Children of Hotel Venecia in Kyiv!

by Nilofar Shidmher

Fifty-thousand-dollar babies
born out of rented wombs
of women who after
receiving their money have
happily gone home.

Their affluent foreign mothers are still
in their own countries, quarantined
in their homes with
their spouses, waiting
for the end of the pandemic.

The children are in the care of nurses
who are yearning to be with
their own children and sleep
beside their spouses,
not alone in this five-star boutique hotel.

Every night, the nurses kneel
by their beds, leaning on the cold
sheets, facing the wall,
and cross themselves, praying to God
to rid them from COVID 19 and these

nobody’s children!

Nilofar Shidmher, PhD, MFA, is a bilingual writer, poet, creative writing-informed research scholar, and educator. She is the author of two collections of short fiction and five books of poetry in English and Persian. Her first poetry book in English, Shirin and Salt Man, was nominated for a British Columbia Book-Prize. Her latest fiction book, Divided Loyalties, has received many positive reviews. She has served three times as a Writer-in-Residence in different cities across Canada, the last of which was with McMaster University and Hamilton Public Library. Dr. Shidmher teaches in the Continuing Education Program at Simon Fraser University. 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.  

When We Can Gather Again

by Susan Auerbach

A celebration of life will be held when we can gather again.
–obituary, Los Angeles Times

When we can gather again
we’ll run whooping in the streets
as if at war’s end and throng
bars and subways and stadiums, stunned
at the proximity of strangers.
We’ll marvel over not-so-new newborns
and rush into hospitals to sit
with the dying. We’ll release kids
into playgrounds and free disembodied
worker heads from tiny Zoom room boxes.

When we can gather again
we’ll ramp up production not
of visors and ventilators
but of prom dresses, movies and ballets,
book tours and horse fairs. Schools will burst
with the clamor of homecoming
and teachers, who can no longer mute
the room, will remember why they teach,
while students will never forget
How I Spent My Pandemic.

When we can gather again
I’ll fly trans-Atlantic to kiss
the top of my grown son’s head;
you’ll cuddle your grandchild and read
Little Owl’s Day as long as she wants.
Millions will swipe right again while couples
dash out for dinner with friends–separately.

We’ll join moments of silence
at 7pm. We’ll need actors
and playwrights to stage a recovery
and long vacations for nurses
and grocery clerks. We’ll sing
Hallelujah at grand re-openings
of parks and sanctuaries and cook
lunches together for the hungry.

When we can gather again
we’ll gather up courage to take off
our masks (the ones we wore before)
and deem everyone essential to dream
a future for this brave new wounded world.

Susan Auerbach is a novice poet who returned to creative writing in midlife. Her poems have appeared in Greensboro Review, Literary Mama, Third Wednesday, Please See Me, Altadena Poetry Review, Art in the Time of COVID-19, and her grief memoir, I’ll Write Your Name on Every Beach: A Mother’s Quest for Comfort, Courage & Clarity After Suicide Loss (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2017). She lives in Altadena, CA, with her husband, two dogs, and six chickens. 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.  

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.  

A Hymn To The Evening

by Carla M. Cherry

After Phyllis Wheatley’s Hymn to the Evening

7:00.

I love the stillness in the mornings,
caress of newly clean air,
but this daylong silence makes this Bronx girl miss
rap/reggae/bachata bass of passing cars
and the shudder of my bedroom window.

I stare at the steely sky,
wonder if my neighbors are tired of our daily salute.
Dwindling whistles,
fewer arms sticking out of windows
smacking spoons against pots.

I stroke the bottom of my metal mixing bowl
and the hundred tiny cuts etched in it
from three months of me and this old knife.

I like keeping things shiny and smooth
but these marks
in the bottom of my mixing bowl
remind me of grooves
grooves
groove
albums
Daddy’s record player
pulling dust off the needle
to keep the records from skipping
Daddy head-bopping to
“The World Is a Ghetto”,
stiff poppin’ and lockin’ to
“The RubberBand Man” to make us laugh,
me asking myself where heaven was if it wasn’t in the sky
and what made Ashford and Simpson
ooh, oh like that at the end of “Somebody Told A Lie”
Aretha wailing “Mary Don’t You Weep”
while Daddy made pancakes.

7:01.

whistles
whoops
and the man several floors below
who cups his hands around his mouth
to make his woof woof bounce off our buildings.

I run to my kitchen window
push it all the way up
slip my arms
mixing bowl
knife
through my window guards,
get to banging,
clanging,
help my neighbors
make this music.

Carla M. Cherry has been teaching since 1996. Her work has appeared in publications such as Anderbo, Eunoia Review, Random Sample Review, MemoryHouse, Bop Dead City, Anti-Heroin Chic, 433, The Racket and Raising Mothers. She has written five books of poetry and is an M.F.A. candidate in Creative Writing at the City College of New York. 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.   

Avalanche

by Elizabeth Edelglass

My mother flurried tissues,
like snow, dusting
every couch,

hidden beneath
every cushion, packed
in every pocket,

buried in every purse,
banking lacy flakes—
forgotten coin in corner crevice.

A slip of white
floe’d from every sleeve
at her wrist, as a wayward

bra strap might seduce
from a young woman’s
shoulder. I, the young woman,

repelled, averted my superior
gaze. Now I hoard tissues
in every pocket,

use and re-use,
boxes stockpiled
in the basement, toilet tissue

mountained
under every sink, towel paper
crumpled in blanc balls

dusting the kitchen
counter like snow,
extra rolls shoveled under the bed.

Shortages now, supermarket shelves
plowed barren. I never prized
the other shortages my mother

must have lived through, treasuring
her hoarded tissues,
fragile, fleeting as melted snow.

Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer and book reviewer drawn to poetry during this year of isolation. While the media is flooded with year-end lists of 2020 horrors, Edelglass has discovered, through poetry, a few surprising personal notes of grace. Edelglass’s fiction has recently appeared in Sixold, Prime Numbers Magazine, and New Haven Review. She has won the Reynolds Price Fiction Prize, The William Saroyan Centennial Prize, the Lilith short story contest, and the Lawrence Foundation Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. 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.   

Labor Day

by Cheryl E. Klein

May 1, 2020

The kids are slipping
and sliding on an inflatable rainbow
our lawn turning to mud.
We have a lawn
and there must always be a pause
for that: our good fortune.

My boss has ideas,
and these too are luxuries
born in her former hunting lodge
in the folds of Laurel Canyon.
She watches mountain lions
on webcams stalk their prey.
She outlines her vision
and speaks of strategy.
I say I’ll try.
Our most famous local lion
crossed two freeways
to get to Griffith Park
and so maybe she believes
in exceptionalism
as much as conservation.

The kids chant their demands
like labor activists
and I suppose that makes me management
delivering Jell-O in plastic bowls
shaky and blood red.

I was pregnant once
but never went into labor.
The years between that unbeating
ultrasound and eventual adoption
created a wild beast in me.
It crossed freeways. It looked back
at the rushing cars and saw
what might have happened.

Our son has formed a union
with the neighbor kids
whose parents are out of work.
The crunch of big-wheel tires
on concrete is the sound of summer.
My boss wants to know
why I am not on top of things.
But it is April, the weather
falsely warm, school falsely canceled.

Our tortoiseshell cat brings roaches
through the dog door at night
watches their antennae twitch
bats them with a curled paw.

Each day I make a list with two sections:
work and life. The kids rule the driveway
between our homes, the border
unenforceable but fraught.
The school opens
only to give out the free lunches
now stacked in orange plastic boxes
on the neighbors’’ kitchen table.

Pfizer donated medication
when our famous mountain lion turned
up pocked with mange. McDonald’s
is donating $250 million
to Black communities
and health care workers.
What is a donation?
What is labor?

My son says, “Mommy, there’s a cockroach”
and I tell him his other mom will get it.
Last night she cut his hair in the kitchen
and nicked his ear. She applied a band-aid
before he saw the blood.
If there had been a mirror
he would have screamed.

Cheryl E. Klein’s column, “Hold it Lightly,” appears monthly(ish) in MUTHA. She is the author of a story collection, The Commuters (City Works Press), and a novel, Lilac Mines (Manic D Press). Her stories and essays have appeared in The Normal School, Blunderbuss, Entropy, Literary Mama, and several anthologies. Her work has been honored by the MacDowell Colony and the Center for Cultural Innovation. By day, she works for the youth writing nonprofit 826LA. 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.    

Seeding a Pandemic

by Carol Casey

Ordering seeds during a pandemic is,
like everything else, complicated
The distributor is overwhelmed

open only to commercial growers.
Try again later, door shut, scarcity panicky
we regroup, find other sources.

Little packets of promise, dry curling 
embryos. Just add water and life quickens, 
becomes spinach, cilantro, dill. 

We prepare the earth for our continuation.

Carol Casey lives in Blyth, Ontario, Canada. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and had appeared in The Prairie Journal, Sublunary Review, Cacti Fur, Plum Tree Tavern, and others, including a number of anthologies, most recently, Tending the Fire and i am what becomes of a broken branch. 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. 

Covid Cozy

by Siri Espy

I’m so happy to be here
social distancing with you, my dear
we said for better or for worse
and there’s nowhere in the universe
I’d rather be than this damn house
24/7 with my spouse

I’ve given up on getting thinner
as I cook you one more dinner
you never even try to squelch
a hearty after supper belch
sometimes it’s like a fancy prison
but with Netflix on the television

I think we’re slowly going bats
it’s just you, me and the cats
but isolation seems so wise
with Corona virus on the rise
we watch as all the cases tick up
and await the thrill of grocery pickup

A grand romantic interlude
is a splurge of evening takeout food
there’s no weekend getaway
but we celebrate each garbage day
there’s sickness, health and in between
but we never mentioned quarantine

There’s really nowhere else to hide
I guess we’d better stay inside
until the virus goes away
it’s quite a lot like Groundhog Day
but there’s nothing else I’d rather do
than social distance here with you

Siri Espy is retired from the corporate world, where her writing included two books, numerous articles, and innumerable reports and bullet points. Her varied career included stints as a psychologist, market researcher, college instructor, consultant and health care planner and marketer. The mother of an awesome daughter, she lives in Greenville, North Carolina with her tolerant husband and three crazy cats. She is delighted to rediscover her creative side and unleash her quirky sense of humor.  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.