My love, you died before this plague,
before this confinement.

You would have hated it.
You were never one to be confined.

I can see you,
you would have worn a mask
because you were not a fool.
You would have worn one of your floppy hats,
because that was who you were.
Perhaps, a bandana around your neck as well.

But you would have been out walking.
You would have been checking on your friends,
perhaps bringing them groceries,
perhaps just cheering them up,
letting them know there was at least one person who cared.

Your daughter has a touch of your spirit,
which would have surprised us both when she was younger.
She has been sewing masks and delivering them
to hospitals, to workers still working.
She has delivered groceries to shut-ins,
including even that leftover, your husband.

I think it would please you to know that.

Perry L. Powell is a poet and author who is finding it all too easy to stay at home alone with his ghosts and his memories.

Three days into my stay,
you are given the ward bed
next to mine. We share dreams
and paint our fingernails
a bright Cha-Ching Cherry
for its promise of tomorrows.

Each week, your mom
brings us a new color:
Lavendurable,
The Power of Pink,
No Room for the Blues,
Can’t Be Beet!

Today, she hands me
Lights of Emerald City.
But you must have asked her
for a separate color,
because you paint yours
When Monkeys Fly.

A month later, both beds are empty.
Today, to your funeral,
I will wear Mermaid’s Tears.
My mother says it’s gaudy.
But you and yours
will love it.

Mary Kipps writes poetry for all age groups, in traditional forms as well as in free verse. Her work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies across the U.S. and abroad since 2005. She is also the author of three Kindle eBooks of paranormal satire: “All in Vein”, “A Sucker for Heels”, and “Bitten: A Practical Guide to Dating a Vampire.”

On this earth it is the season when all the air is blue and filled with wet lungs.
Winter has carried the weight of old civilizations.

My Father and I are waiting again for Sebastian’s return.
We wait by the slate pined shores of the oiled Atlantic

He tells me, “Hope cannot reverse the salt from that old water.
It will still gather on our lips.”

Spring will brush this weight off,
When it is new like a flower that has held on to let loose from its green wrapped egg.

That’s when my father decides to build the fire near us now

With the dead pine in the water and the green skunk cabbage
that has climbed out finally between our neighbors’ gravestones.

He pulls it all up and all is combined into flame in front of us

My father drinks his coffee in the backyard and
we watch together the white smoke from its hotness spill through the air

to mix with the ash and old illness our ancestors
had brought who came here on the sick barges

It is the smoke and my father’s coffee
that brings them here today again to gather up together
to our gray sky where it will sit thick with the wetness of ancient illness.

The air has been left clinging to their empty words
Like breath clinging to the trichomes of a browning vine.

We will sit here watching the water
around us like a taste of soil

Until the birds of King Sebastian have returned.
They will have traveled as much as we have.
They will have traveled from those mountains of those islands in our ocean.

My father stokes the fire mass on our lawn now
with the stub of a new green pine bow, his coffee in hand.

M.P. Domingos joined the military a good bit of time ago to experience the real world before getting out. Neither have happened. He writes when he can, usually at the most inconvenient times on anything he has available to him. He edits at night on an old computer after the kids go to bed.

The roof’s pitch will return thrown balls,
but prepare for the unpredictable
stagger, the occasional catch
in the gutter.

Wind will push your bike downhill until
you learn balance: how to center, lean
into gravity’s air, never
too right, too left.

Shoelaces and neckties will fall into slop-knots:
uneven ends twisted and pinched,
tangled and forced into staying
a little while longer.

Pencils will guide your cursive into loops
that capture whitespace, points
directing the reader’s eye
to crooked lines’ ends.

Razor blades planted too deep will teach
proper pressure and easy stroke: curves
and patterns all yours to follow,
avoiding blood.

John Davis Jr. is a seventh-generation Floridian, a third-generation citrus grower, a second-generation educator, and a first-generation poet. He enjoys spending time in the outdoors with his family.

The street boys, lunging forward
in their fathers’ boots,
make noisy ados tonight in Tibriz.

The war that might’ve killed them
didn’t; the nation their uncles died for
in 1983 survives another night.

They want whiskey and internet pics
of Emily Ratajkowski in a red bikini;
they want Pokemon on the Avenue

of Martyrs and Wilson basketballs.
They sneak tobacco in their jeans
and cross the shadow of the mosque

where wildflowers break through
winter, purple and gold, like artifacts.

Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where St. Paul trode. He teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.

The Cheviot sheep live
in the high country of Scotland
and never smile. It is an unselfconscious
life: they live on clover, with few species

of any other kind. From the bland calm eyes
in their pure white faces they gaze on
green grasses of the lea and follow
untrodden paths to eat their fill—

a tender sprout here, a clump of sweet tendrils
there; a continuous munching
of mellifluous rhythms.
Fatter, and happily fatter

and bulging with wooly whiteness,
she’s fulfilled by the clover completely.
When she returns from her hours
of contemplation, she sees the male.

and admires him in her poetic fashion,
rewarding him with the one word she knows.
The winds blow softly as their minds merge
In the wooly oneness of sheep.

Martha Kahane is a psychologist and an avid choral singer. She misses choral singing terribly since singing in groups has become lethal. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband of forty years.

I return to you because it is late in the city
and the avenues don’t end, it is always the hour

of sirens bleating and the girl whose hands I hear
thanking the sidewalk for its canals, the child shaking

out her father on the fire escape, the man who boils
in the caves of the building where I check the phone

asleep in my shirt and listen to your lips, the sound
your shadow makes when you empty the windows

that let in none of July’s darkness. I return to you
because I see you in the taxi’s humid season

breeding through the Hindu music of corners
that stay up the whole night grinding their stalks of cotton.

I return to you from all the Broadway that vanished here,
the people who parcel out their very lives to watch you

birthing a pony in the orchestra pit, and the cameras
protecting the tall, emaciated oboe kneeling in the restroom.

I dismantle my theater cushion, map to someone else’s thighs,
slaughters their legs have sung. I return to you, comb the floor

for dimes and rice, hibernation money, and the husbands,
the husbands sipping water in the tainted houselights.

Rob Cook’s most recent book is The Charnel House on Joyce Kilmer Avenue (Rain Mountain Press, 2018). His work has appeared or will appear in Epiphany, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, great weather for Media, Rhino, Caliban, deComp, Interim, On the Seawall, Borderlands, Barren, The Bitter Oleander, Hotel Amerika, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. He is currently working on a novella.

Removing Volatile Compounds

from this organic matter,
a heart relinquishes
as a residue once heated
in the absence of air

Frederick Charles Melancon lives in Mississippi with his wife and daughter.

天 性

It’s raining today
But yesterday was fine

The Masters
Know the way of heaven

The green jade melody

Strung between moments
Flushed with the dawn

The sun comes
And the stars go

This is the way of things

To look out of my window
To burn paper with doubt

That is the dew of clouds I lead

Back through the night
Back though the world

Here –
The rain falls harder
On this morning pass

I will not proceed

心

I will not lose you

Not to the illusions
Or to the delusions
Painted on
This fleeting dream

By the white lies
By the colours
By the flower words

No – I cannot
Control the ignorance
And – no – I cannot
Overthrow the suffering

But I can focus on you

Beautiful
Boundless
Forever present
In this eternal morgue

The fire will not burn
And the ashes
Will not scatter this

As above
So as below

Darkness passes to the light

I could never lose you

仙

The sky
May be grey

But that
Doesn’t mean change

Out in the marshes
White cranes will cry

And up in the heavens
New gods will hear

All dew drops of mist

On this –
Imperfect pane

J H Martin is from London, England but has no fixed abode. His writing has appeared in a number of places in Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Website: acoatforamonkey.wordpress.com
IG: @jhmartin72 / Twitter: @acoatforamonkey

Just being here,
which is to say the frying
of omelets, the making of coffee,
the daily crossword
and the broken heart,
is almost enough. Today
I folded towels and stacked them
in the closet. I brushed my teeth
and sought magpies
through the window. Today
I held my daughter’s
plastic dinosaurs and watched
the stars she stuck on the ceiling
a decade ago. Today I made myself
glad with the almost,
and read a Neruda poem
chosen at random
and Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room.”
Today I was pretty good,
and pressed my mother’s
wedding dress for no reason.
I didn’t drown or berate the rain.
I ate potato chips.
I drank two beers.
This is the work of life;
this is what it means to be
in silence and await tomorrow’s.

Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where St. Paul trode. He teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.