Todos Vamos a Estar Bien

by Mell McDonnell

We’re going to be all right.

And how much more believable when
in Spanish it slips
silvery over the tongue,
exhales as breath—

this space

something newborn:
mine, yours, ours—

inhale .  .  .   .  exhale .  .  .  .
lungs, life, communion.

Todos vamos a estar bien.

Mell McDonnell is a person of several careers–as an instructor in English at the University of New Orleans, as a freelance financial writer, and as marketing/public relations director for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, University of Colorado, Boulder.  She is a member of the Denver Women’s Press Club and Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop. Ms. McDonnell’s poetry appears in The Silver Edge (Leaping Berylians Society, Denver), Third Wednesday (Ann Arbor), and The Road Not Taken: The Journal of Formal Poetry. Surekha spent her formative years in the beautiful hills of Nilgiris before she moved to her hometown, Thalassery, to pursue a career in fine art. Her works have been in many exhibitions across India, and most recently to “Revived Emotions,” an international exhibition at Ratchademnoen Contemporary Art Centre, Bangkok. She served as the head designer for a leading Kerala based jewelery chain for 17 years, leaving behind an oeuvre of more than 3000 designs. Painting has always been her first love, exploring the moods of nature, and finding shades, colours, tones and textures in landscapes, especially focusing on her memories of Thalassery and Nilgiris.  

The Puzzle

by Harriet Stratton

 
       …what draws itself apart pulls itself together.
                                                                         —Heraclitus

Mother sits just where I left her
before the visits stopped—

at the jigsaw table. She puzzles
over small shapes scattered like shards

before her. The big picture, propped,
offers color and pattern clues,

the comfort of familiar objects,
a postcard from the past.  She’s trying

to piece it all together. That’s the game.
That’s always been the game

and her game, at age 96, is persistence, intention,
not dwelling on how it all came apart.

Harriet Stratton, the teenager, loved poetry but studied, practiced and taught Fine Arts. Once retired, she re-embraced her first love and joined the Poetry Collective of Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. She’s published a number of poems in local literary journals but remains proudest of a protest poem in The Colorado Independent.  She lives on the front range of the Rocky Mountains. Art by Karyn Kloumann, founder of award-winning indie publisher Nauset Press.

One Day: An Era

by Dr. Bijoyini Maya

One day surrounded by petrichor at the banks of the Ganges
We will surrender our hide and seek … one day.
You will not hurry to office
Nor will I be seeking employment in classifieds section…
In your eyes the sunrays split into thousand beams —
I will be in a sari, then used to draping
Maybe that day so many years of silence will be tired of hush
Our language will find words —
Waves of time will one day bring this flood
I will have no time to be miffed as I glance at you.
Or perhaps illusory desire will remain in dream world,
Never come true in tangible reality, however, what is the harm in a wish?
In this fairyland, you are my prince
This breezy dream for the sun scorched days
 Full of dirt: anxious job hunting.
Also in the interior most corner of the heart in a small hut lives bird of hope — It says
One day, that one day will happen

একদিন — দীর্ঘকাল

একদিন বৃষ্টির সোঁদা গন্ধে গঙ্গার ওই প্রান্তে

ধরা পরে যাবো হঠাৎ দেখো দুজনা — একদিন …

থাকবেনা তোমার অফিসের তাড়া

না আমার কোনো চাকরী খোঁজার পালা

তোমার চোখে বিন্দুর ন্যায় সূর্য কিরণ খণ্ডিত

আমার পরনে শাড়ি, তখন বেশ অভ্যস্ত

হয়ত সেদিন দুজনের এত বছরের নিস্তব্ধতা চাইবে বিশ্রাম!

তোমার আমার বাণী পাবে ভাষা —

সময়ের স্রোত একদিন আনবে এই বাণ ভেঙে সব দ্বার

চূর্ণ হবে আমার রোষাবেশ চেয়ে তোমার পানে একটিবার…

হয়ত এই অলীক কামনা স্বপ্নই থেকে যাবে,

সত্যি হবেনা তার কোনো ছবি, তৎসত্ত্বেও আশা করতে কি ক্ষতি?

স্বপনের  রাজ্যে তুমি আমার রাজপুত্র —

এই স্বপ্নটা স্নিগ্ধ করে জীবনের সূর্যতাপ মাখা

ধূলোয় ঢাকা, অস্থির, চাকরি খোঁজার দিনগুলো

আর বুকের কোনে ছোট্ট কুটিরে একটা আশা —

একদিন! সেই একদিন আসবে…

Dr. Bijoyini Mukherjee dedicates all her creative endeavours to Shakthi and her mother through her pen-name Bijoyini Maya. Her professional expertise includes public relations, teaching, storytelling, research, soft-skills training, content writing, editing, and spiritual counselling. She has published articles on New Zealand literature and ecocritism. You can also find her short stories and poems in various journals and magazines like BlazeVox. For inculcating love of Bengali literature, she is indebted to her foster mother, Kalyani Mukherjee. 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.    

Travel in the Time of Covid

by John Reoli

Beaches want for footprints.
Humans, if we still deserve
The name, are nothing more
Than curiosities to the scavenging
Crab whose caviar eyes see us

As newcomers, interlopers, tourists
At Evolution’s resort.

Who will win, sun or sunscreen?

It’s not all doom and doomsday
In this Caribbean paradise.
Sunlight, after all, is the best
Disinfectant. Isn’t it?

Unmasked breaths roll with the surf.
Invisible buoys mark invisible
Hazards between bodies diving
For shells, coming up for air.

The crab skitters from lapping
Waves that erase its footprints
Until hot dry sand records
The impermanence of its fleeing marks.

Wondering if the virus will be humanity’s
Natural end, I wade safely distanced
In the surf as the sea erodes sand
Beneath my feet.

John Reoli is a New York City based writer and actor. He is the author of the poetry collection Naked Prayers (Six Gallery Press, 2007). His poetry has also been published in The Oakland Review, Thieves Jargon and The Red River Review. His short fiction has appeared in the James White Review, Harrington Gay Mens Fiction Quarterly, The Front, Pittsburgh’s Out (1997 Short Fiction Contest Winner), Blithe House Quarterly and The Oakland Review. His most recent play, Just Stop! was selected for Sundog Theatre’s Scenes from the Staten Island Ferry 2021. Other dramatic works include A Room with a Futon in the 2015 Venus Adonis Festival and One Seat in the Shade which was presented in the FringeNYC2008. Jim Baron is the owner, with his wife Liz, of the Dallas-based Blue Mesa Grill restaurants and TNT/Tacos and Tequila. He’s been a surf bum all his life, with his late brother Bob and younger brother Dan. He spends a couple hours every day painting water colors, and happiness for him is being on the beach with Liz, Kate, Zak, Ian, and Lola, the labradoodle, who runs the show.

The Forgotten Mask

by Jackie Oldham

Monday morning,
Cold and steel gray,
The old lady drove to the convenience store
With steely confidence
For milk and bread
To start her day.

She strode into the store,
Gathered her items,
And placed them on the counter.

The counter lady asked
“Where your mask, sweetie?”
The old lady cried out, high-pitch laughing,

“Oh My God! I left it in the car!”

And slapped her left palm over
Her mouth and nose,
While inserting her debit card        
To pay for her sundries.

Taking the shopping bags,
Left hand still serving as her mask,
She elbowed open the convenience store door,
Got back in her car,
And drove home, chagrined (but still laughing)—
Wondering how she could have forgotten
The damned mask.

Jackie Oldham is a writer from Baltimore, Maryland. She has read her work at local venues, for the Quintessential Listening: Poetry podcast (2019, 2020, and upcoming on February 10, 2021), and for the Black Poets Matter series, presented by Mad Mouth Poetry. Her essays have appeared as Editorials and Letters in the Baltimore Sun newspaper. Her first short story, “Age-isms,” was published in midnight & indigo, an online and print literary journal featuring Black Women writers. Three of her poems have been published: “Golem Emet” and “I Don’t Want to Play The ‘Capitol’ of Edition of Clue™” in Oddball Magazine and “Just Another Covid-19 Saturday” in Global Poemic. 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.

The Time Back Home

by Lorelei Bacht 

The time back home started flowing 
At a much different pace from ours – 
A shift almost imperceptible at first, 
Then a chasm, undeniable. Across 
The distance of a continent, we can still 
Hear their distant voices, on and off, 
Online – It is not quite the same: we seem 
to have parted ways, only capable
Of conversing when the planets align, 
Once every century. 

The time back home has gone sour, 
Thick and slow like an underwater dream.
Muffled panic in the distance, nothing 
They write makes any sense. They talk 
Of bubbles, complicated lines 
Between, around old people and places
We once thought connected. There is 
No such thing as stopping on the way home 
Just to say hi. 

The time back home has accelerated, 
Perhaps, and we have become a relic 
Of a distant and glorious past – that is 
How they must feel reading about our lives, 
Which are quotidian and eerily 
Unaffected – what they would give, 
For a chance to complain about 
Our minor inconveniences: sometimes,
We have to wait a few hours
To buy some beer. 

The time back home is incalculable, 
Unlike The time difference of the old days. 
How simple then, to add or retract a handful 
Of hours. Now the difference is measured 
In days, birthdays missed, weeks, 
Of impossible quarantines, months 
And years without seeing loved ones. And the certainty
that without a hug, a gentle 
Touch, the irreplaceable presence of one to one, 
We have begun the slow but irremediable process 
Of turning into ghosts.

Lorelei Bacht is a European poet living in Asia with her family, which includes two young children and a lot of chaos. Her work focuses on aging, motherhood, and finding onself as a nearly middle-aged woman. Some of her musings and previous publications can be found on her Instagram feed. Sulochana Mahe is an artist based in India’s former French outpost, Mahe. She dissolves herself day in, day out in social work, and art. Her work includes teaching painting to cancer patients, helping them overcome their sense of being doomed. She taught art to 150 prisoners at the Central Prison, Kannur, moving their minds to the softer sides of life. Teaching art to women at a care home in Thalassery gives her joy that colors can’t.

Corona Worship

by Wilda Morris

It’s Sunday morning,
another month of Covid isolating.
I don’t rush to finish breakfast,
don’t put on dress shoes.
Don’t ask, Should I wear this top?\
Are these slacks too tight?
Is my lipstick on straight,
my hair combed right?

Live-streamed service starts. Only God
knows I’m in my nightgown,
my hair’s in curlers, my feet are bare.
I’m drinking coffee, nibbling a doughnut.
Only God knows if I say
on the Lord’s Prayer aloud,
if I sing the hymns off key.

God only knows how I miss
the Sunday hugs and the friendly hellos.
God knows I’m better off without
the coffee hour treats, those enticing sweets
and how much I miss conversations by the coffee pot.

God only knows how my heart is lifted
by the sacred music, how it soothes ne,
how the benediction falls like a dove’s feather,
how I start another week in isolation
feeling less alone.

Wilda Morris, Workshop Chair, Poets and Patrons of Chicago, and past President, Illinois State Poetry Society, has published over 650 poems in anthologies, webzines, and print publications. She has won awards for formal and free verse and haiku, including the 2019 Founders’ Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. Her second poetry book, Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick was published in 2019. Her poetry blog features a monthly contest for poets. She regrets that the pandemic required cancellation of planned visits with grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Liz Baron is an artist and restaurateur who lives in Texas by way of New York City. She and her husband, Jim, founded, own and operate four Mexican-Southwestern restaurants. She got her Bachelor of Fine Art from Pratt Institute but stopped painting when restaurant work and family life consumed most of her time. She is grateful to the online art classes of Sketchbook Skool that helped her regain the joy of a regular art practice. 

Street Wash (2020)

by Kathy Jacobs

In my neighborhood
last November
a large doe lay
on a driveway
Glass-eyed and gutted
carcass gaping and empty
Entrails draped over
a sagging brown box,
pelted by buzzing flies
Her blood intermingled 
with lawn sprinkler runoff
Who was this hunter
to decide 
the local kids needed
a reality check 
about death?

In Chicago this summer
lives dripped into streets
from bullet holes
Poured over feet
of children
Who later played
where gutters
ran pink
After the hydrants
were opened

In my town this December
loss is in isolation
Outside the nursing home
relatives peer through rain-
spattered glass
Hoping the loved ones inside
understand 
Caregivers’ faces are hidden,
anonymous
Weariness etched 
in their eyes
Muffled wheezes echo
in hospital hallways
Cloistered lungs ache
with ground glass 
The statistics are sterile
Detached and monstrous
Devoid jarring stench 
Absent violence and viscera
An undeclared war
with washed casualties

Yet in this year of dying
I find myself returning
To Chicago streets
and deer

Kathy Jacobs is a retired professor of nursing. She has been poems published in anthologies from the Nebraska Writers Guild and Plainsongs. 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.

The Early Bus from Valverde

by Eliot Khalil Wilson

I will maintain the social distancing,
masked, mindful of my hands, way in the back
where you can see me, but I am not seen.

Ten feet, a waiter’s eyes, cautious and mean,
then a woman dressed in barista black.
I will maintain the social distancing.

Mechanics bring the smell of gasoline.
Windows locked, five feet, neither wears a mask
and you can see them, but they are not seen.

Walmart clerks board and stare at their phone screens.
Six office cleaners climb up and file back.
Welcome all to blue collar quarantine.

We move in held breath like a submarine.
Still there is distance though the bus is packed.
We will maintain the social distancing.

At the light idles a lewd limousine.
From tinted windows, smoke escapes the cracks.
They will maintain the social distancing.
They can all see us, but we are not seen.

Eliot Khalil Wilson has published three books of poems and won more prizes than he could ever deserve, two Fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Bush Foundation Grant among them, as well as prizes from the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets. Liz Baron is an artist and restaurateur who lives in Texas by way of New York City. She and her husband, Jim, founded, own and operate four Mexican-Southwestern restaurants. She got her Bachelor of Fine Art from Pratt Institute but stopped painting when restaurant work and family life consumed most of her time. She is grateful to the online art classes of Sketchbook Skool that helped her regain the joy of a regular art practice. 

No Solicitors

by Blake V Rose

For all you know I am a
Pink flamingo staked before
A double-wide in Kentucky

I am a no soliciting sign
Fastened to the front wall
Of a Sinclair in Wyoming

A glass of untouched prosecco
Somewhere moldering
In an Italian basement

For all you know I’m positive

With every cough
This shit is getting real

For all you know I am
The woman with an airbrushed
Shirt tied in knots
At the seams
Two feet behind you in the line
At your local Aldi’s

For all you know I’m positive
That you are too

With every public sneeze
This shit is getting real

Blake V Rose is currently in pursuit of an English degree at East Carolina University and will one day move home to Tennessee. He is proud to have fiction published in Alban Lakes Publishing, Hireath Books, and Adelaide Literary Magazine. Blake has poetry published in the anthology Under the Cherry Tree: 20 Great Poets in Their 20’s. Sulochana Mahe is an artist based in India’s former French outpost, Mahe. She dissolves herself day in, day out in social work, and art. Her work includes teaching painting to cancer patients, helping them overcome their sense of being doomed. She taught art to 150 prisoners at the Central Prison, Kannur, moving their minds to the softer sides of life. Teaching art to women at a care home in Thalassery gives her joy that colors can’t.