” contest with this poem, “The Best Seat.”

Among the Numbered

ANTOINETTE F. WINSTEAD

May 26, 2020

for Helen Carr b.1960 d.2020

I was not afraid,

not before today

when what had seemed impossible

that thing that happened to others

happened to someone I knew

someone I loved — cherished. 

And it was no longer someone else’s problem

talked about in the abstract

all those numbers.

For one of the numbers is you.

You are numbered in those thousands

daily counted as the lost among us

and now I understand the loss

the pain suffered by those

unable to comfort the bereaved

to share their grief and tears

with each other — together.

And I am so afraid

this will not end

and death will find its way

one by one to more I love

until at last it stands at my door

to be let in.  And what then,

when no lock can bar its entry?

Will I succumb or be counted

amongst the survivors?

I do not know what would be worse

of the choices —

to live

to die.

But should I be the last

of all my beloved,

I will welcome death

for to live would be unbearable.

A profession, poet, playwright, director, and actor, ANTOINETTE F. WINSTEAD teaches film and theater courses at Our Lady of the Lake University, where she also serves as the Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Program Head for the Mass Communication and Drama programs.

Jane’s Remains

ROBERT ALLEN

May 27, 2020

My sister-in-law died the Ides of March

Then the virus spread

Now she’s just dead

Can’t have funerals till the virus abates

Would draw a big crowd

That’s not allowed

Asked my nephew’s wife about her remains

They’re at the funeral home

Jane’s all alone

Lies on a slab in a cold metal fridge

Other corpses surround

Her only friends now

We all know what kind of person she was

Sweet and generous soul

Least deserving woe

Our family plot is at Mission Park South

Brother waits for her there

In death to pair

October we will celebrate her life

If the virus is done

Her birthday month

We plan to exchange fondest memories

That’s how Jane’s remains

Become Jane again

ROBERT ALLEN is retired and lives with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and six cats. He has poems in di-vêrsé-city, Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, the San Antonio Express-News, and The Ocotillo Review. He has also been featured in VIA's Poetry on the Move contest.

The Days That Are No More

The Days That Are No More

Digital Image by Jerry Craven

 JERRY CRAVEN 

May 27, 2020

            Claire asked my opinion about the authenticity of a star sapphire in a gold ring. A natural stone, not a lab-grown crystal, its value had to run into five digits. I set the ring down and stepped back. It was too pricey for me to handle.

            She wore a paper COVID-19 mask when she placed the ring on the counter, and I wondered if this person wore the mask to protect herself from me or to protect me from her own spewing of virus when she talked—or maybe it was a bandit’s mask. I reached for a mask, which Jesse required of all employees, though I didn’t work for him, was there to allow Jesse a lunch hour.

            Her eyes told me she was smiling. “Why,” she asked, “is a pawn shop open when it’s legal only for essential businesses to be open?”

            I waved my hand at the wall where Jesse displayed handguns. “In Texas,” I said, “the governor considers shops selling firearms to be essential businesses.”

            “Must I buy a pistol before you tell me what the ring is worth?” Another eye smile, a teasing one.

            I hung my mask on one ear. “If I promise to be a good boy and never harm you in any way, not with coronavirus or anything else, will you take your mask off? And I am James Maddison Barr.” I handed her a business card.

            She glanced at it. “A gemologist. And a writer. Okay, James, I’ll accept your promise and hold you to it.” She dropped her mask to dangle from one ear.

            I stepped back and might have gasped. “Julie?”

            She tilted her head in puzzlement, much as a dog might. “Claire. I’m Claire Muscovy. Who is Julie?”

            “A girl from my past. High school. You look much like her.”

            “Nope. I’m a woman. Full grown. Not a girl.”

            “I meant no insult. Back then people called me boy and called Julie girl because neither of us were grownups.”

            “Apology accepted. Now, about the ring.”

            “Where did you get it?”

            “India. My husband stole the ring and gave it to me. He’s dead now.” Her eyes danced into another smile, her lips joining the dance. “How much?”

            I suspected she knew, but I told her anyway. A clear stone, tinted light blue—a medium cornflower—with a single inclusion visible even without a loupe, the surface of the stone starred from any light, but when hit with a pen light, the star was the best I had ever seen on any sapphire or ruby. It was a perfect star sapphire with that one inclusion proof that it was a natural stone.  A collector would pay at auction thirty to fifty thousand for it.

            She nodded. “In this weird time of pandemic, I need some immediate cash. Make me an offer.”

            I studied her long hair, her intense blue eyes, her lips. All so Julie but not Julie. “I’ll give you some cash or a personal loan. Do not sell or pawn this rare stone. Don’t mention it to Jesse. Though he’s married to my sister, I’ll tell you he’s not honest. He would grab the gem and not let go until it thundered.”

            Claire laughed. “Like a Texas snapping turtle.”

            “Yes. He would declare it to be glass or a fake, or whatever he needed to say. How much do you need?” I took out my wallet. “Maybe two hundred?”

            “A loan then.” Claire pulled from her purse a paper packet like those gem dealers use to wrap stones. “Take this as personal collateral. Can you afford three hundred?”

            “Yes. I offer the loan without collateral.”

            “Why?”

            “I don’t know.  Because, because . . .” I started to say because she looked so like Julie. “I don’t know.” I handed her three hundred dollars. She leaned across the counter and slipped the paper packet into my shirt pocket. I objected until she startled me into silence by touching a finger to my lips.

            In the time of social distancing and the real danger of catching a virus that could kill me, I allowed her touch, welcomed it, wanted more, and fell silent as she left the shop.

            Claire Muscovy’s name, phone number and addresses were handwritten on the paper, and inside the folds was a small faceted sapphire with a Texas star cut, blue as Claire’s eyes, a lovely stone though lab-grown, so for all its fire and beauty, not natural and hence worth only about 20 bucks.

            I called her within an hour, suggested we meet, but she was evasive, in a nice way, finally said okay, next week. Where? I named a small park on the edge of the city. “There are ducks,” I said. “I’ll bring bread for them.”

            It turned out that having a week to wait was good, for I used Google to read about Claire Muscovy. The web had little about her, some of it alarming. I wondered if she put off a meeting in order to check on me. If so, she would find plenty information, given my success as a gemologist and my published books.

            At the park neither of us wore a mask.

            We sat a proper social distance apart on opposite ends of a bench on the edge of the lake, which isn’t a lake at all, only a stagnant pond with dark, scummy water, attractive only because of the colorful muscovy ducks beaking the water for bread I had tossed out. Claire seemed eager to talk.

            “I remember little about high school,” she said. “But I do remember a fun incident. You wore your hair high and tight on the sides with a floppy pompadour on top.”

            So she had found an anecdote anyone could find on the web. My hands suddenly felt numb and my ears flushed with dread. Don’t look at her, I told myself. Watch the ducks, avoid tears.

            “I hated that hair.” She laughed a sincere-sounding laugh, clapped her hands as a child might. “Remember how I tied you up for play, how I used Mom’s pinking sheers for cutting hair? All so comical.” She scooted on the bench a bit closer to me.

            “I would have allowed Julie to cut my hair without tying me up. I would have done anything Julie asked. So you’re telling me that you’re Julie?”

            “Yes, I saw that you knew even before I dropped the mask.” She moved closer. “Do you mind not keeping social distance?”

            I did mind, shook my head and muttered to myself, “Deep as love, deep as first love, and wild with all regret.” I fought against tears. “I also forget much of high school. What did you use to tie my hands?”

            “I don’t remember. Maybe rope from my father’s camping supplies? Your hair fell in large tangles, and your scalp looked haggled and bleedy when I finished. Pinking sheers. How did we even think to use them?” She moved closer until our legs touched. “I had forgotten all that until I read an account in one of the articles about you on the web. Oh Jimmy, we both lost so much when I was foolish enough to move away.”

            “You told me your husband was dead. His family name was Muscovy?”

            “Yes. Like the duck with red flesh on its head. Some say buzzard duck or vulture duck.” She pointed toward the pond. “Like those ducks. You brought me here to see muscovy ducks, right?”

            “Maybe.” I put my arm on the back of the bench, telling myself to stop yet allowing my fingers to brush against her.

            She looked startled, then leaned into me. “You can see I’m back now, that I’m Julie. Again, and forever.”

            “Your husband. Did you kill him . . .”

            “No. Of course not.”

            “. . . with a knife?”

            Anger wrinkled her brow, and she seemed to spit out her words. “Someone told you lies repeated in that mockery of a trial. Lies. Did they tell you the jury found me innocent? Did they?”

            “Julie zip-tied my hands and ankles. When she finished the haircut, she snipped the plastic ties with toenail clippers. These are not details that are easy to forget.”

            “Oh, now I remember.”

            “Revising history changes nothing.” I sighed, wanting to pull her to me, to accept her story. “Claire, the beginning of wisdom is realizing you will never have a better past.”

            She stood with sudden energy, shoved my arm aside. “Don’t you dare lecture me.”

            “I apologize,” I called after her as she strode away, “for not keeping my promise.” Claire glanced back, her jaw set in anger, a tear streaking one cheek.

            Pushed by an abrupt, determined whim, I took Claire’s paper packet from my shirt pocket, shook out the fake, unnatural sapphire and flipped it far out into the pond. Then I read her name scribbled across the paper, wadded it up and dropped it into the scummy water.

JERRY CRAVEN has served as editor for 4 university and literary presses and has designed books and book covers for 3 of them. Some images from his 2020 art show "Magical Realism" are available here: http://www.jerrycraven.com/resources/some%20Magical%20Realism%20art%402000.jpg

Lament for June

COLIN CUMMINGS

May 28, 2020

There are thunderstorms to look

Forward to and even tornadoes

Promise a bit of excitement, although

I could live without the hail. My daughter

Says if she had three wishes they would

Be that the sickness would go

Away, that the llamas would help

The sickness go away, and that the electricity

Would go out during a storm. She hopes for

Calamity with such reckless bright honesty

That I find myself hoping the lights go out

Too. I picture the gathering clouds bruising

The bright June sunlight and hear rumbling

In the distance as if the thunder were train

Cars colliding on the tracks. The wind

Turns and cools and you smell the threat

Of the storm, a massive and lumbering

Promise of rain, of the chance of destruction, of

The loss of power. In my mind we gather

In the basement, the noises above a stampede

But we’re safe. We wonder at what comes next.

We ask who else wants to make a wish.

COLIN CUMMINGS has lived in Amarillo, TX most of his life and studied Political Science and English at the University of North Texas in Denton. He works in the restaurant and construction industries and has a passion for projects and events that bring people together.

Ambivalence

GRANT SISK 

May 28, 2020

At first it seemed like so much of the news one gets these days, Klaxon headlines and all the breathless, over the top rhetoric, visions of doom and gloom, on and on, the endless loop. I didn’t really think so, as people have been eating bats for as long as there have been bats. And people. Then again, maybe it was captured and encouraged to thrive in a controlled environment as is the case with so many of us these days.

After the virus escaped and went travelling and went jet-setting and went snowballing it was another thing entire. I locked my office door for the weeklong spring break and never went back.

In fairness, working from home wasn’t—initially—all that different; ninety percent of what I do I can do from anywhere on the planet if there is an internet connection, my laptop and coffee. Or whisky. One had to be careful during the ensuing days that stretched into weeks and then into months of videoconferencing on a multitude of platforms; no two groups seemed to use the same one and soon I became familiar with them all, as I also became familiar with colleague’s kids and animals, spouses, lovers, all drifting in and out of the camera’s eye, some intentionally, some repentant, others shocked and left to stand gaping like a latter day Adam, Eve or some conglomeration thereof into the blindness wrought by their world’s first sunrise. Mostly, we all just checked out what we could of each other’s houses and apartments like voyeurs, laughed at the awkwardness and little tech or proficiency deficiencies, such as one colleague who’d forgotten to “Mute” his microphone relieve himself during a break in the discussion. At least he flushed. After my first videoconference was over, I looked around, cast critical eyes at my home office, then began to move this and change that…staging for the next meeting. I also came to enjoy having the ability to turn my camera off and lie down on the sofa for a quick nap. I’ll miss that when the world reopens.

Later, it got worse. The meetings began to stretch in length but contract in frequency. Five one-hour meetings a week gave way to a three-hour video-thon on Tuesday and then nothing until Friday. We yelled at our kids, our spouses, cats were slapped from desks, dogs howled plaintively from behind locked doors. And there were other things. Sometimes we turned off the cameras and microphones entirely, left them that way for unhealthy periods of time, events unfolding unknown and unheard to the others who chatted glibly about projections, plans of action, the virus, accounts receivables, the return to normal, beginning to learn by degrees that everything was lurching towards an accounting. I began more and more to notice people’s affect, the ones who were engaged and chatty, and the others, whose cameras eventually went dark. Friends and colleagues in China with whom I had worked for years, whose homes I had visited and considered friends were guarded and to the point; we’d become strangers once again.

Outside of the house it was better and easier to handle. I’ve always been both restless and healthy and wasn’t overly concerned for myself, but I have elderly parents who rely on me for necessities such as yard work, groceries and company, but mostly company. That and traffic—or the dearth thereof—must have been a too great temptation to resist. I don’t know of course; I figured resistance was futile, so I didn’t try. That said, I really did try at first not to enter their home but it was no use and besides we share the same religio-fatalistic attitude, sort of a “God will do what God wants and anyway if it’s bad I deserve it” mentality so we dropped all pretense of quarantine in the strictest, really any, sense of the word. My dad was going stir crazy too and so we began to make daily trips to the farm where he grew up and where I run a few head of horses, using a lanky, grey gelding we named “Maximus Silver Bullet Tall Boy” as our main excuse. From the start we couldn’t remember the whimsical name we’d landed on and started calling him “Huh?” We’d picked him up on a short jaunt through the country to look at another gelding just as the pandemic was spiraling down into Texas. A casual glance out the truck window and there he was, fetlock deep in mud, penned up next to a double wide where he was being systematically starved to death by the owner. We eased the truck to a stop and just stared, wondering why anyone would do such a thing. We paid the lady 130.00 dollars because she said that was what she had in him, loaded him in the stock trailer and that was that.

Back at their house my dad and I would sit on the back porch as evening dissolved into night. Smoking cheap cigars, we’d talk about how nicely Huh, a.k.a. “Maximus Silver Bullet Tall Boy” was putting his weight back on, owls, politics, the virus, the farm, his parents and grandparents and extended family, anything, everything and so on for hours and at leisure I never had before with work, its deadlines, my problems. We talked a lot about this new virus, this COVID-19 and how for some reason the world seemed so locked in terror and yet, it was like a legend you hear about but never really, truly encounter. Sitting there I thought about how life is always a mixed bag, the good enjoined with the bad and that if it hadn’t been for the virus, like so many people everywhere I’d have never gotten to spend this time with those I love, my dad, mom, sister, my wife and her kids, my mother-in-law and my son, which is to say “family,” that group of people most of us say are all important in our lives; important to say I guess, because we so rarely show it. It occurred to me that with every loss something is always found.

GRANT SISK is the world's laziest writer and spent most of his pre- and will presumably spend most of his post-COVID-19 days working in Global Programs and Relations for the Dallas County Community College District. When he does write, it's usually an essay, short story or hot check. 

Los Dias Oscuros #22

OCTAVIO QUINTANILLA

May 29, 2020

Los Dias Oscuros #22

mixed media on archival Paper

OCTAVIO QUINTANILLA is the author of the poetry collection, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014), and served as the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX.  His poetry, fiction, translations, and photography have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals such as Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Texas Highways, RHINO, The Rumpus, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pilgrimage, Green Mountains Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Texas Observer, Existere: A Journal of Art & Literature, and elsewhere. Visual poems have been exhibited in several galleries, including Presa House Gallery, Equinox Gallery, and at the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, TX. He holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and teaches Literature and Creative Writing in the M.A./M.F.A. program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. Connect: Instagram @writeroctavioquintanilla and octavioquintanilla.com.

Coronavirus Tale with a (Sort of) Happy Ending

CHUCK ETHERIDGE

May 29, 2020

She called in tears

Eighty year old voice

Quavering 

Like a frightened chick

“I’m in a wheelchair

Now

I can’t care for him

I have to put him down”

“He,” 

Her much-loved cat 

Thirteen years old

Softer than down

Her only companion

In isolation made worse

By a pandemic

That made isolation a virtue

I cannot fix her body

Cruelly wracked by age

Nor can I even go see her

To offer company and comfort

But maybe

Just maybe

I can help

Save the cat.

“Give me two days,” 

I say.

Her voice perks up,

Hope-filled that her companion might live.

I turn to the modern town crier

Facebook

And pen a plea

To free a condemned cat

Kind hearted people 

From Texas to Louisiana

Repost

Extend the plea

Within an hour

A friend 

Six blocks away

Says

“We lost our cat

We can take him

The kids are excited.”And just like that

A feline is freed

From death row

It takes a logistical 

Day

To navigate 

Coronavirusland

Getting things

From her apartment

Getting the cat 

From the vet

Delivering him 

Safely

Exchanges without 

Human contact

God knows

What the cat thought

Of all of this.

But he is “rehomed”

He is safe

He is free

It’s a happy ending

Mostly

But my friend 

Is now completely alone.

A self-proclaimed desert rat, CHUCK ETHERIDGE was raised in El Paso, Texas. After a stint in the US Navy keeping the coast of Southern California safe from the threat of enemy invasion, he attended the University of Texas at El Paso and TCU. In addition to his time in the service, he has worked as an actor, a convenience store clerk, a Rent-a-Poet, and a catalog copy writer (specialty: describing staplers) before finding respectable employment as a Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and free-lance writer. He is the author of two novels, Border Canto and The Desert after Rain, his poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction have been published in a variety of reviews and anthologized in a number of books, and he has written two plays that have been produced. His most recent work can be found in the Corpus Christi Writers Anthologies and Trek-a-Tanka.

Non Memoriam

JESSE DIORON

May 30, 2020

Do not remember me, I beg you.

Neither weep nor laugh.

Forget me, please.

As you would a pleasant dream before you fully wake.

A rainy day not wet enough to stay.

A hiccough suddenly stopped without a start.

A bump whose only proof of being is an unexpected bruise.

A piece of paper, used, months ago, to list those items now unneeded at the store.

The trip — before and after.

The last light of the night.

And the place unmarked in the book you find, lying on the floor.

In 1983, two men beat JESSE DOIRON nearly to death with a hammer. Panhandle.  Now, he’s 70. Ready to die of COVID. Had a good life. His wife still loves him, his son still befuddles him, and his daughter still inspires him. He wants them to live carefree.

800 People

SHERRY CRAVEN

May 30, 2020

I looked at chocolate brownie
dough in the bowl, stirred my
fifty strokes, and tried to grasp

800 Italians dying in one day,
the beautiful olive-skinned people
who love wine and song and gave

to us Bocelli and Michaelangelo
not to mention Leonardo Da Vinci.
I couldn’t imagine 800 dead in a golden
country of lovers and silvery olive trees.

All I could do was stare at the
velvety chocolate dough and
strain to think the unthinkable,

to conceive the inconceivable,
and to make a space in my heart
for 800 dead souls who gave their
spirits to the winds on the same day.

My mind spent the rest of the day
revolving around an axis of horror
and grief while my spoon stirred
around and round rich, sweet, chocolate.

SHERRY CRAVEN has published poetry in numerous journals and anthologies and has had a poetry collection Standing at the Window published by vacpoetry in Chicago. She has also had flash fiction and creative nonfiction published and read poetry on NPR, as well as being included in Quotable Texas Women.

A Covid-19 Sacrament

CAROL COFFEE REPOSA

May 31, 2020

“Wash your hands,” the doctors say.

So I wash them.

“Keep calm and wash your hands,”

The Alamodome sign decrees.

Hot water rushes between my fingers

And over my upturned palms.

“Wash your hands long enough to sing

‘Happy Birthday to You’ twice,”

The radio voice commands.

I work up a rich lather

Foam and bubbles everywhere.

With luck and suds perhaps I’ll rid myself

Of every misbegotten molecule,

Each errant cell.

“All the perfumes of Arabia

Will not sweeten this little hand,”

Lady Macbeth laments.

So I wash still more,

Stronger soap and hotter water.

Maybe with such scrubbing I can shed

Those secret silent grudges,

Envy of another’s car or dress or poem,

The time I bit my sister’s arm

And almost hit a vein,

Her blood dripping on the floor.

I want to rinse it all away,

Rinse off Syria and Yemen,

Iraq and Afghanistan, the toddler’s body

Washed up on a Mediterranean shore,

His shoes still neatly tied.

I will strip it all,

Peel off the sickened layers,

Scour through skin, muscle, sinew

Even the memory of Pontius Pilate

Until I finally behold

Clean bones

And wait.

The poems, reviews and essays of CAROL COFFEE REPOSA have appeared in The Atlanta Review, Southwestern American Literature, Valparaiso Review, The Texas Observer, and other journals and anthologies.  Author of five books of poetry, member of the Texas Institute of Letters, four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and winner of the 2015 San Antonio Public Library Arts & Letters Award, she is the 2018 Texas Poet Laureate.

Lucy

CLAY REYNOLDS

May 31, 2020

She sits beside me every dawning,

Content in our silent commerce,

Patient, uncomplaining of my ragged hack

Of pipes charred by abusive time.

Her gaze is constant; her steady breath

A misty vapor on sunlit dew.

She asks for nothing, except, perhaps,

My hand upon her head

That for my comfort she holds at propitious height,

Or maybe the rake of my fingers on her ears,

And, often, down her neck

To smooth her velvet pelt and calm taut tendons.

As I own her, I’ve named her;

I want her notice when I call. 

Her name means nothing, though;

For truly, I am not her master.

She owns me, and to me she gives me no name.

My self is in her eyes.

I bring her food and all too rarely bathe her,

See after her health, and offer her

All too often a harsh word when she displeases.

If I banish her, she leaves;

She returns upon command, eager for a praising tone of greeting,

Delighted in her goodness.

She is my morning mistress,

Her mute companionship more a habit than a cause.

Indifferent to global strife, ignorant of human suffering,

Careless of my worries and concerns.

She bides with me and patiently shares the melancholy wool

Of time I gather in the ruminations and regrets that come with age.

I could not endure without this soughing cur,

This living balm that offers unvarnished adoration.

This beast that forbids despair and wards off harping Furies.

She accepts me as I am with all my faults and flaws.

She forgives me all my sins,

Even those that hurt her.

For her I am never beyond redemption,

Never lost or alone in darkness.

My imperfections assure her

Of my worthiness, my potential for salvation.

I think, sometimes that she is Mother.

I think, sometimes that she is God.

Novelist, short-story writer, essayist, literary critic, and pundit CLAY REYNOLDS is a retired professor of Arts and Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. He and his wife, Judy, dog and cat live on an acre of rain-soaked prairie in Lowry Crossing, somewhere east of McKinney, TX. His numerous published works can be located and in some part obtained from at least some on-line bookstores, and from his website, www.clayreynolds.info.