Because We Only Know How to Measure

by Laurel Benjamin

Fishermen know. I would come upon them
in the fog, surprised both of us,
creases in sand dunes like hideouts
as the Pacific caught my shoes
unseen until barely light
and bubbles in the tide, clams talking

as loud as the surf.
The men never nodded, just beated
their poles out, knowing forward motion
would save them, and soon the sun
would rise full and they would lose
their moment, pack up their gear,
walk up to the parking,
remove their boots, their macs,

and leave.
Now in the second year of the virus
retrospective photos show streets, cafes,
whole city blocks shut down.
Shuttered shops dovetail with protests
against police, and now groceries

carboarded up again
and my curtains came out uneven,
one panel a nine inch hem
the other uncontrolled, pins dropping
with their blink blink, and I put too much pasta
in the casserole, bechamel sauce taking
the supporting role
for even if we know the practice of sewing, of cooking,

we are not guaranteed the outcome
of one year and the heat of the next—
which terms do we use to describe
what we cannot control
and cannot name
(though we name it)
the arc of embers.

Laurel Benjamin holds an MFA from Mills College. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry, California Quarterly, The Midway Review, Mac Queens Quinterly, Wild Roof Journal, Tiny Seed, WordFest Anthology, Global Quarantine Museum Pendemics issue, Ekphrastic Review Bird Watching Challenge finalist, Oregon Poetry Association’s Poetry Contests honorable mention, Sunspot Literary Journal’s long list, among others.She is affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and the Port Townsend Writers. 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.

Transplant Shock, Pandemic Spring #2

by Jane Attanucci

Sunlight sharp against

cold, deep-end blue sky,

unclaimed tray of pansies,

floppy purple & yellow petals,

pot-bound & tired.

Tugging each tiny orphan

from its plastic cup,

I tuck them into rich, soft soil.

Trickling cooled kettle water

over the old clay pots,

I begin to pray.

Outside, inside—where

can I place them safely?

Was feeling ever simple?

Jane Attanucci’s poems have appeared in Common Ground Review, Mom Egg Review, Off the Coast, The Pittsburgh Poetry Review and Third Wednesday among others. Her chapbook, First Mud, was released by Finishing Line Press (2015) and her full-length collection A River Within Spills Light is scheduled for release by Turning Point in August 2021. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 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.

Fifth Floor, Assisted Living

by Debbie Collins

she’d cut her hair with the tiny bathroom scissors again

it was spiked into some crazy birdlike fluff like the ducklings 
making their way to the pond through the parking lot

she watches them from her window 
and makes clucking sounds with her tongue

where have you been, she pleaded with me

words like quarantine and isolation made her wince 
with remembering and pain

Charles passed on, she said quietly, 
not meeting my eyes

we lost four on our floor altogether she said,
studying the parking lot

put on your mask, I say, let’s get out of here – 
the sun is glorious today

finally, finally she can feel the sun on her face, 
and we’re both, just for now, 
wrapped in a daydream

Debbie Collins lives and writes in Richmond, Virginia. She has been published in Third Wednesday, antinarrative, and Flatbush Review, among others. Her first book, he says i’m fierce, was just released by Finishing Line Press. 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.

Quarantine in Worm World

by Amelia Gorman

“If all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes.”
Nathan Cobb, “Nematodes and their Relationships”, 1914

Here in the middle she’s compelled by pests
on every side. Walls rise around and force
her to step back from the Pacific Crest.
Her breath attaches to itself like remoras.
She never saw the Grand Canyon, doesn’t
think she ever will. Or a tumbleweed.
But somewhere out there now, All-That-Wasn’t
still cuts a deep vein in the earth and grieves
until the end. But she is stuck in place
like a museum display, a glass jar,
restrained. She never saw the Grand Staircase
Escalante, or eased through Voyageurs.
Even if she could now, she’d only see
worms make up redwood and Joshua tree.

Amelia Gorman is a recent transplant to Eureka, California. In her free time you can find her exploring the forests and tidepools with her dogs and foster dogs. Her first chapbook, Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota, is forthcoming from Interstellar Flight Press. 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.

Whirling

by Jessica Burnquist

Traveling home is not possible–
pandemic borders and invisible risk.
But if it were, what might be discovered there,
seen in newly familiar slants of desert light? 

Deep purples of bruise emerge from nowhere
into the light and now there is time to reconcile 
or throw memory into a lake. And the lake is not
bordered with Narcissus. The lake is a reflecting pool 
deeply waving in the most significant faces. 

Sometimes you swim in the lake. Sometimes 
you drown. Sometimes you are reborn and even 
if this takes place in the worn impression your body
causes in the sofa, it means something about 
your nature. It means you are willing to drift.

Maybe when you were small, you studied your mother
and her opal pendant with a burning fire to put it 
in your pocket for magic and wishes. Spells for later when 
no adults were nearby and you were in the air 
of the backyard or the park across the street 
with wild hive-causing grasses. 

Much later, you will order an opal from India, 
wear it on your writing hand and the wishes
will find a way to pour out and you will be 
and you will not be home again. And you 
will be drenched and dry. You will overhear
reports on the latest spikes of death
because so many traveled too soon, 
and you will be aware and you
will be at once joyfully, 
miserably alive.

Jess Burnquist is the author of the chapbook You May Feel Your Way Past Me (Dancing Girl Press). Her poetry has appeared in multiple journals including Clackamas Review, Ms. Magazine, Natural Bridge, Hayden’s Ferry Review and more. She currently directs education and youth empowerment at a human rights anchored non-profit in Southern California. 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.

Sinkholes

by Margaret Dornaus

                     “You see the caution signs, but you don’t really know
                      that it’s a real thing . . . ”

                     October 2019 Associated Press report from a local man
                     walking across a sinkhole-ridden beach on the Jersey shore.

You remember the stories. News of sinkholes—clusters of them—
one reportedly swallowing a whole house, a 40-year-old sycamore, a pickup
truck and custom camper, five Porsches, an Olympic-size swimming pool
and large portions of Denning Drive in Winter Park, Florida, 40 years ago.

Then, just before news of the latest pandemic, it’s the Jersey shore
man’s turn to fall into one of 12 suspicious sinkholes after a storm-ravaged
sea wall tumbles down.  A lot of people walk their dogs up and down
[there], the man tells a nonplussed reporter. There are others

like him, throwing caution to the wind, seizing the day for another
chance to live la dolce vita without becoming prey to the news of climate
change, acid rain, rising tides, tsunamis, earthquakes, the tip of all those
polar ice caps. All those sinkholes and viruses and global catastrophes.

You see the signs, but like that hapless Jersey man out for a stroll, you prefer
not to read or write about so many unpleasant things. The ones hiding
under your bed or rattling your roof. The things that leave you breathless,
shivering, depressed, unseen, alone. All of those things. Sinkholes.

Margaret Dornaus holds an MFA in the translation of poetry from the University of Arkansas. She recently had the privilege of editing and publishing a pandemic-themed anthology—behind the mask: haiku in the time of Covid-19—through her small literary press, Singing Moon. Her first book of poetry, Prayer for the Dead: Collected Haibun & Tanka Prose, received a 2017 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America, and she received a 2020 Best of the Net nomination from MacQueen’s Quinterly for her haibun “Late-Night Inventory.” Her poems appear frequently in national and international anthologies and journals, including Contemporary Haibun Online; Journeys 2015: An Anthology of International Haibun; Red Earth Review; The Ekphrastic Review; The Lindenwood Review; and The Red River Book of Haibun. 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.

Contact Tracing

by Lisa Eve Cheby

i.
Rain in Griffith Park and my last human contact.
I snuck out early from day-one of work-from-home.
I lay my naked body face down under the sheet. 

After Marika prepared my body with oils, before I return
to begin shelter at home, the rain and no one but I
walk in Griffith Park. The eucalyptus and longleaf pines are closer
than six feet, their branches brush, alive and fearlessly fragrant.

Five men play golf as cars swish by. My umbrella still proclaims
slogans from last year’s teachers’ strike, where I learned
it is acceptable to walk in the rain     
                                    healthy             doable
                                                                                    even necessary. 

ii.
Eight days ago, when we were still pretending
our lives could persist
unaltered, we chose
the air & space
of Descanso Gardens over
a museum. We were already washing
hands more profusely, denying
hugs. We leaned up to smell
the cherry blossom, caressed
the rough skin of trees.          

Today             to feed my skin
I brush the Norfolk Island Pine

on my balcony            I had been craving
slowness, to clear the way for learning
                                    to say no,
                                                to value
time, the only yield
we can never recoup.  

But now

iii.
The balcony rail steams like mountains warming in daybreak. 
The plants drip accumulated dew that dampens the chair & my thighs.
The birds reclaim the mornings like humans their journals.

It has taken 13 days since Grace hugged me,
after the yoga class where I brought my own props,
for me to let gratitude seep in like the rain

carries in a wintery cold waking me from a fevered dream.
How should my body temperature feel on cold nights
under a down blanket?  

iv.
Now is the crying stage, even for the introverts.
This is not Christmas or a retreat. 
Someone is making bacon and I am alone.

Lisa Eve Cheby, a librarian, poet, and daughter of immigrants, holds an MFA from Antioch and an MLIS from SJSU. Her poems and reviews have appeared in various journals and the anthologies including Drawn to Marvel, Coiled Serpent, and Accolades. She was a SAFTA Writer in Residence. Her chapbook, Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Dancing Girl Press) was featured in The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed Series. 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.

While I Wrote this Villanelle, the U.S. Death Toll Rose from 400 Thousand to 425

by Andrea Clark

Give us back all these lives
Such suffering we cannot brook
Give us back the earth, the sea, the skies

Find us paper products in ample supply
Return our borrowed library books
Give us back all these lives

We still go out for a drive
No longer linger in restaurant nooks
Getting back to the earth, the sea, the skies

We accept in exchange four ones for a five
But this bargain for a bribe you mistook
Give us back all these lives

And we’ll surrender what keeps us alive
We too have little time–just look
Give us back to the earth, the sea, the skies

Who decides who shall survive?
Our faith fundamentally shook
If you won’t give back all these lives
at least give back the earth, the sea, the skies

Andrea Clark lives in Oakland and is a low-residency MFA student at Dominican University of California. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cathexis Northwest Press and Dark Moon Lilith. Her poem, “Tongues Not Welcome,” was a semifinalist for the 2020 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize. 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.

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.

Exponential

by Melanie Han

I got coffee with a friend today.
We went on a walk on the beach
then she went back to her apartment to have lunch
with her roommate before spending the afternoon
with her boyfriend who then dropped by his brother’s house
for a half hour to play with his nephew
until he left to return to his own place for the night.

                       By the time I got the phone call telling me
                                     I had tested positive for it
                                                  my friend had spent the day at work
                                                               and her roommate had visited the grocery store
                                                                            and her boyfriend had grabbed a meal with his                                                                            mom
                                                                                    and the nephew had gone to preschool
                                                                                                     and           and                  and…  

                                                        

Melanie Han is an avid traveler and a poet who was born in Korea, grew up in East Africa, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing in Boston. She has won awards from Boston in 100 Words and Lyric, and her poetry has appeared in several magazines and online publications, such as Fathom Mag, Ruminate, and Among Worlds. During her free time, she can be found eating different ethnic foods, studying languages, or visiting new countries. 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.