Pandemic Wave

TERRY DALRYMPLE

April 28, 2020

My grandson, three, smiles hugely into the FaceTime screen his mother holds.

“Hey, T-Pa, guess what,” he says.

“What?”

“I made a wrecking ball!”

His mother, bless her heart, has kept him busy in social isolation.

“Cool,” I say.

“Want to see it, T-Pa?”

“I sure do.”

He runs to get it from across the room. In the meantime, his one-year-old sister repeats as she flashes her beautiful smile, “Hi. Hi. Hi.”

“Hi, sweetie,” I say.

Her brother reappears in the frame, standing near a stack of cardboard boxes his mother has dug out of a closet. The wrecking ball is a big rubber ball attached to a string and hanging from the back of his toy excavator. He pulls it back, aims at the boxes, and releases. The boxes go flying.

“Fantastic, buddy,” I say.

“Want me to do it again?”

“I sure do.”

After four more demonstrations, we sign off: “I love you, T-Pa,” he says into his mother’s phone. Behind him, little sister blows a kiss.

* * * * *

A long-time best friend calls to check up. Are we well and staying safe in pandemic

isolation?

We are, I say, and the two of us share stories about teaching online, which we both hate but are making work.

He tells me about a new gumbo recipe he has tried. We both agree that at the very least gumbo must include shrimp and okra. I tell him about making radish greens pesto from my home-grown radishes and using it on fried cod. We compare our ways of coping, working online until we can’t stand it, then moving around a bit, he lifting weights and walking, me digging, planting, hoeing, and watering gardens. We talk about entertaining TV series we’ve watched. We talk about favorite music.

* * * * *

I text a friend from long ago, a high school friend I’ve seen or at least spoken to maybe six times since the 1970s. “Hope you and yours are alive and well,” I say. Half an hour later, he texts, “Yes, thanks. I remarried a couple months ago.” I didn’t know he’d divorced. “We bought a new house in Austin,” he continues, “and getting it in shape keeps us out of harm’s way.”

I congratulate him, tell him my wife, whom he also knew in high school, and I are faring well. We exchange some memories of long-ago days, things we did that we shouldn’t have, things we didn’t do that we should have. I laugh. A lot. And I feel certain he’s laughing, too.

* * * * *

In the grocery store parking lot, I pull into a slot reserved for curbside pick-up. The day is warm, so I roll down my window. In the car next to me, a tattooed young man and his tattooed wife or girlfriend nod at me. I nod back.

“Gotta love this curbside service,” I say.

“For sure,” tattoo man says. “You doing good?”

“So far. You, too?”

“Never better,” the woman replies, then giggles briefly.

My groceries come. Their groceries come. After our business is done, we start our vehicles. We nod at each other again, smile, wave.

TERRY DALRYMPLE writes fiction and teaches literature and writing at Angelo State University in San Angelo, TX. He enjoys photography and gardening, both of which provide excellent therapy during these times of social distancing and isolation.

Cooking the News

JAN SEALE

April 29, 2020

Time was, we tripped out at dawn,

bent down and brought the news,

neatly rolled and thrown by a stranger,

to the porch, the hall, the couch.

Now we do the same fetch and carry,

this time handling the column of print

with sterile cloth. Inside, another cloth

releases the rubber band. Jigger of water

in place (used another time in pleasure)

and we’re ready. Snapping the door

of the microwave, we bid the news

a small goodbye, wishing such an act

could hold more universal power.

The heated facts grow ready in two

30-second primes. When the bell dings,

the words come hot off the press

a second time, fragrant with

the odor of new ink, breathless

for us to read, but carefully, carefully,

until the news cools down.

JAN SEALE is the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate. Her forthcoming book A Lifetime of Words will be published this year by Lamar University Literary Press. She lives in McAllen, Texas, and is eating lots of vegetables and fruit from the spring crops of U.S. and Mexican farmers unable to supply their regular markets.

Valediction Forbidding Mourning Alright

ULF KIRCHDORFER

April 29, 2020

Johne Donne, you would be the perfect poster boy
for COVID-19 education, bestow upon you a hash
tag, your poem with the compass conceit so perfect
to tell people that when they stay the hell away
from each other, there is always one leg of the compass
the other can eventually return to. Of course someone
would have to make a video that is fun so people can turn
to poetry for comfort; your dull sublunary lovers I am afraid
exist more and more, not only when it comes to reading poetry
but to do anything born from contemplation and compassion.
Soon the people who have never heard of Auden’s “poetry
makes nothing happen” will return to the stores and elbow
each other to pick up a loaf of Wonder Bread like glue
to go with hot dogs made from meat scraps at the plant
where now shielded men clear their throats cutting chicken.

ULF KIRCHDORFER is a poet and photographer looking forward to moving back to Texas. Current projects in production are a book of bird photographs, with poetry written by a co-author, and a poetry book with the working title of “Hamlet Gets a Puppy.” Before the COVID-19 pandemic Ulf enjoyed swimming four times a week.

A Correction Officer Quarantines

SETH WIECK

April 30, 2020

On the northeast side of Amarillo

thirty-seven hundred violent inmates

are quarantined for crimes such as murder—

capital and multiple—continued

abuse of a child, indecent and lewd

exposure, several habitual burglars,

assault— on disabled persons and spouses/mates.

Each sentenced from four years to life without parole. No

death chambers here, though. Human depravity

has a scent: poorly ventilated cell

blocks and a diet of foul prison food.

The air thick, dyspeptic, smears the concrete

passages with a humid plaque. The mete

between men doesn’t exist. We have chewed

each other’s stench, coughed each other’s phlegm, pell-

melled our wasted cells. Outside, the city

cannot hear the coughing, the liquid gasp,

the odd kind of sympathy to cough in kind.

They cannot feel the twice-breathed air syncopate.

Barometric pointers beat as though they were a metronome.

In twelve hours, I’ll punch the clock and go home.

After I count sick men as they expectorate

on the floors. At hour twelve, I’ll find

mucus on my uniform. With the venom of an asp,

I’ll kiss my kids when I get home and dream

that every mouth was stopped. The whole world

held accountable.

SETH WIECK'S writing has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Curator, and The Broad River Review, where he won the Ron Rash Award in Fiction. He lives in Amarillo with his wife and three children, and teaches literature and writing at Boys Ranch High School. 

my ancient solar calculator

MICHAEL HELSEM

April 30, 2020

in the before time

thought we were alone

stodged on opium 

& fruits occult

would never walk

in the before time

called light things a plague

opinions, disease

shelter was a noun

mowed down, for grass

in the before time

iron lungs were legend

dicker this triage

seal each lit castle

weren’t taught by force

in the before time

MICHAEL HELSEM was born in Dallas in 1958. Shortly afterwards, fish fell from the sky.

Funeral Pyre

RON WALLACE

May 1, 2020

New leaves, greening above me,

are swaying to “Paradise” playing on my phone 

          like an old transistor radio

that, somehow, has rediscovered sound.

I take a moment,

for what once were muscles,

struggle now to lift a leaf rake

           freight-hauler hands

have gone softer than the cotton gloves that hold them,

and blisters rise where callouses once called home.

Faded-to-white curls

hang beneath my sweat-stained Yankee cap.

Just an old cowboy herding leaves and copperheads

that sleep beneath the aftermath of autumn

          into a pile for burning,

a funeral pyre for this spring without baseball,

this world without John Prine in it.

An antique red Chevy pickup rolls slow

past my front yard,

you wave a massive hand from the driver’s side

          and I think to myself:

even my favorite ghosts are social distancing

during this time of virus.

Back in the real world

my boot heel destroys a snake making his escape.

I strike the match, light the leaves

          and move on.

RON WALLACE is an English instructor at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant, Oklahoma. He is the author of nine books of poetry, five of them finalists in The Oklahoma Book Awards with his collection Renegade and Other Poems winning the 2018 award. He recently edited an anthology of Oklahoma poetry titled Bull Buffalo and Indian Paintbrush (the Poetry of Oklahoma).

Alternative Texts

TOM MURPHY

May 1, 2020

People have been discussing classical texts on plagues, like Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, and Albert Camus’ The Plague, plus some newer ones like Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, but no one has had the wherewithal to mention a more than interesting text than Rhinoceros by Eugéne Ionesco from the French Post World War II era of theater that Martin Esslin dubbed Theatre of the Absurd. In Rhinoceros, characters turn into Rhinoceros for no apparent or explicable reason as they canter in mass hysteria over doctors and safety, if that isn’t a metaphor for COVID-19 our COVFEFE-19 then what is? In lockdown are we all trying to avoid turning into rhinos? Are we hiding from radical change that would take our lives? Another classic Theatre of the Absurd drama is Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett in which when it was performed in San Quentin Federal Prison in 1957, the prisoners were rapt by the idle banter of Estrogan and Vladimir as they wait for the appearance of a man named Godot that never makes an appearance. Are we all in lockdown waiting for Godot to appear as well like the prisoners of San Quentin? Idle chitchat our way through the days. Have we not cleaned our cells, epidermis and domicile as well? If COVID-19 is Godot, do we want the encounter with it or are we more afraid of turning into Rhinoceros, will we use the antibodies of the Rhinoceros to help those waiting for Godot to ease their mindset and lives?

Then again, in some sense we are like the human pods in The Matrix film where the machine world extracts our energy to feed themselves, while the machines provide us Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Disney. It is too easy to see that the Overlords want their energy and thus end lockdown and start making money; products are a side issue to the balance sheet. In these times of COVID-19 lockdown, one may ask what good is capitalism? What does Late Capitalism give me for my hours of labor? Is there real worth in what I do for the dollars I receive in compensation? Is there any worth in anything but the time I wait to become a Rhinoceros while listing to Estragon telling Vladimir, “Don’t let’s do anything. It’s safer.” And defers to get their answers from the one that will never arrive; Godot.

Here, I would like to clarify that Defoe, Camus, and Mandel are real answers, nonetheless, these two dramas of Theatre of the Absurd seem to take in the enormity of our lockdown world, while our Overlords are breaking out their switches to ignite productivity once again and have even sent Bertran de Born with his severed head as lantern to guide us from this lockdown state. In Betran’s stead, we have flag and sign waivers, and gun toting MAGAS. It is hypocrisy that these paid stooges, yes paid $1,200, have been likened to Rosa Parks, who never waved a flag, never carried a sign, never held a gun in public or marched on a state capital. Rosa Parks, a dignified human, refused to give up her seat on the bus where laws and rules and racism deemed her unfit to sit. The difference is astounding, her cause noble. But what is noble? Is being noble the mission of humanity? Is industry on any level noble? We have mined the earth for Millenia for metals, minerals and jewels, these metals have become weapons, these minerals have polluted are bodies and earth, these jewels ensconced in crowns. William S. Burroughs’ said language is a virus. Smith in The Matrix said humanity is a virus. Are we only a virus fighting another virus, waiting to be turned into rhinos while bantering in that wait for Godot? Is there a slim margin to repeal the hunger of the dollar that feeds the Capitalistic machine? I rather doubt our luck on that change, more likely turn into Rhinoceros, catch COVID-19 and then reconsider my options as I wait for Godot.

TOM MURPHY’S books include Pearl (Flower Song Press 2020), American History (Slough Press, 2017), co-edited Stone Renga (Tail Feather, 2017), chapbook, Horizon to Horizon (Strike Syndicate, 2015). Murphy is Langdon Review’s 2021 Writer-In-Residence, and he is a committee member of the People’s Poetry Festival of Corpus Christi.

Shelter in Place

JESSICA NENO CLOUD

May 3, 2020

 The radio blares

“You are in a life-threatening situation

Take cover now to preserve your life”

He’s only 5 but he knows what that means

“A tornado?” He says 

“A real life one”

“Maybe”

“Will we be injured like they say?”

How can I lie to him?

How can I tell him the truth?

I choose a middle path

“It may not even come where we are

And even then we are in the safest place”

Booms and clangs from outside

“It’s here!”

He a happy go lucky kid 

But behind that is an undertow of anxiety

Just like his mama

“It’s not here baby

Sit with me”

And I stroke his hair and hold him under my chin

Like he was a babe again

The weather radio is not helping him

But we need the information 

“Humans and animals outside will be injured”

After having his school, his routine, his trips to his grandparents, and his friends ripped from him

Now a tornado

Poor buddy

What’s next

A plaque of frogs

Meteor strike

Rain of fire

He draws viruses as villains all day

And he pretends to conquer them as a superhero

“Flying debris will be dangerous to those without shelter”

JESSICA NENO CLOUD is a poet, mama of two wild things, and higher education fundraiser who lives in Hattiesburg, MS. She earned a Master of Arts degree in English literature from the University of Southern Mississippi. You can read more of her work on her Instagram page @jessicacloudpoetry.

Last Embrace

MARILYN ROBITAILLE 

May 3, 2020

I’m reading Dreiser’s Sister Carrie

She sits in an earth-bound rocking chair

Staring through the window at passersby

Oblivious of their plights and heartaches

She’s complacent and happy, most problems solved

Few discomforts to speak of, maybe just the cold

But she can build a fire to warm herself

Coal bin full, matches by the hearth

She rocks, observes the crowded street

Indulges in this moment, smiles and dreams

Reviews her daily tasks, the things she left undone

Little does she know, disaster’s on the march

In one quick breath, the screw will turn

Fate will smack her hard, and fortune deal a blow

Leaving Carrie all undone, completely woebegone

Without reflection, she failed to savor,

Failed in her gratitude when all was well

The bin full, warmth radiating,

That last perfected moment unappreciated

Fast-fleeting, ephemeral, so beyond her now

The world all-shifted, the devil unleashed

I feel and note our silent sisterhood 

It would be nice to know precisely

That last embrace,

That last embrace of normal

MARILYN ROBITAILLE teaches English and directs study abroad at Tarleton State University. She is founding co-editor of Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and co-hosts the Langdon Review Weekend festival. Her work has appeared in a variety of poetry anthologies. Fifty Poems and Images (Romar Press 2019), her book of illustrated poetry, has been featured in interactive poetry readings and gallery exhibits.

Building Relationships Online

MARY GUERRERO PEREZ

May 4, 2020

How do I build relationships online when no one seems to have the time?

I try to text and try to call but no one seems to care for it all.

I post my lesson each week online, but only a few turn them in on time.

I send them a message and make a call.

Once again, no response, none at all.

How did I build a relationship online?

I posted a video about not being able to go out and how it was driving me insane. 

To my surprise, a kid responded. That was the first time she and I ever bonded.

We talked for an hour about COVID and how the whole thing was just so morbid.

We talked about prom, graduation and banquets.

We talked about class and how she didn’t think she would make it.

I offered my help and joked about how these classes are not sublime.

To my surprise, she said, “Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow online.”

MARY GUERRORO PEREZ is a Spanish teacher at Palo Duro High School in Amarillo, Texas.

Three Signs of Memory Loss

VINCENT HOSTAK

May 4, 2020

1

Four days or so ago it snowed.

It was long past midwinter.

Now young martins cascade

shed from thick pine bristle—

dark raindrops swirling

in sunlight.

This time of year such early scouts are rarely seen.

2

Then I caught a sparrow’s nest

hidden below a twitching branch,

empty as a school bag

a child once carried home.

It was fastened there

tautly held.

There must always be lodging here, out there, somewhere.

3

I’d like to see your face—right here.

Instead, all these perfect poses

gazing from lighted glass.

The Spring’s already lost.

Whenever was it

you were here?

And was I coiled by the window counting martins?

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/.

Milestones

RICHARD DIXON

May 5, 2020

 Yet one more morning

open the day to more bad news

unwelcome milestones

and always more deaths

one short month into this quarantine

already feels like half a year

gloved and masked against foreign agents

In the park yellow crime tape

around playground equipment

slipped down now to its ankles

across the street, Love’s travel stores

corporate expansion

hosts a small army of construction workers

no masks or gloves, hard hats

and reflector vests in their place

We’re going to get out of this thing

climb on out of the mud

like something primordial

clean up, shake it off

like so much sloughed skin

spring, so far, holds forth

only weak promises

RICHARD DIXON is a poet and essayist living in Oklahoma City. He is a retired high school Special Education teacher and tennis coach. His work has appeared in Red Earth Review, Red River Review, Dragon Poet Review and many others, including the Woody Guthrie anthologies and the new Oklahoma poets anthology. He has been a featured reader at Full Circle Bookstore, Norman Depot, Shawnee and the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival.

How Do I Put a Plague into Fourteen Lines

KATHRYN JONES

May 5, 2020

After Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “I Will Put Chaos into Fourteen Lines”

I long to write a sonnet like Shakespeare,

Fourteen lines about beauty, truth, and love;

Yet we live in the midst of numbing fear,

I dare not touch a thing without a glove.

How do I put a plague in fourteen lines 

Of ten syllables and a rhyming scheme?

Iambic pentameter’s beat confines

When my heart wants to pour out in a stream.

I sit by the window and cannot leave

So I journey to you, friend, in my mind,

This prolonged apartness does make me grieve

As does the loss of so much humankind.

      Flatten the curve and help the weak revive,

      Hold close beauty, truth, and love to survive.

KATHRYN JONES is a longtime journalist, essayist, author, and teacher. A regular contributor to The New York Times and  a contributing editor and former writer-at-large for Texas Monthly magazine, her essays have been published in Texas Monthly and in two anthologies, A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, (University Press of Kentucky, 2019), and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016 ). She currently teaches journalism at Tarleton State University and is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor (The Last Picture Show, The Wild Bunch) and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016. 

Hiraeth

KATHRYN JONES

May 6, 2020

My ancestors came from Wales;

I have never been there, but I share

their constant longing

for something

I cannot describe but know in my bones –

hiraeth, a Welsh word for

an incompleteness that yearns,

like a soul wandering alone in the hills

looking for its mate.

I pour myself into the hole of grief these days

and find no bottom; even if I did,

I would crawl back out

and search again

for a place like home but more –

KATHRYN JONES is a longtime journalist, essayist, author, and teacher. A regular contributor to The New York Times and  a contributing editor and former writer-at-large for Texas Monthly magazine, her essays have been published in Texas Monthly and in two anthologies, A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, (University Press of Kentucky, 2019), and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016 ). She currently teaches journalism at Tarleton State University and is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor (The Last Picture Show, The Wild Bunch) and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016. 

Social Distancing: Week Six

RICHARD MCALISTER

May 6, 2020

On the side of the road a few miles from Ute Lake

lies a lonely little piece of my ear

that shriveled in the sun & turned to dust

or was a meal for the belly of a bird or snake

or a morsel for a hungry coyote.

I wore a neck brace for months

because of classic adolescent fantasy:

It could never happen to me.

I could drive at twice the legal speed limit

and I would not bounce my 280Z through the air

like a boy's Lego thrown across the living room carpet.

That same adolescent fantasy

inhabits Sling TV on the tablet

mounted next to my PC monitor: WFH

Governors re-open restaurants

and people stroll sandy beaches arm-in-arm

barefaced, gloveless, while

Johns Hopkins' map turns redder and redder,

Reporters question a tiny gravel-voiced doctor—

a novel Don Quixote  tilting at a novel virus—

who stands in the looming shadow

of the pretender-pumpkin-in-charge of plagues.

.

Ice-rink morgues in Spain and Maryland.

Abandoned nursing-homes in Madrid,

empty but for beds cradling

grandmothers who exhaled their last

with no one to hold their hand.

In New York, sheet-shrouded corpses

line ER hallways, zippered bags fill semi-trailers,

and workers in vinyl hazmat suits

stack

neat

white

rectangles

in a corpse landfill.

The bulldozers work at night.

Blocks and blocks and blocks

of middle-class cars line streets waiting

for a bag or box of canned beans, rice, and pasta

from a masked, gloved volunteer

in the new drive-thru soup kitchens.

And tea-party protesters

bring pickets to the south

instead of Boston.

Hungry, unemployed, wondering:

Starvation vs COVID-19—

Six feet of separation—

Does it really matter?

Nero fiddles. Rome burns.

And a chunk of adolescent ear decomposes.

Leave the tanning bed light on for all of us

in this Motel 6 full of cockroaches bearing novel coronavirus

to the breakfast buffet in New Normal, U.S.A.

RICHARD MCALISTER is a husband, a father, an English teacher at Boys Ranch High School, and a poet whose work has appeared in Lyric magazine.

Shizukana utsukushi-sa (Quiet Beauty)

VINCENT HOSTAK

May 7, 2020

Applied to a garden or some such thing

it makes more sense:

Shizukana utsukushi-sa,

Quiet Beauty.

But the eyes of drones high above the city

are trained to consult only clamor.

So, when canals and river channels calmed of ferries

look like downstate rivulets;

sidewalks cleared of restless striders

compare to deer paths, less the groves;

taxi ways are taciturn;

bistros bereft of buyers

and coyotes crawl the office parks;

those eyes can only doubt

the earnestness of what they see:

Shizuana utsukushi-sa.

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/.

Home

CHAD KNESEK

May 7, 2020

I heard a story once upon a time in my childhood about a rabbit who had built the most glorious burrow. She had searched every day for things that would make her home more comfortable. She collected straw from a nearby farmer’s field so that she would have a nice, soft place to sleep and found bits of paper that she was able to crumple and put near the entrance of her burrow to protect her from the wind and the rain. It was all that she had hoped for in a home and was happy in knowing that she would live out her days in the home she had so carefully built.

One day while the rabbit was outside seeing what she could see, she noticed a bird in its nest in a tree, singing to its heart’s content.  The rabbit asked, “Why are you so happy? Being in a tree can’t be terribly comfortable and certainly won’t protect you from bad weather.” The bird stopped its singing and replied, “I build my nest off the ground to keep my eggs from harm as I only need it until my children are old enough to fly away to begin their own lives.”

The rabbit laughed at the bird and said, “I’ve built my home to last a lifetime. Surely that’s a much better plan than working so hard on something that you will only use for a month or two.” 

The bird looked around its nest, looked up at the pale, blue sky and then down at the rabbit. “You see, a home is not only what you use to build it, but also what you build into it. My home is built for the memories that I will make here with my family even if it’s only for a short time. I will watch them hatch, feed them when they are hungry, keep them warm and safe and watch them grow. When they leave the nest, it’s doubtful that I will ever see them again and I must know that they always remember that they were loved in this place.”

I had not thought of this story in many decades and today, as it came rushing back to me, it all became clear. As a teacher, I knew that the message would soon arrive that our campus would remain closed for the remainder of the year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. That message did, indeed, arrive and I could not seem to stop the tears.

At first, all I could think about were my 5th-grade students…those kids that I had known and taught every year since they had been in Kindergarten. I thought of all the things we had not covered yet and whether or not they would be behind when they begin middle school in the Fall. My heart ached.

I then thought of the bird and its temporary home. Had I built such a home for my students? My classroom was a safe place for my students and my classroom was where I was able to watch them grow. But, now I face the reality that I may not ever see them again. How did the bird cope with the loss of family?

In the end, while my classroom is one of many on my campus, I know that mine has many wonderful, happy memories built into it, both for me and for my students. Years of memories flood my mind today…the inside jokes that stretched the laughter from year-to-year and the many “a-ha” moments when my students would master a new skill, just to name a few. And, I am confident that my students…my family…know they were loved in our home.

The bird was right. What we build into our homes is just as important as how we build our homes…even if it’s only meant to last a short time.

CHAD KNESEK is an elementary music teacher in Houston, Texas. He is currently working towards his PhD. in Curriculum and Instruction at Texas Tech University specializing in Language, Diversity, and Literacy.

Vector

CHRIS ELLERY

May 8, 2020

Out for a walk the last morning of April

I spy a beetle crossing a sunny drive

on its way to a shady bed of roses.

The trees and sky are full of birds,

and the shadows of their wings

are prowling the insect’s crooked path.

I’m not an ornithologist nor entomologist.

I guess the poet in me makes me stop

to scientifically observe the scene.

The beetle sidles across the aggregate,

a ripe and shiny plum on spindly legs

conspicuous as a roasted turkey on a plate.

It moves and stops, moves and stops,

pretending to be a shadow or a leaf, determined

by a will that every epic hero comprehends.

As I watch and reflect, a fact that I’d repressed

incongruously creeps into the sunlight

of my consciousness. Just yesterday

I read that COVID-19 has killed

more Americans than the Vietnam War.

More than 58,000. And more will die.

I know that stat is a strange vector

to trace in the tangent of a bug,

yet there it sits in me like a body bag.

The sky is a feathery commotion of raptors.

I understand all living things must eat,

and the robins and jays have hungry hatchlings.

But all my being is for the sentient form that crawls.

In Zen stillness, determined not to interfere, I urge it on,

this corpus of the shadow or the self.

It comes within one human step of shelter.

I think, I hope that it will make it.

Then a grackle lands on the pavement.

Black as the bug itself it hops along

some invisible perimeter

six feet away. It stops, watching. The bug has stopped.

A minute feels like a decade passing. I feel

my breath in the suspense, and my breath is the breath

of everything that lives around and in me.

With one last bewildered bob of the head

the grackle flies away as though I willed it.

The beetle slips into its place of thorns and flowers.

My heart explodes with a quantity of joy

that seems to me both comically absurd

and insufficient for the moment

even as it burns with a magnitude of sorrow

too bright to look at,

too high and vast to measure.

CHRIS ELLERY is author of five poetry collections, most recently Canticles of the Body. He has received the X.J. Kennedy Award for Nonfiction, the Dora and Alexander Raynes Prize for Poetry, and the Betsy Colquitt Award. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he teaches at Angelo State University.

Immoral Panic

JONATHAN FLETCHER

May 8, 2020

a virus spreads

We are not immune.

outbreaks of illness

They’re the carriers.

fear of foreign bodies

They’ll infect us all.

possible exposure

Avoid all contact.

risk of contamination

They brought this here.

more cases confirmed

We must inoculate ourselves.

masses quarantined

We’re protected now.

patient zero identified

How can he be one of us?

masses still isolated

We can never trust them.

virus contained at border

We’ve cleansed ourselves of them.

JONATHAN FLETCHER is an alumnus of Northeast School of the Arts (NESA), the University of Chicago, and Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio.  His work has been published in the regional literary magazine, Lone Stars, as well as the Lake’s literary journal, The Thing Itself.

Social Distance

COLIN CUMMINGS

May 10, 2020

When the air moves

A lot we say the wind

Is blowing and when the air

Is still we say the wind

Stopped blowing. But wind

Is always wind. We have words

For sound and words for absence

Of sound: silence. Where did the sound

Go? Did silence trade it places? Doubt

Might be the right word for lack

Of certainty. Faith may be lacking

Doubt, but who can really tell? Wind

Only knows to blow, not to stop. We can’t

Stop what we are. Even now

You have a neighbor, actually

A total stranger, a human with

A life like yours, but completely different

In the same ways. They’re on

Their porch; your eyes lock across

The windless air; your soul

Leaps. There is a word for the lack

Of fear you feel and it is empathy.

Human connection. You see yourself in

Other selves. You aren’t alone

You’re just not together.

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.