This Year

by Sha Huang

They all say this year will be written into the history book:
Mountain fire, locust, a pandemic that you will not see
in a hundred years,
Angry crowds, division, violence
Death.

Many people lost their lives.
Some restaurants, book stores, and cafés may die too,
along with the memory attached to them.
A friend of mine disappeared out of the blue,
while another friend is having a hand-to-hand combat with cancer.

Keep writing and painting on a quiet summer afternoon.
Let the flowers, branches and rivers grow.
Or take a walk with family and friends, chatting,
creating fresh memory to nourish our intertwined roots,
and to resist the robbery conducted by time and chance.

这一年

他们都说
这一年将被载入史册
山火，蝗灾
百年一遇的全球瘟疫
愤怒的人群
分裂，隔绝
暴力，死亡

很多人失去生命
一些餐馆，书店，咖啡馆即将永远消失
附着在上面的记忆就要无枝可依
一个朋友不辞而别，无影无踪
另一位朋友正和癌症近身肉搏

在这个安静的夏日午后
继续画画，写作
让笔尖长出花朵，枝桠和河流
或者和家人朋友散步，聊天
让新鲜的回忆不断诞生
滋养连结彼此的根系
以此对抗
时间和偶然性的洗劫

Sha Huang was born and grew up in Chengdu, China. She writes, translates and paints. Her poems and translations have been published in multiple literary journals and anthologies in China such as Young writers, Chinese and Western Poetry, Anthology of Chinese Poetry 2019, Thatched Cottage, and Chinese Poetry. She is currently teaching Chinese language and culture at a university in the U.S. Varada J.M is a 9th-grader based in Kerala’s Koyilandi, studying at Rani Public School, Vadakara. After hurriedly doing homework, Varada divides her time between practicing classical dance and watching horror films. She loves dogs but nobody at home wants one.

From the Inside

by Federica Santini

The year of Christmas in March
we dipped our fingers in sugar and mud
and played at creation with cake.

At night we dreamed of slitting our wrists,
no blood seeping out, as if from a doll
or seeds bred in darkness at Easter:
non-sentient snippets of hair,
curled fingers dry underground,
pink seashells gleaming with poison.

The year of Christmas alone
we waited and waited and waited.
We looked for the first new blooming
of spring.



Federica Santini lives in Atlanta, GA, and teaches at Kennesaw State University. She holds an M.A. from the University of Siena, Italy, and a Ph.D. from UCLA, where she studied poetry and literary translation. A literary critic, poet, and translator, her work has been published in over forty journals and volumes in North America and Europe. Her recent poetry appears in Snapdragon, Plath Profiles, and The Ocotillo Review among others. She is a 2021 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference Fellow (Arizona State University). Stella Bellow is an illustrator currently attending Parsons School of Design in New York City.

Food Lion, August 2, 2020

by Tracy Donohue

I see only eyes
above the masks

no full faces

until I see the man
without a mask
at the check-out lane

like a different species

well-dressed
firm jaw
tan
around seventy

so very tall

he radiates
a confidence
that comes
from being saved
by myths

a slight smile rests
on his exposed face

such sureness dazzles me

he gazes at me
hawk-like
with half lidded eyes

with a dog’s tilted head
I stop and stare

I want to bark
to tell him
there is danger
to take cover
but he wouldn’t
understand
the words
through my
muzzled mouth

I trot away

I don’t look back

Tracy Donohue is a retired professor of Theatre Arts. She lives in North Carolina with her husband Morton Stine. Along with writing, Tracy enjoys kayaking, singing, biking and reading. Sally Lelong is a visual storyteller working in a variety of media that lend themselves to use in a conceptual framework. She lives and works in New York, and routinely exhibits her work in a variety of settings from print to thematic installations to street art.

October, Plague Unlocked

by Kushal Poddar

We changed my mother’s medicine
to placebo.
She showed real ailing, true health,
until
the day she died, still recovering.

“I believe in silver linings.” she said
while we dined in our dim room, almost dark,
and because I had to say something I moved
my lips, “Revolution means circling back to
the origin, not changing the origin.”

Freud sat on the third chair. A sparrow brought
a grain of grin on my mother’s lips. She ate it.

Kushal Poddar is an author and a father. He edited a magazine, Words Surfacing. He has authored seven volumes including The Circus Came To My Island, A Place For Your Ghost Animals, Eternity Restoration Project: Selected and New Poems, and Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse, A Prequel. Sally Lelong is a visual storyteller working in a variety of media that lend themselves to use in a conceptual framework. She lives and works in New York, and routinely exhibits her work in a variety of settings from print to thematic installations to street art.

September 2020

by Peter Bushyeager

Saw a romantic comedy I liked
and I mentally replay it
fabulating in the mist of
today’s air that’s straddling
two seasons and an airborne pest.
The window was open.
I read that article about
the danger of orchestra flutes
that shoot 12-foot columns of
laden air along with their trills.
About necessary rules in
circumstances like this becoming
rigidly fixed one nippy March afternoon
then remaining in place through winter.
About the wild power of nature
those straggly persistent yellow flowers
stay the same 1980 or 2020 always
look like some sort of daisy
but refuse to flop to willingly recline so
gracious to willingly recline into
the side of a hill among the deciduous into
your ribcage wearing soft terrycloth nap
that flattens on impact but
rises again with a good wash to
recline into a breeze that lays like
warm water on your skin.

Peter Bushyeager’s poems have recently appeared in New American Writing, Local Knowledge, Café Review, Sensitive Skin, Live Mag!, Boog Reader 12, and the anthologies From Somewhere to Nowhere (Autonomedia2017), and SensitiveSkin: Selected Writings 2016-2018. His poetry collections include In the Green Oval and Citadel Luncheonette. He is editor of Wake Me When It’s Over: Selected Poems of Bill Kushner (Talisman House 2018). Varada J.M is a 9th-grader based in Kerala’s Koyilandi, studying at Rani Public School, Vadakara. After hurriedly doing homework, Varada divides her time between practicing classical dance and watching horror films. She loves dogs but nobody at home wants one.

At the Edge of the Lake

by Kim Michalak

What is it about the edge of a lake
that feels like a new beginning?

Is it the weeds, lilies, and reeds
sprouted from the edgewater
their faces uplifted toward the sun
necks not yet flattened against
the muddied bellies of turtles
and alligators, resilient

Or is it the proud chirps and squaws
of the herons and other water birds
reminiscent of elementary school
choirs, each on a different note
and rhythm, yet even the angry ones
manage to harmonize somehow

Maybe it’s the smell
of decaying earth, the matter
of all things, a mouthful of sweet
and sour symbolic of the cycle—
a grounding thing to remind us
we are all at the edge of something

Kim Michalak is a Florida-based poet, mother, and optical stylist. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University and is an associate editor at The Fourth River. Her works have appeared in Brushing, Rose Red Review, and Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing. Sabiyha Prince is an anthropologist, artist, and author based in Washington, DC.  Her books and essays explore urban change and African American culture, and her paintings and photo collages grapple with memory, identity, kinship and inequality.

To Be

by Dale M. Tushman

Lonely is better than sad.
Sad weighs so much
it changes the contours of a
heart.  And it’s messy.
Very messy.  It oozes into spaces

you would least expect, like windows,
a bathroom mirror, the closet,
the coffee cup, so you cannot
always armor up and send it somewhere
you’re not going to be, like         happy.
(Or even mildly pleased.)

Lonely used to have options, 

which allowed one to feel close    enough
to mitigate the silence,
but now, behind our masks and/or
milling around/nearish the doordash person,
we have to take the time
to get distracted enough

to lose the scent of grief or despair. 

There’s always an app or two
or fifty
to produce lights/camera/action which short
circuit the nervousness that comes
with the “s” word.    Unless one is
an elder or technophobe and only has
a flip phone which has limited minutes and apps
and arthritic fingers cannot rescue an incoming call
or find the place where messages hide.
Then,
one can always curse at a missing person,
and the grey of sad can shift
into brown paneled walls of solitude,
like those in the library.

Dale M. Tushman‘s writing started with messages in bottles and notes to Santa. She moved up to ardent and (hopefully) articulate political protest letters (an on-going effort), short stories for university publications and eventually a life in New York publishing as a writer/editor and producer of multi-media education products. Her poetry has been well received in both print and on-line journals and now the smallish screen. She has been a psychotherapist for over twenty years. She is a transplanted New Englander now living in southeast Georgia, a place not terribly much touched by modern times, and one of the good things about this buckle-of-the-bible-belt is that it does love its crazy people: She is hardly noticed among the Bougainvilleas and Spanish moss. Sally Lelong is a visual storyteller working in a variety of media that lend themselves to use in a conceptual framework. She lives and works in New York, and routinely exhibits her work in a variety of settings from print to thematic installations to street art.

Rural Isolation

by Elaine Reardon

The crow calls after I’ve poured 
a second cup of coffee. The forest is quiet,
aside from Moss Brook, sound

splashing through the open window.
Wood frogs left eggs in the pond last night.
then went quiet this morning.

That crow was the only bird calling today.
No one answered its cry.
Have corvids socially isolated, too?

Spring is quieter this year
aside from those wood frogs
who know how to have a good time.

Right before dusk, they begin to carouse.
I almost hear Billy Strayhorn at 
the piano, and see trays with appetizers

and cocktails passed around the small 
vernal pool, where passion runs
fast and loose down there, just past the garden.

Elaine Reardon is a poet and herbalist. Her first chapbook, The Heart is a Nursery For Hope, won first honors from Flutter Press in 2016. Her second chapbook, Look Behind You, was published by Flutter Press in late 2019. Most recently Elaine’s poetry and essays have been published by Pensive Journal, Naugatuck Journal, UCLA Journal, and several recent anthologies. Carolyn Monastra is a Brooklyn-based artist, activist and educator. Her recent projects, The Witness Tree and Divergence of Birds, focus on climate impacts on people, landscapes, and wildlife.

Lost, Lamented and Found

by Regina Beach

I. Lost

A Bristolian fox stole my wallet
My track suit pockets have the bad habit
Of expelling their contents on the floor
When I get out of the car
They’re all I wear now, 
Since we started working from home
I shouldn’t’ve gone out
Nipped down to the shop
In a moment of weakness
I’d quit, but got a hankering
I didn’t even tell the missus
Knowing she’d tell me not to go
She bought me that wallet before we were married
You can’t replace memories like that
Watching rooftop fireworks hand in hand,
Late night Singapore noodles after pints in the pub
My license, cards, 80 quid,
And the shame of having to tell her I got the fags 
But lost everything else

II. Lamented

I bought that wallet in the tanneries of Fez
Watching the men from the balcony of a leather goods shop
As they jumped waist-deep in ammonia, salt and dye
Swirling the cowhides with long hooks
In the before times, when we were allowed to travel
I brought back a journal and a necklace for me
And a wallet for my sweetheart, at his request
He buys the best gifts; I’m forever practical
Which is why I bit my tongue, gritted my teeth 
And told him to cancel his cards
That he was lucky his license was lost 
And not taken by the cops
I didn’t need to scold him, it’s just money 
He’d retraced his steps
The car, the walk – the clerk hadn’t seen it
And if the junkies outside the gas station found it 
Then it’s already long gone

III. Found

Since my husband died, I’ve found great solace in the soil
Nurturing the hydrangea, the rose bushes 
And keeping the ivy at bay
I found a wallet in my garden the other day
Out in the front while weeding my hedgerows
Lo and behold the battered leather appeared
Looking like a fox or a dog had got hold of it
From the the bitten corners and gnashed banknotes
I pride myself on humility and honesty
Only opening it to find out to whom it belonged
Saw that it was the property of a young man down the road
I cleaned myself up, put on a mask and walked to number 67
He looked shocked when I handed it to him
Must have been gone a long time
He thanked me and slid the battered billfold in his pocket
Isn’t it nice when a knock brings good news for a change?

Regina Beach is an American writer based in Bristol, UK. She is most at home pedaling her bicycle or on her yoga mat. The narrators of the three parts of this poem are her husband, herself and the kind old lady down the street who really did return her husband’s wallet. Read more of Regina’s writing and listen to her podcast at ReginaGBeach.com. The photograph that accompanies her poem is her own.

During Pandemics Everyone Writes About the Sky

by Kendra Nuttall

Sun rays against skin, birds chasing half-empty airplanes
across mango sunsets into moonlight.

I remember the Idaho sky in fall.
I remember Grandpa’s Thanksgiving Day hugs.
I remember Thanksgiving.

I’m one of the lucky ones, I haven’t forgotten
touch. I haven’t forgotten the impossible
warmth radiating from sleeping dogs on winter mornings.

I haven’t forgotten
how to feel. Do you remember the day we got married?
It was raining and we were happy.
It’s raining and we are still happy.

Kendra Nuttall is a copywriter by day and poet by night. Her work has appeared in Spectrum, Capsule Stories, and Chiron Review, among others. She lives in Utah with her husband and poodle. Her debut book, A Statistical Study of Randomness, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Sally Lelong is a visual storyteller working in a variety of media that lend themselves to use in a conceptual framework. She lives and works in New York, and routinely exhibits her work in a variety of settings from print to thematic installations to street art.