Volume three
2 HORATIO Volume 3 Summer/Fall 2020 Special Issue: Poetry of the Pandemic
editors Joan Cappello Jennifer Stewart Miller Elaine Sexton publisher Elaine Sexton designer John Kramer
cover art: Terry Castle, Hydrangea Without a Cause, altered photograph. Inside covers are digital negatives of cover image, made with kind permission of the artist.
POETS
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Jessica Greenbaum Scott Hightower Myronn Hardy Maja Lukic Peter Covino Jennifer Stewart Miller Jason Schneiderman M.C. Bolster Sean Singer David Groff Frances Richey Joanne Proulx Marilyn Mazur Denton Loving James Brasfield Maya Mahmud Julio César Paz González Jane Wallace Pearson Marlena Maduro Baraf Michael Broder Amelia Ross Sebastian Matthews Carmen Bardeguez-Brown Linda Hillman Chayes Aaron Smith Theresa Burns Joan Cappello Rick Hilles Michele Karas
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Patricia J. Barnett Roger Mitchell Marion Brown Jennifer Franklin Renée Christine Ehle Cassie Pruyn Mindy Gill Bonnie Jill Emanuel Michelle Yasmine Valladares Pamela Hart Paolo Javier Sheila Rabinowitch Sherry Stuart-Berman Martha Rhodes Katherine Harris Matthew Thorburn Mary Ellen Pelzer Curtis Bauer Daniel Lawless Sarah Van Arsdale Joanna D. Brown Ron Slate Kay L. Cook Patricia Spears Jones Neil Shepard Kaye McDonough Elaine Sexton Ruth Danon
Special Issue: Poetry of the Pandemic All the poems in this issue are new. We solicited work with no stated theme. In some cases, timeliness took precedence over polish in order to shape a true documentary of this time of necessary protest and necessary (when possible) self-isolation. These poems may be read in any order, but the order of appearance follows a timeline of the rapidly changing world from March to early July, 2020. The majority of the poems, as well as the cover image, were made in April and May. The impact of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis, MN, which subsequently led to worldwide protests, was just beginning to be felt at the time of our original deadline in June. We thank our contributors, writers and makers living or sheltering in place all over the U.S., from Maine to Tennessee, New Jersey to Florida, North Carolina to San Francisco and New York; and abroad, from Thailand, Australia, Canada, Vietnam, and France. Personally, I’d like to thank my two co-editors, the poets Jennifer Stewart Miller and Joan Cappello, who joined me in every aspect of editing and handling this issue. The logo and thoughtful design of 2 Horatio, from its inception, is by John Kramer, my friend and collaborator. I thank him, once again, for making a graceful space for poetry here.
Elaine Sexton New York City
Jessica Greenbaum
Going for a Run Without My Glasses because they fog up with the mask on so I thought I would try it and I started in the park on the early, rainy side of spring, the light green trees like a tune that was going to get louder, with added bass by June, and the crabapple and cherry blossoms like lacey colored clouds fallen over some branches and the next time around I thought they were held up by the branches, and after a squint I realized that the blue patches on the ground were only dropped gloves even though I’d pass a trash can the next moment but I liked seeing the whole park as a moving composition, as if in CAD/CAM as I jogged around it and on the dark morning someone walked by with a yellow briefcase and they might have been a wandering tulip and for a split second where to, I wondered?
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Scott Hightower
This Artless Virus This artless virus doesn’t have existential dread in times of uncertainty like I do. This virus doesn’t have legs, it wants mine. This virus doesn’t have skin, it wants mine. This virus doesn’t have hands, it wants mine. This virus doesn’t have eyes, it wants mine. This virus doesn’t have lungs, it wants mine. This virus doesn’t have life, it wants mine. This virus doesn’t compose songs. This virus doesn’t have imagination, wonder and bewilderment like I do. This virus doesn’t have a reckless heart, it wants mine.
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Myronn Hardy
Ode to a Gray Sofa From where I stare ceiling cracks. Then the azure cracks of sky so many cirrus clouds moving. Your wool makes me itch or is it my lewd linger? Always here my back here. Blue duvet over me you. Empty peanut butter cookie sleeves over me Pretzel crumbs I’m watching too many terrible movies. We are in a terrible movie documentary. Dire leadership the world abhors us. We are being led to die. Cores of pears stones of nectarines strewn before your woody feet. This is what I offer. Forgive me for being who I am now. My skin graying from lack of green vegetables motionlessness fear a feeling of giving up. Even though you keep me from the floor I am not grateful. I am ashamed for being ungrateful in your peppy grayness. But the woe of now weakens me. I am weak in the strength of your steadiness.
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you.
Maja Lukic
Fort Greene this is a bare side street with a suspicious broken up sky the neighborhood by turns too dark and too lit neon miasma, black trees, blue air people stare out of their windows down the avenue all my neighbors in their containers wait all the faces are still there but rearranged in fear it’s been years since I’ve recognized terror it was cold last night on the park bench when a friend and I stepped out with bicycles and cans of Pinot Noir we tried to map out the new year of curfews and vaccines (how long will I have to be alone?) a week, a month, two or more; it eats, it grows it is time it were time, Celan said it is time in quarantine I only ever move through time but not space the rotating planetary days the light cutting a path through the windows over the ceiling, skimming the blanket where I miss an old lover I take my place by the window watch the street precarious
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no one comes by so I water the plants and read Eliot— I can connect / nothing with nothing I would sleep but sleep has dried away and only a fugue state of powders and pills brings not rest but a greater stillness life now—sequenced stillnesses and silences discernible only to the one who hardly ever moves except for walks in the park where I hear a little boy complain to his parents about a fence: why did they even put a fence there? it separates nothing from nothing me and the street I don’t enter
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Peter Covino
Forest green slick-headed mallard with choker and consort We swallowed the light’s comeuppance and laid a hammock in the woods. We peeked beneath dirt’s hooded shirt and left the masks to rot and plastic degrade. Occasionally cars sped by on soundless invisible tracks redoubling our ears. We beheld beholden birds slicing the air, a great blue heron returned to the city park. Two mallards resting aplomb. I wasn’t expecting much just a walk and wave from a fellow dogwalker a beaver, an otter, a groundhog on the path.
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Jennifer Stewart Miller
Two Dream Weddings Featuring Personal Protective Equipment and New Pantone Colors For L. & B. No. 1 Providence, RI — Walking down the aisle at R.I. Hospital’s exclusive employee parking lot, the bride, an ER resident, was radiant in her N95-white gown hand-stitched from surgical drape sheets. She wore a contrasting medical-blue mask and matching disposable gloves and booties. While the tall, dark, and handsomely-masked groom couldn’t really kiss the bride, you could still see the joy in his and her eyes. No. 2 Waitsfield, VT — The sky was medical-mask blue, dotted with a few N95-white clouds floating serenely by, as the happy bride and groom stood on the scrub-green lawn under viral-orange maple trees, and—with a few casually-tuxedoed cows in the adjacent pasture as witnesses—exchanged their vows—in sickness and in health, until death do us part—love, as usual, the only PPE.
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Jason Schneiderman
At my drink-drunk-drunketty-unkest I lay down in the road to see the stars more clearly. I laughed a tequila shot through my nose onto a man trying to pick me up at a club. I decided I had to translate Akhmatova at that very moment, and woke up my host family by searching loudly for her collected works. I threw up in someone’s bed, again through my nose, which may be a theme in my drunkenness. I called my friend’s green card marriage a green card marriage for the entirety of a party, despite her insistence that her gay husband was her husband and that her family was not a ploy or a trick or a legal fiction. Each time I stopped drinking so heavily, for a year, two years, three years, and I’m not admitting to much here, a handful of stories across two decades, the moments I thought I ought to drink a bit less, and yet it bears saying that every weepy drunk considers himself a kind drunk; every mean drunk considers himself an honest drunk, and every handsy drunk considers himself a flirty drunk. And is it so terrible, the joys and regrets of drunkenness, if they’re just a one off, if they don’t become a habit, if we can disappear and come back? I’m not sorry I saw the stars from that gutter, though my sober sympathies lie with the sober driver who was furious that I had almost made him a murderer. What I remember best is those stars, and how they were as beautiful as any stars could be and how much they meant to me with my inhibitions stripped, and how well I can still see them now. 14
M.C. Bolster
One Tooth My rogue tooth falls out of place every three days. Like clockwork. Tricky to salvage as it drops, a giant pebble mixing with bits of oatmeal swirling in cold Corona slipping out with no warning as I listen to Adele’s swoon— endless love in the arms of a chiseled cowboy. My rogue tooth is fake— a thousand-dollar fake, clone of a tooth, a stand-in for missing molars lost to age and Hershey bars. Jarred loose from my jaw just as the world shut down.
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Sean Singer
Schism Today in the taxi a passenger got in and she was crying. I don’t know why. We left Astoria for Williamsburg. I gave her a little package of tissues and she went on her way. Kafka said crying is especially alarming for me. I cannot cry. When other people cry, it seems to me like a strange, incomprehensible natural phenomenon. I thought maybe she was going through a breakup, or perhaps it was a passage in a novel. Some people think of Williamsburg as the “hipster apocalypse” and others, the Orthodox, know the Lord is there with them. She’s pushing a shopping cart full of plastic bottles rescued from trash cans. Crying literally means “to ask for loudly.” She mumbles through a drop of saltwater, but She’s really saying: You are worthy of asking and having your question heard.
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David Groff
Essential Workers The boy at the window opposite leans out with his mother at 7 p.m. to bang a pot for nurses and doctors whose risk he doesn’t get, his percussion like gunshots on the wall of our brick forts. He’s loud as he can be, the boy squirming in his dollhouse quarantine. He’s grinning, maybe thinking our applause is his, that he’s the engine and the wheel, all the coiled city jangling at his toy. What grace to be and know too little. If only I could be a boy again, could call up ghosts a shriek would send to bed, could find some joy in noise, could sleep without the fever of my fear, could clutch a hand.
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Frances Richey
March 2020 Dead leaves hop on dry tips down vacant city streets— alien insects.
Warning to the Sea Turtle in Oman Laying Her Eggs in the Moonlight For your hatchlings those construction lights on shore can be false moons that kill.
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Joanne Proulx
Simple Math my phone rings my daughter is calling from the park behind our building “come down” she says “the ice is perfect” at night we break quarantine and escape our glassy nest in the daylight hours we call our mothers our friends in France, our sons and sisters just to hear them say I’m having soup for dinner or today I saw a beautiful grey rabbit in the yard their voices—how could we have forgotten? fools to believe comments pecked onto screens offered the same sort of miracle in 20 point, all caps red, the sign in the hall instructs us to let the elevator pass if someone is already inside yet for days the doors have opened onto spot-lit emptiness, gleaming brass handrails and a whiff of lemon-scented ammonia if each story of a high-rise is 12 feet in height and a family of three lives on the 11th floor how far is their fall back to earth simple math for complex times we’re all homeschoolers now studying exponential growth curves the behavior of skittish mammals in fresh captivity the force required to ventilate a drowning lung or dash the hardest heart open into kindness I descend ____ feet to the lobby outside the world empty as the elevator the moon subbing in for the sun 19
a digger of dirt I want to press my sterile hands to every surface French kiss the light post dosey doe with the willow bathe in the thawing canal my daughter waits in the park by a puddle skimmed with spring ice we thrill at the give the toes of our boots pressed to its surface her hand casually resting on my shoulder we offer up the full weight of our bodies teasing our luck, shrieking as it cracks we are all wet-footed fledglings now praying that the ice will hold us
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Marilyn Mazur
this week my spade forages spring ramps in the woods we barbecue salmon, the patio white with snow zoom, zoom, zoom—social distancing all day I edit my grandson’s mandrill monkey poem with tears, I sort old photos of my late sister a zoom seder—a zeder—commingles us I hum Twinkle Twinkle Little Star as I swab kitchen counters my daughter will intubate infected patients tonight a snowy ski trail snakes up the bare slope the still-brown mountain boasts a line of green pine trees Banded Galloway cows loll in my neighbor’s field cloud shadows sit on the distant mountain a dozen red robins dig worms in my front lawn the rain leaves teardrops on the window a sheriff’s car drives down the road twice daily it will feel like Pearl Harbor this week Sam Cooke croons Oh Mary, Don’t You Weep we chant ancient prayers, murmurs that balm my truck—with Vermont plates—jostles over a bump here’s your order. thank you—I pick up groceries curbside the chickadees sing: excuse me, excuse me, excuse me what to do about the chirping bird’s nest in the fireplace?
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Denton Loving
April 10, 2020 John Prine died this week from the virus, and fifty-thousand others around the world. My mom turned 75. Instead of birthday cake and a party, three rabbits jumped and chased each other in circles around her house. Every state was a self-declared disaster, but not everyone’s isolation was the same. Those of us with too much time on our hands cleaned out garages, basements, storage sheds. Our dumpsters overflowed with dry-rotted clothes, broken-down kitchen gadgets, back issues of National Geographic. From my barn loft, I rescued a box of my old toy cars. My favorite: a blue Tonka twoseater—missing its back wheels, another sign to shelter in place. The super moon—perfect light for stalking prey—called my cat to action. At 4 a.m. I let her outside. I could see far into the fields where the cattle glowed like ghosts.
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James Brasfield
Out Here Hour upon hour the stillness of boulders on the beach and the tall trees on the bank, one a birch, its buds fattening . . . now, suddenly, the wind-wavering saplings, the waving branches and leaves: such patience, until the sound of it all— an unmindful diligence moves the second hand.
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Maya Mahmud
Untitled Truisms You don’t have to answer anyone’s questions.
Good things happen when people are allowed to make up new words.
It requires skill to observe your surroundings without naming any objects.
Say everything with a modicum of uncertainty and watch your life dissolve like sugar on your tongue.
The same skill can be used to observe your peers, without psychoanalyzing them.
Without a watch you’re practically the same person only less controlled.
Don’t expect your friends to always excite you. The trick is to keep eye contact, even through a computer screen.
Long-term relationships keep you accountable to your patterns, making it complicated when you’d like to dispel past iterations of character.
Love is a long stare.
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If you’re unsure about what you believe, observe the way your body reacts when you lie.
Sunlight is less intense with one eye closed.
You are charming when you ask appropriate questions.
If you remember you are breathing more becomes possible.
When you think erratically, a kind of religion is born in you.
Wearing a face mask keeps you safe from illness but, makes lipstick obsolete.
Small insects have a sharp bite.
Spreading homophobia is like pouring bleach in everyone’s drinking water.
Be aware of your silences.
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Julio César Paz González
love lust he wanted me to write a love poem but if we don’t love each other’s shit; the daily struggle with the stained seat, the wine-injected gaze, the guts, folding cheap toilet paper into daisies, the smoke coming out of my lips when I think I love then what’s left? for now, this will suffice
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Jane Wallace Pearson
April 2020 Sunday Daffodils don’t care. Impassive on the sill above the sink, their yellow-deckled edges remind you of all the letters you never had time to write and now you do. Monday I expect no one to be impressed by my private economies, how I dress; I wear only one sweater; eat the last small piece of cheese; usher a fly out the back door to please no one. God maybe. Tuesday [“Whose woods these are….”] A young stranger came to our door today, wondering. I shook his hand, forgetting, and said I didn’t know. As he walked away I was arrested by the seat of his pants, stained with fingers of oil and dust, sagging flat as an open palm, gray-green of dying grass.
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Marlena Maduro Baraf
Farrow and Ball, “White Tie� Paper white with a hint of yellow and a minor complication of brown to bind it to earth. Used often for trim on houses, it takes on a supporting role to vibrant hues and complex muted ones. The Phalaenopsis white orchid, sturdy and bold, anchors the sideboards in New York City model apartments with views of the river. The coarse petals and sepals are shot with sparkles like stardust. If you look at the underside you will see a blush of mauve or pink and faint transparencies of the green of their bud birth. Daniel picks the white star studded orchid for the drama, the size of the gesture that says I love big. I love you with flair. I am a good guy. He loads the love with variegated purple varieties, blossoms articulated with symmetrical fuchsia fingers and bloody throat. What is the underside of a giant nautilus shell? Is it the flaky, chalky exterior drying in the sun? Or the glossy intermittently reflective pink of its mouth? Even the underbelly of a weathered cement pot bleaches from grey to almost white on the inside belly next to the old soil. The years drip off my fingernails. We churn and become the underside. And the other side, bold and transparent, supporting and dominant.
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Michael Broder
First Thing in the Morning of April 13, 2020 You sip your coffee. You take your meds. You feed your kitties. You check your email, your social media. You used to get straight to coffee and your poem. Now you are far more distracted. Now before you write your poem, you check the headlines. Cannot start your day without knowing yesterday’s death toll, if a new clinical trial started treating patients with an experimental drug. You anticipate the governor’s daily press briefing, live streamed on Facebook or watched later if you miss it. It’s your Mr. Rogers. It’s your fireside chat. One of your backyard feral cats looked sickly, and then stood off and looked at dinner but did not eat, and then just did not come back—you assume he’s dead; that’s how they do it; you’ve seen it before. And it has nothing to do with the pandemic, and yet it seems to— everything that happens during this time— a new TV show you start watching, a book you read for a few minutes at bedtime before your Ambien kicks in—everything seems to be Covid-19 edition, everything seems connected to the—you like the term “health crisis,” which nobody seems to use. That’s what they called AIDS—the health crisis. Then you were marginalized and the federal government dismissed your plight. Now you have marriage rights and characters in TV shows, movies, and stage plays— and the federal government fucks everyone else right along with you. Plus ça change.
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Amelia Ross
Workers She would have been a copyist in the 19th century, if a woman were lucky enough to get a job. Skilled with words, hired because she was bright, pretty, though not enough to stand out. She learned to save, some years did not take a vacation, always paid for her own health insurance. Not a woman of independent means, she never knew if she were better off alone. His unemployment insurance ran out. Congress recessed without passing the promised extension. Now a discouraged worker, no longer counted in unemployment figures. Highly educated. He sold for his boss, managed clients, understood knotty business problems. Everyday approached the search with an attitude. Sold himself, sent emails with good cover letters and resumes. Paid the rent with his savings.
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Sebastian Matthews
Dusk in the Pandemic It’s late in the algebra of the day, dogs on their sides; I’m trying to solve for the color blue as the world crashes to the ground in a heap of steel and plastic. Join me for a drink? A walk? Carry me through a song that carries in it an antidote for fear. Let’s sit a while and contemplate the simple truths: tea tannins, piano solo, dog fart. What I’m looking for is an angle of light, a chill breeze shot through the body straight into my criminal heart.
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Carmen Bardeguez-Brown
Timbales Maracas y Trompetas Ave Maria AyBendito Beauty is in the Eyes of the beholder. Suénalo Suénalo Laugh with your eyes open. Candela Candela Pelo Malo Acuérdate que camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente. Estudia Estudia Estudia Preparate para que nunca tengas que depender de nadie. Suénalo Suénalo Y qué se cree esa prieta Goya Beans Candela Candela Pelo malo You only live once. La vida es para vivirla. You are pretty for your kind. Candela Candela Pelo malo Flatten the curve. Death rate Wear a mask. Ave Maria Ay Bendito Candela Candela Pelo malo I can’t breathe. 32
Another black man killed by the police. Intubation Incarceration AcuĂŠrdate que camarĂłn que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente. Candela Candela Pelo malo The zip codes the zip codes the zip codes.
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Linda Hillman Chayes
When the world and breath are braking, is there any sleep to be had? With time in play, did we speak the day before or the day after? When will I love air? Isn’t it enough that childhood ghosts steal my voice? When company arrives uninvited, what words can be spoken? When a word escapes me, why do all its sidekicks knock around my brain, bickering? Will longing, boxed, combust? Can you reach into Zoom and grab your child from an adjacent square?
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Aaron Smith
Unneeded After the storm, the wet trees, hazy sky and I remember when I was young in West Virginia, leaving into a life I believed I would be happy in. And the humid air. And bird noise. Then nobody I loved had died yet. My mother hadn’t sobbed into a phone. I hadn’t been alone yet, unneeded the same way I needed. A man hadn’t given me flowers in a brown paper bag.
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Theresa Burns
Habituel It was opera out there— it had been raining all day— the trees were slaying the clouds and stealing their mists. I rushed to get you to walk with me through the beast of it, but you refused my overtures, learned further into our usual. I cursed you, set out on my own, returned twenty minutes later, fiery eyed and still hungry. You missed the double rainbow, I howled, on my way to set the table. Not till dinner was finished, the plates and glasses racked, did you show me the picture you caught on your phone. Twin arcs high above the houses one red-edged, inflamed, the other already fading.
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Joan Cappello
the sum of his worth every night we skype and he tells me things like how i weigh too much to be an actress and that smell has no words and the long story of how donna rocco’s nose came to be tipped ever so slightly to the right “it has to do with storage space� he yells over the sound of loneliness bouncing off our walls launching him into a dissertation on the seven levels of silence until my sky goes black with waiting and he smiles then takes a sip from the trick glass i once bought him as a souvenir
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Rick Hilles
Lockdown Haiku Binge-watched Tiger King. Like being nibbled to death Slowly by goldfish!
Now the lawn is mowed. (Did it with a push mower!) It made a toy sound.
Ate a banana. Ate another banana. Feel about the same.
Checking out the yard After last night’s frost. The peach Tree’s fruit: soft, so cold!
“Social Distancing”: Been practicing it? Yes. Thanks! (Since I left the womb!!)
After last night’s frost The banana trees’ green leaves: Fists of brown leather.
Nursing a dry cough From a noose to an ascot. (Thank God it’s asthma!)
The lavender bush Returned with such a vengeance! Bees study its ways.
Third time this morning: Caught a wasp in a tall glass Then took it outside.
They have left their fears Inside with me, as they get Back to their real work.
As if it needed Me to say: Don’t drag your legs! Pollinate!! (It’s Spring!)
Speaking of real work, I need to come clean, the way Flowers are Earth’s dreams.
Back to Tiger King: If I don’t cut my hair soon, Call me MULLET King.
Last day at the lake Before all State Parks closed, saw The great blue heron
Spring, how you taunt me! Even my yard’s green lushness Dares me to mow it.
Landing on a log, A fallen tree covered in Turtles. (So many!)
For the longest time I waited to cut the grass. (The grape hyacinths!)
I stood in shadows, Watching the ordinary Miracle progress.
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Then heard a bright voice From behind: charming, witty. (Could it be?!?!) Hassaan!
I could do, I thought. To stand with them like turtles Before the heron
With Becca and Yi! Those darling people, giggling So contagiously!
Not disturbing their Loveliness, or anything Else at Radnor Lake.
How much I wanted To embrace them all then when The terrible thought
The thought pains me still. Then, looking at my yard now, All the waking things:
Filled me completely: What if I had the virus And gave it to them?
The peach tree, waking Up with the banana trees, And the fig’s first leaves….
(Asymptomatic Typhoid Marys I’ve heard still Spread the contagion!)
For now, let’s embrace In the scents of lavender And crushed rosemary!
Of course the thought cuts Both ways: and I am older. Even more at risk!
Dreams For Our Future: The lights turn on in all rooms Of a great white house.
Like the turtles there I froze. Fell silent. Vanished. The most loving thing
Crumbling to the seas All mountains that were dung-hills. Safe now to embrace.
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Michele Karas
Elegy for a Fallen Grosbeak In the road a smear of black and white and poppy-red. Has the sky dropped a handkerchief? How easy it is, I think, to slip a thing so exquisite from a fixed place and care so little as not to retrieve it. It troubles me enough to circle back. When I approach the torn corner of silk, it does not startle to reanimate. Nor, when I kneel to scoop it up, does the bundle of bone and feather—no heavier than a garlic bulb— cease its cooling in my palm. The tiny mechanisms that are his talons ringlet around an invisible high wire, inducing vertigo, and suddenly I too am tumbling flightless in a hailstorm. If the earth is a magnet, so is everything in it— all of us resisting, and failing to resist, the pull of each other or something else. Tell me, what leaves with the Living when the Living change form?
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Patricia J. Barnett
Passing Time Sky’s mask rises, falls. Is it dawn or is it dusk? Does it matter? Yes.
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Roger Mitchell
The Silence All around us forgotten knowledge stirs. My father almost never mentioned his, whom I discovered died of typhus in the great epidemic of 1918, a man who was mentioned only as he who died of cirrhosis of the liver, who wanted to be like his father, a doctor, who wouldn’t allow it. Too hard a life in the days of horses and buggies. Calls for help at any hour. Dead at forty and later buried where his father was the following year. Who may have given his son the disease that killed him, working to save a few of the tens of thousands bringing death back from France. Then died of it himself. Or of grief at having killed his son’s wish, and then his son, the man whose jacket hangs in my closet, a white flannel sport coat, “1901” blazoned across it in red, who it was said became an engineer, and someone his son rarely mentioned. In the last census he answered he called himself a salesman. Of what he didn’t say, perhaps wasn’t asked. Last fall, on a visit from my cousin,
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she told me years ago her mother, his daughter, told her she heard, at eight, quarantined with him, his last choked breaths, heard the rattle, when the mouth can’t swallow its own saliva. That would have been enough for me never to mention, never to want to, had I been there. As, for some reason, I want to imagine my father was. How full silence must be, that so little is remembered.
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Marion Brown
Tarot In the hollow of the crescent moon, a vagrant cloud— my grandmother’s hand stirs the pot, the ring finger missing its tip. I do not credit signs, but even a blunt finger points. Oma, the sorceress, bargaining for roots, borrowing from an empty purse, reading the wheel of fortune, comes back at night to stir the silver cup where I never drink or turn over the cards. What good is money? Fretting about a ruptured supply chain, I smile at gaps on a pantry shelf among stolid cans of tomatoes and tuna—my sliver of self-denial. I channel Oma, who scraped through two world wars in Berlin. Turning off lights to save, she sometimes told my brother and me, “Amerikaner sind glücklich.” Americans are hungry, not lucky. Unemployment soars to its worst level since the Depression. I scan the NY Times. On the front page, the President brags about cutting SNAP—food for hungry kids.
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Jennifer Franklin
Memento Mori: Pompeii In my favorite fresco, a skull hovers over a speckled blue butterfly and wooden wheel— soul versus fortune. Ancient citizens near Vesuvius gazed at the same sunken eye sockets— unprepared for disaster as they drank wine and dined with cutlery top-heavy with silver skulls. Two years ago, I was one of thousands to walk these ruins. Now the poppies of Pompeii are untrampled during our plague. We wait while politicians and scientists decide when we can return outside without endangering ourselves and others. On Hart Island, workers in hazmat suits dig mass graves. According to archeologists, humankind’s most lasting contribution to earth will be the endless stash of chicken bones we buried in the soft soil.
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RenĂŠe Christine Ehle
but i like to be alone but alone i am being numb being like a lone wart on my own finger neither pain(ful) nor (un)known but quiet is a peace but just a piece of me pierced to be a kind of hole bored and narrow bare(ly) holy but streets are clean but a blossom dropped a pink cherry blossom on blank concrete spring springing (un)seen and (un)seized dropped and passing but nature is noticed now but the pale raccoon waddles in the light before the evening and in the morning out of its normal nightness but on this ordinal day the void returns and undoes creation
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Cassie Pruyn
To the Tree in the Field Giant broccoli floret, yellow trapped in green, fabric filled with holes, living lace, ruffly riot, wind whipping up chunks of you in disparate directions, New England tree—you’re here when I’m not. When I was elsewhere, you grew buds on your bare branches. Your leaves shivered out like mold, wrinkly and compressed. You stretched them skyward and you sent them inward, leaves fluttering into shady nooks, and now you fill up the edge of this field and yellow infuses itself in your felt in order to get to be here, as you, in your corner. When will I get to live in your corner, when will the wind take me up and jostle me quiet?
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Mindy Gill
The Overnight Train On the overnight train you do not sleep. Steel trolleys gimbal down the hallway, and the English couple bunked below sink cold cans of beer, hiding their jealousies badly. That month, so many rooms by the sea. Green coconuts, and sweetness. Silence on the balconies. Now a small window, two dim reading lights. Tomorrow, a mountain house above the paddies, where we will sit and watch the stars ice over, our hands touching occasionally, having not yet come to the end. The town lights flaring out. Young muscular dogs prowling the streets.
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Bonnie Jill Emanuel
O The shimmer of the wind gliding across the land with dandelion seeds, flax-yellow florets under dead or blinking traffic lights running, running down 9th Ave. Shepherd’s Purse, amaranth, clack of rats on the fire escape. Zoom me— the sun on your tongue. I’ll whisper a blue glitter field to my screen, it will zoom right back to you. O Desolate City. O Bloom.
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Michelle Yasmine Valladares
blessings blessed is the father who sat my brother and I down, warned us of how we might be treated after immigration. to anticipate the names called behind our backs or to our faces, the jokes and slander at our expense. he spoke from experience of growing up Catholic in Bombay. he recalled driving with my mother across the southern states in 1968, remembered motels with vacancies and diners with tables that refused them. he jabbed his cigarette into the air like a weapon—“whatever they say, they are wrong. remember they are ignorant and idiots.” blessed is the mother who fought for another table in her loud, Indian, accented voice, each time we entered a restaurant. at thirteen, I cringed and wished for invisibility. wasn’t this the local tradition in Scottsdale when you were new in town—to seat a family of four by the toilets. racism, discrimination, injustice were words I learned at home, not at school, not in mixed company, never in public. blessed are the parents who drove us out of Marblehead the night the cousin who shouted at me to get my “black arse out of his father’s car,” decided to beat up my uncle. we stopped first in church so my mother could stop crying and then in a bookstore so she could buy the Best Public Schools on the East Coast. blessed is the teacher in Cold Spring Harbor, who intervenes when the white boy asks if our school is segregated, as if my brother and I are invisible. blessed is my best friend’s mother who takes me to my first march at ten for disabled children in Kuwait and my second march at nineteen for racial justice on Martin Luther King’s Day in Washington DC. blessed are African Americans whose time for real justice arrives, arrives, and arrives. blessed are the activists, the essential workers sacrificing themselves on the front lines for BLACK LIVES MATTER.
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blessed are the Buddhist teachers who emphasize lovingkindness as the one-word solution to our anger and hate. our minds of delusions are the real enemy. living beings are our mothers. these are koans to meditate on day and night. blessed are the friends and family who connect in a strange summer of quarantine. all of us know someone dead of Covid-19. all of us hunkered down, isolated in our epicenters. we share stories to reinvent ourselves, transform like acorns and wildflower seeds into trees and fields of golden poppies. blessed is the inexpensive and colorful one hundred percent cotton bandanna that workers have used throughout the ages. blessed are the brown, Latinx, Black, white, Muslim, mixed race and bodies of every gender on Rockaway Beach, when the thresher shark is rescued off the jetty’s rocks. one man lifts its tail and the other its bleeding belly. and we all clap as the shark swims out to sea ‌ though it will die hours later on the sand. still hope for the first time in weeks is resurrected because strangers collectively cheer for the life of the living being that scares us.
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Pamela Hart
Carapace Pantoum Water worn by sand I collect creatures shelter diatom, fungi, sponge wander while molting, my coat slipping off shore. More scorpion than shell, I house waves hold diatom and sponge ocean washing my arthropodic structure that wanders while molting, slipping off shore, body become building. I, washing ocean over such structure, telson night, ruddering even bodies which build offshore their foam alive to flatworm fossil. When my telson rudders the night I coagulate while in-sheltering foaming, alive to flatworm tern skim displaced by wind my shelter a coagulation of water-worn creatures together tern skim displaced by wind I molt then slip off shore.
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Paolo Javier
Moonbird Moonbird
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the end of the world is an island land of fire “Hey Moonbird, moonbird” at the end of the world What do you ask of me? Soothsaying?
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sing in veneration of lost city eyes, bleak in the process of knowing tonsils thundering One form of that life a sinister way Beyond your ability to change & to steward Managed retreat you’ll need a moonshot
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Ever been this far from home? night before sleep in Ushuiaia yanking spat from restinga shelves sustenance for enduring strangle a shrinking migrant
4
A spring tide, rollicking-and-rolling Bronzed & swooning snap into whip formation cleave air Under moon, ripped & gorging aminos do yr best to concentrate on feeding Green eating profiteering, fat birds fly faster than thin
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5
measurement is what you concocted unable to fathom Enormity catastrophe finality Here is a past lodestar empire Managed retreat will need a moonshot
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secret knowledge of the sea who deems your inoculation Safe As we become them mass death seeking water Wall of anguish you’ll add to the equator Moonbird feels newly molted No gaps for wind to pass through
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Will you return to this beach? holdfast over eons each sea grows bitter with continent song guarding torrents of embankments drowned all sons daughters of catastrophe
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Sheila Rabinowitch
Night Swim Once I swam naked in the Mediterranean. In this aged body I am too shy. Sometimes at night I sneak out from my Catskill retreat, slide into the cool lake. Neighbors can’t see me in the dark. As weeds tug my feet I kick past their tangling strands pulling me under. No one sees my crow’s feet or sagging skin. I turn on my back, follow the moon—
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Sherry Stuart-Berman
My son throws me a line but it’s his green, can I steal it? He’s 12, says he doesn’t understand my poems, says, they’re like this: grass, magnified by the eyes of the earth. “My tree,” “my sea,” “my sky,” his first words back then and wow, this planet, some promise we make, huh? Like broken microscopes we fail to magnify god. When my son and I fight my face bolts— tongue storming fast behind— and iris open, he’ll stop, adjust focus, condense light into lens. Just like that. I go off my meds. In front of my eyes black spots float. It’s 3 a.m. and here’s where I’m small. That bald patch in our yard never seems to grow, airless dirt packed tight.
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Martha Rhodes
Out of Sorts Rondeau What’s in the air, what’s stalking me that wasn’t there, until at 3, just as the wind picked up that barn and settled it onto another’s farm— or did I dream this malevolency— Admittedly, I’m out of sorts, and all this week I’ve wanted to lash out at those who speak as if there’s nothing—Don’t be alarmed. It’s a gentle day, you won’t be harmed— it’s in your mind, you’ve never been happy— Those who know nothing say that to me? There’s an evil out there. The air’s no balm. Stop trying to soothe me. I won’t be calmed. A gentle day? I won’t be harmed?
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Katherine Harris
On the Pain of Growing a Wing The secret between us is an elegy. Holding my palms to the grey-green window the still-leafless branches span my life line, my line of fate, the arboreal airways of my lungs. A dead-wind screams beyond the glass, tossing the trees. Maybe the howl will breathe the land clean and revive us, like the poppy-snow of Oz. Spring starlings have not yet arrived on their waves of murmuration. Black opal oracles with the stars prophesied on their wings. Answers and nestled hearts for the end of the plague, on the pain of growing a wing. The night-pond is solitary, a nightingale singing to the northern lights, creating a sound circle. In a dream, my mother’s face, eyes open, silent, mute.
— Title after artwork by June Leaf
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Matthew Thorburn
Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Eileen A dab of gray in the green of that wild shrub, a catbird repeats his cat-like mewl, bickering with a big grackle perched above. The grackle croaks back then turns his purple-black head away. I keep still, kneeling in the lilies I meant to thin out. Quiet, quiet— don’t want to startle them off, can’t see the catbird now but he’s not finished with his say. Soon the grackle starts in again too and I hear my great-aunts, their low sandpapery voices echoing in the blue kitchen, their housecoats, in heaven. That continual back and forth, their on and on that must still trundle on in some eternal morning: “Surely you will recall ….” “Well, yes, but ….” “I suppose, although ….” One starts, one stops. One coughs, considers, starts again. I’m a child looking up from cool linoleum, until the catbird zips off, the grackle flaps away.
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Mary Ellen Pelzer
Pantoum Etiquette Do not stand too sternly on his rights. He has taken care to inform himself of all the rules. He relies on his power of observation— to be a Good Club Member. He knows all the rules to which he must conform, learned how to argue good humoredly, to be a Good Club Member. He must take pains. How to argue good humoredly with every organized body? He takes the pain—waiting to be spoken to first by the regular members. Organized within his body, he observes his power when insisting on speaking first to the regular members, saying: Do not stand too sternly on my rights.
Borrowed text from Holt, Emily, Encyclopaedia of Etiquette: What to Do, What to Say, What to Write, What to Wear, A Book of Manners for Everyday Use (1912).
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Curtis Bauer
Dispatch I Want to Look Like Dancing A new gift—night rain. The morning’s suppressed. I keep news in my pocket. Laughter there too. I have just killed 99.9% of the germs on my hands and my fingers could be lavender sprigs. Here, smell them. Let’s wait together and see if we can attract bees— my scent and your beauty. We can pollinate. Our singing and [Distraction: sometimes I jump up and down. sometimes I lilt from foot to foot. sometimes that looks like dancing] dancing will look like plants in the breeze.
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Daniel Lawless
Aglet —from Definitions A blood-letting tool, a vestigial claw. A liturgical vestment, a kind of stitch or stenographical notation, a vase, a fresh-born eel. It’s fun now to imagine it could be any of these, but In 1967 the right answer was “the little sheath at the end of a shoelace”— Da’s nightly vocabulary quiz, home from the Galway cab-yard, The summer before Séan and I would try for posh Saint Tim’s. More than fifty years but I can still see it: his pressed shirt and flocked cap, that pipe He claimed the Mayor himself had given him. The two of us watching A drop of spittle trickle the length of its lacquered stem As he continued “… from the Old French, Aiguille, ‘“needle’”. To point or pierce. Colloquially a small sorrow.”
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Sarah Van Arsdale
February, 2017, Seen from April, 2020 It was Chris’ birthday we were crowded around the table in the new apartment— the one we didn’t like, and didn’t keep for long— the dining room so small we could barely fit six but that night we were happy even though it was 2017, hardly the happiest year in the history of our country. It was Chris’ birthday and everyone had arrived a little late because the A train was running slow, and it was snowing. I’d roasted a chicken and some of us were drinking wine. We’d talked about birthdays and how quickly it all slips past just like our parents warned us. I was wearing a plaid shirt and my triple strand of pearls that I’d bought at a vintage shop on Broadway and that fooled no one. I’d made a coconut cake forgetting coconut wasn’t Chris’ favorite, but no one minded because it was cake and it was Chris’ birthday. In the photo, we’re forever leaning toward one another, arms wrapping shoulders,
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the candles guttering down, the table strewn with dishes the transparent wine glasses glimmering in what’s left of the low apricot light. This was all so ordinary— exquisitely ordinary—
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Joanna D. Brown
Outcropping I sit at our tiny, wrought-iron table on our porch Over the railing, the rectangle of yard, lilacs nodding Really, it is an inversion of a mask, this rectangle view (Lips of grass, eyes of sky) Open wide my nose, my mouth Feed me air more precious than any cannula On my street, people wear lilac masks on their faces but cannot mimic the spring The bougainvillea biker & his dogwood daughter ease past timid cars and the young chrysanthemum straggles, tilts on her wheels, rights herself blooms forth to catch up The lilacs mutter like gloves in a rectangular box empty fingers waving Unlike the porch’s glossy, framed invitation the gloves, the EKG machine and I must be covered the curtains down
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Ron Slate
Viralesque In this world already so enshadowed and ailing, the haggard, hunted face is encountered everywhere. The problem is not the spiny microdemons murmuring we are coming for you. It is more about your insistence that you deserve to be spared. But if you survive, it will be through the usual media: shrewdness, detachment, and luck. * Our laments resonate effectively among the neighbors. The first time. But a shout is a clamor when repeated through the days. If I scream I’ll save you, you need to hear it only once. Today someone across the street bellowed from a porch, Is this Thursday? And the day before, Is this Thursday? I wouldn’t call back. But I didn’t want to be alone. And also, for some minutes, I didn’t know the answer. * The odds are not favorable, but there is a chance, as the grave threat recedes, that you will stop condemning your lived life for its fecklessness and disparaging your dreams for their facile freedoms. Restarting the world on renovated terms, you will peel the last apple in the bin, core it, and count the seeds. * Asymptomatic: striding while sick, sick while oppressing the healthy. They’ve been here since the first time I saw the flag in my classroom. But I did not hear their voices clearly until my own body appeared in their sights. * News item, page 6: Eleven Die as Locusts Swarm in Sudan. In the village of Wad Medani, 110 miles southeast of Khartoum, the elders argue into the night. Some say the locusts gave off an overpowering smell, causing asthma. Some say the weak and aged ones, now the dead, simply imagined they couldn’t breathe. Some say the deafening clack of wings, the thickness of sound, choked off life. * 66
One says, “I have a real person hiding under the personality you know. It’s my secret self and it’s the best part of me.” The other one says, “I’m the space between what I am and what I am not, the space between what I dream and what life makes of me.” The two of them, socially distanced by six feet. And then some. * No one is available to guide you to the exit, and if you should manage to grope your way there, no one will be waiting on the other side to greet you with an antidote. * In March, while the news arrived from across the sea, there was a silent rupture in our city. The clock in its tower skipped a beat, the tower sunk imperceptibly. You had an opportunity, but you savagely refused to renounce the unlocatable source of your values. Every street corner was begging for love, all of our uncountable differences were asking for asylum. You said We need cleansers and chocolate. * Every day at a quarter to four, the hospital orderly walks by on his way to the hospital and the all-night Covid rounds. Green scrubs, supper in a backpack. We stand at the window, waiting. Here he comes, today he’s wearing his Celtics jacket as well. The night is a long guess about the route he takes home. The next day—a vigil. * It was only a matter of welcoming the pandemic, exploiting it as a pier to push off from to a mythical journey among whirlpools, enticing islands, and beasts. A journey, like all others, ignorant of what is at stake, abandoned to chance. We could have sailed together. We could have shared our provisions to the very last sardine and crawled up on the sand. A crew of survivors for the ages, singing a sea shanty that we made up, each of us the author of a verse.
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Kay L. Cook
The Loss of Back to Normal Something is happening, as promises dislodge from our mourning constitution where lines have been crossed and signed and torn at the perforation where normal was color-coded without consent. Back to normal is in constant change, tired from breathing
under pressure.
Where will I put my knick-knack normal which I now fit neatly in photos and boxes and plastic bins, as I wake up in this never back to normal? Will I ever again clink glasses filled with ice floes melting, time-lapsing, sans metronome, Earth rotating with axis ajar throbbing off key? Will different always mean violence? Will never again ever be enough?
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Patricia Spears Jones
The face of a Black woman, no matter the popular myth, is at a loss. Back in the Minstrel Show era, Mammy was easy. Sang lullabies, rolled my eyes, rolled my hips, made Some money. At least I was cleaning no white folks Houses. Then some diner had a cook who made flap jacks, dressed her up as mammy and the white folks Loved it. Loved it. Next thing, mammy mass produced Round face, big teeth, apron and bandana––and jokes about me and Uncle Ben—you know we Did not know each other. But there was I the only Black woman on the supermarket shelves, smiling for a few dollars. Then the people who hated Amos and Andy and other benign stereotypes Decided to hate me. Aunt Jemima. What did I Do but smile, wear that bandana and sell maternal Love for any who bought it. Why mammy figures are in homes across America—white homes, mostly And those Avant Garde Black people Who collect Black Memorabilia—the stuff tossed In the trash by so many, but these Avant Garde People wanted to see how many ways dark skinned people Could be made for commercial use. They. Learned. Outrage. All those watermelons, wood piles, and aprons. The Gold Dust Twins, so named because there was no gold or dust. The Black Black Memorabilia people helped make Aunt Jemima a research project & mammy history. Thus, Betye Saar put a rifle in Mammy’s hands. Mammy as revolutionary, dug that so much, but was just too much for the business angle. Mammy got a makeover. Image change at Company decreed. Gone bandana, apron and at least 50 pounds, Even the box shrank back to when Black imagery could be made for a nickel and sold for a dime many times, many times.
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Hidden in attics & storage units & garages across the South, Mammy dolls sit near Southern Belles & Confederate Colonels And other ancient symbols of the world of Lost Causes. The Minstrel Shows; the Corporate Icon; the Demised Image. Oh that desire for the power of mammy––that large breasted, Ever-smiling Colored Lady come to console All within the White House, the Whites’ houses. Mammy in the movies. Mammy on tv. Mammy flickers Mammy perches on that precipice of desire and ridicule— Her smile ready to wipe away any negativity Any thought of brand dissonance—the ultimate Myth of Reconciliation, why hate her. Now even Oscar Winning Mammy can’t claim cable. Nodding comprehension for this ungainly insult by the blonde teen, who says “Aunt Jemima was cancelled” How could this be—Aunt Jemima was freed from slavery And worked her way into becoming the face of a pancake mix. Just what every Black woman wants to be, The face of a pancake mix.
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Neil Shepard
May 4, 2020: Coronavirus Report We inch closer to lockdown’s end, inch toward a line where the new normal resides, wherever that is, as it moves through days of light and shadow, infections rise or abate, rise or abate, and the line’s re-drawn. Lilacs don’t know this, their purple clusters shamelessly luxurious, more adventurous for having no gardener tend them as they overhang the gate and disperse their petals into the street, where joggers stop, take off their masks, and sniff memories so fresh, so remote, they might as well come from another life.
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Kaye McDonough
Journal Excerpts Wed., June 10 At the televised memorial for George Floyd, a pastor calls out to a member of his choir: “Lorraine, take us to the Valley.” Lorraine brings it.
Mon., June 12 CASES 2,275,645
DEATHS 119,923
Some Summer Reading for the Pandemic: Poe. “The Masque of the Red Death” Hawthorne. “Lady Eleanore’s Mantle” (1721-22 Boston smallpox epidemic) Ben Jonson. “On his Son” (1603) DeFoe. Journal of the Plague Year DeFoe. Robinson Crusoe (on social isolation) Edith Wharton. “Roman Fever” Henry James. Daisy Miller Albert Camus. The Plague For the ambitious: Boccaccio. The Decameron
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Mon., July 6 at 4 p.m. CASES 2,914,786
DEATHS 131,011
Worse than the corona virus, a neighbor assures me as we run into each other in the condo garage, are “the looting, the violence and Marxism.” I stay silent behind my mask. She wears none even though she is a nurse.
Mon., July 6 at 5 p.m. CASES 2,915,554 At Rockefeller Center Prometheus and Atlas wear masks. Remembering that Death is a lagging indicator, I’m busy making place cards for the Communion of Souls.
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Elaine Sexton
[ride] The most beautiful thing about a convertible is hair, and the most beautiful thing about hair is its disposition, dead, but alive in the skin in the air, the skin holding on to each strand for dear life, alive in the wind. The most beautiful thing about the wind passing over the skin is sensation, cellular, invisible, metabolic. What is metabolic is life-sustaining, and the most life-sustaining thing I can think of today is decency. And decency is blind, unseen, until it isn’t.
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Ruth Danon
One More Thing to Worry About that earth’s magnetic field is weakening. This will make space travel far more difficult. No doubt I say. No fucking doubt.
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CONTRIBUTORS MARLENA MADURO BARAF ’s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Ekphrastic Review and On the Seawall. She is author of the memoir At the Narrow Waist of the World and lives in White Plains, NY. marlenamadurobaraf.com CARMEN BARDEGUEZ-BROWN is the author of Dreaming Rhythms: Despertando Silencios (Pandora Lobo Estepario Productions, 2015). During the pandemic, she’s living in Chiangmai, Thailand. PATRICIA J. BARNETT ’s poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly and others, and set to music (Awilda Villarini, 1991). CURTIS BAUER ’s third collection of poems is American Selfie (Barrow Street Press, 2019). He lives in Lubbock, TX. | curtisbauer.net; IG:@ curtis.bauer M.C. BOLSTER ’s poem “Haibun: Pittsburgh” appears in 2 Horatio No. 2. She lives in New York City. | FB: marycatherine.bolster JAMES BRASFIELD ’s third collection of poems, Cove (LSU Press), is expected to appear in 2022. He lives in Belfast, ME. MICHAEL BRODER is the author of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for gay poetry. He lives in Bed-stuy, Brooklyn, NY. | TW: @MichaelBroder; IG: @michaelbroder JOANNA D. BROWN ’s poems have appeared most recently in the online magazines Gertrude and eclectica. She lives in Providence, RI. MARION BROWN is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, most recently The Morning After Summer (Finishing Line Press, 2015). She lives in Yonkers, NY. TW: @marionsbrown1 TERRY CASTLE (cover artist) is a writer, critic, scholar at Stanford University. Her most recent book is The Professor (Harper Collins, 2010), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. | terrycastle.com; IG: @chateauthierry. THERESA BURNS is the author of a chapbook of poems, Two Train Town (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She lives in South Orange, NJ. | theresaburns.org LINDA HILLMAN CHAYES ’ chapbook of poems is The Lapse (Finishing Line Press, 2014). She lives in Scarsdale, New York. | Lindaehillman@gmail.com JOAN CAPPELLO ’s chapbook of poems is why i travel alone (Finishing Line Press, 2019). She lives in Long Island City, NY. | FB: joan.cappello.50 KAY L. COOK ’s poems have recently appeared in Wild Roof Journal and The Write Launch. She lives in New York City. PETER COVINO ’s most recent collection is The Right Place to Jump (New Issues Press, 2012). He lives in Providence, RI. | petercovino.com RUTH DANON ’s most recent book is WORD HAS IT (Nirala Publications, 2018). She lives in the Hudson Valley. | ruthdanon.com RENÉE CHRISTINE EHLE ’s poems have recently appeared in Gyroscope Review, Carve Magazine, and Common Ground Review. She lives in the Bronx, NY. BONNIE JILL EMANUEL ’s poems have recently appeared in American Poetry Review and Mid-American Review. She lives in New York. | bonniejillemanuel.com
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JENNIFER FRANKLIN’ s most recent collection is No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018). She is the Program Director of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and lives in New York City. | jenniferfranklinpoet.com; TW/IG: @JFranklinPoetry MINDY GILL ’s poems have recently appeared in Australian Poetry Journal and the Institute of Modern Art (AU). She lives in Brisbane, AU. | mindygill.com JULIO CÉSAR PAZ GONZÁLEZ is the author of Lo que aprendí al otro lado del mundo (2020). He currently lives in Hanoi, Vietnam. | jcpaz.tilda.ws JESSICA GREENBAUM ’s recent book of poems, Spilled and Gone, came out from University of Pittsburgh Press in 2019. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. poemsincommunity.org DAVID GROFF is the author of Clay (Trio House Press, 2013). He lives in New York City. | davidgroff.com MYRONN HARDY ’s most recent collection of poems is Radioactive Starlings (Princeton University Press, 2017). He lives in Maine. | myronnhardy.com KATHERINE HARRIS ’ prose “Lift to the Sun” appeared in North Salem Review: Prose and Poetry Volume 1, (2011). She lives in Holmes, NY. IG: @katherineharrisart PAMELA HART is the author of Mothers Over Nangarhar, winner of the 2017 Kathyrn A. Morton Prize (Sarabande Books, 2019). She lives in North Salem, NY. pamelahartpoet.com, TW: @PamelaHart5 SCOTT HIGHTOWER is the author of four books of poetry in the U.S. and two bilingual (English/Spanish) collections published in Madrid. His last in the U.S. was Self-evident. He lives in Manhattan, NY. | scotthightower.com RICK HILLES ’ most recent book of poetry is A Map of the Lost World (Pitt Poetry Series, 2012), and he is currently working on two more books, The Empathy Machine and The Invisible Thread. He lives in Nashville, TN. PAOLO JAVIER ’s fifth book, O.B.B., a full-length comics poem, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in spring 2021. He lives with his family in the unceded territory of the Rockaway, Canarsie, and Matinecock peoples, otherwise known as Queens County, New York City. “Moonbird Moonbird” appears in Sean Hanley’s documentary The Whelming Sea (2020). | nightboat.org/bio/paolo-javier PATRICIA SPEARS JONES ’ fourth collection of poems is A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems (White Pine Press Distinguished Poetry Series, 2015). She lives in New York City. | psjones.com MICHELE KARAS ’ poems have most recently appeared in The Northern Virginia Review, Mid-American Review, and Pretty Owl Poetry. She lives in Canaan, NY. michelekaras.com DANIEL LAWLESS ’ recent collection of poems is The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With (Salmon Poetry Press, 2018). He lives in St. Petersburg, FL. plumepoetry@gmail.com DENTON LOVING ’s first collection of poems is Crimes Against Birds (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2015). He lives near Cumberland Gap, TN. dentonlovingblog.wordpress.com MAJA LUKIC ’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Prelude, Salamander, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, Sugar House Review, Vinyl, and other journals. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. | majalukic.com; TW: @majalukic113
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MAYA MAHMUD ’s poems have appeared in Frontier Poetry and Brio Literary Journal, which also published her visual art. She lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, NY. | FB: maya.amina.mahmud; IG: @lawful_chaos SEBASTIAN MATTHEWS lives with his family in Asheville, NC. Beyond Repair: Living in a Fractured State comes out in August 2020 from Red Hen Press. sebastianmatthews.com MARILYN MAZUR l ives in New York City, but she has been in Vermont since the onset of the pandemic. Her work has appeared in Verse/Virtual (online), Five Poets & Their Poems (The New York Society Library), 2 Horatio, and Palo de Arco. KAYE McDONOUGH’ s most recent book is Pagan: Selected Poems, (New Native Press, 2014). She lives in Branford, CT. | citylights.com/info/?fa=event&event_ id=1990 JENNIFER STEWART MILLER ’s second collection is the chapbook The Strangers Burial Ground (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). She currently lives in Orleans, MA. jenniferstewartmiller.com ROGER MITCHELL ’s most recent book is Reason’s Dream (Dos Madres Press, 2018). He lives in Jay, NY. JANE WALLACE PEARSON ’s poem “Doggerel” will appear in an upcoming issue of Light Poetry Magazine. She lives in Ledyard, CT. MARY ELLEN PELZER ’s work has appeared in Intersections International, on itscomplicated.vet, and Seaport Magazine. She lives in New York City. TW: @maryellenpelzer; IG: @marypelzer JOANNE PROULX ’s debut novel, Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet, won Canada’s Sunburst Award, and her sophomore novel, We All Love the Beautiful Girls, was one of The Globe and Mail’s Best 100 Books for 2017. She lives in Ottawa, Canada. joanneproulx.com CASSIE PRUYN is the author of Lena (Texas Tech University Press, 2017), winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry. She lives in Portland, ME. cassiepruyn.com SHEILA RABINOWITCH ’s poems have appeared in previous issues of 2 Horatio. She lives in New York City. MARTHA RHODES is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The Thin Wall (Pitt Poetry Series, 2017). She lives in New York City. martharhodespoet.com FRANCES RICHEY ’s second collection of poems is The Warrior (Viking Penguin, 2008). She lives in New York City. | francesrichey.com AMELIA ROSS hasn’t been published since college. She’s excited to be included in 2 Horatio. She lives in Bronxville, NY. | LinkedIn: rossamelia JASON SCHNEIDERMAN ’s fourth collection of poetry is Hold Me Tight (Red Hen Press, 2020). He lives in Brooklyn, NY. | jasonschneiderman.net ELAINE SEXTON ’s third book of poems is Prospect/Refuge (Sheep Meadow Press, 2015). She lives in New York City and East Marion, NY. | elainesexton.org; IG: @elainesexton NEIL SHEPARD ’s most recent book is How It Is: Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2018) He lives in Johnson, VT. | neilxshepard.com
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SEAN SINGER ’s most recent book is Honey & Smoke (Eyewear, 2015). His collection Today in the Taxi is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. He lives in Ossining, NY. seansingerpoetry.com RON SLATE is the editor of On The Seawall: A Community Gallery of New Writing & Commentary (www.ronslate.com). His most recent poetry collection is The Great Wave (Houghton Mifflin). He lives in Aquinnah, MA. AARON SMITH is the author of four books, most recently The Book of Daniel (Pitt Poetry Series, 2019). He lives in Massachusetts, but during the pandemic has been living in West Virginia. | LitAppetite.com SHERRY STUART-BERMAN is a psychotherapist. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Guesthouse, The Night Heron Barks, Rise Up Review, and 2 Horatio. She lives in Staten Island, NY with her husband and son. MATTHEW THORBURN ’s latest book of poems is The Grace of Distance (LSU Press, 2019). He lives in Kingston, NJ. | IG: @thorburnpoet MICHELLE YASMINE VALLADARES is the author of Nortada, The North Wind (Global City Press). She lives in Brooklyn, NY. | michelleyasminevalladares.com SARAH VAN ARSDALE ’s most recent book is a single narrative poem, The Catamount (Nomadic Press, 2017). She lives in New York City and Medusa, NY. sarahvanarsdale.com
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