Poetry
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Two Poems by Emma Hyche
Precarity
My friend saidthat adjunct teaching makes him wonderwhich character from Apocalypse Nowhe is that day-
Dennis Hopper maybe, orthat Playmate emerging from the helicopterand shimmying. The onewith the cowboy hat and the fakeguns under the swingblade. I’ma palm tree on the beach
most days, keepingthe sand anchoredto the shore.
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“Quarantine” by Rimas Uzgiris
By day we count like clocks the dust motesAnd wait for the hour of maximum sunWhen the forest folds us inLike the first morning, Eve yet to meet a snake.
The passage back is through the cemeteryHaunted by the occasional humanShuffling from grave to grave,Pottering with plants and sloughed pine.
We park ourselves before electric iridescenceTrying to feel our way towards a future:Seeing only fear and desire and no Eightfold Path, -
Light Year by Regina DiPerna
“Rat. Pearl. Onion. Honey. These colors came before the sun lifted above the ocean, bringing light alike to mortals and immortals.” – Homer, The Iliad
Under rat-colored sky,
a window swings openits sash, floods the other
side of the worldwith cold light,
the not yet of dawn;nets full of stars recede,
become bare slatsof blue between cedars,
fewer magpies than before,fewer feathers loose
in grey air. -
Two Limericks by Raquel Melody Guarino
Pot o’ Gold
America’s in a recessionWith closures in every professionThe nurses all cryAs more people dieWith 12-hundred bucks in possessionOh Jesus
The virus is getting quite badBut the president thinks it’s a fadAs the numbers still lurch“I’ll see you in church!”Says Don, a positive lad
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Raquel Melody Guarino is an aspiring expat who just left Italy due to the pandemic. -
“The Air” by Anthony Mirarcki
There are methods ofcoping, optimism in theface of uncertainty, hope.
Change can be agood thing, a chanceto reflect. But questionsinfect my outlook—
How fast can life change?What will happen next?Where do I go from here?
The answers to theseinterrogatives, liketheir cause, remain in the air.
Maybe time can healall wounds, or maybe timeis up.
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Four Poems by Andrea Jurjević Artwork by Kirstin Mitchell
She Floated Away
After Hüsker DüA mob of slam dancers hurls and shoves in the mosh pit of the park fountain—all this furor, thrust-riot, all this outage, the ridding
of the white corset. Under the cankered poplar a man rests his stiff leg across his lover’s knees, leans into her narrow shoulder and scratches a rough scratch in the V of her thighs—
the axis of her body, black as the tail of a swallow, forked as a dowsing rod.
Yet her gaze is fixed on the fountain,
