Thinking About Joy During a Pandemic
by Mary Zelinka
My grocery store offers pick up service so you don’t have to risk your life by shopping in person. I place my order through their website and arrive in the parking lot at the designated time. A masked man brings out my groceries and puts them in the trunk of my car. When I get home, I discover that he has given me Tide instead of All. The mop I needed for one of the shelters is missing – the order sheet says “backorder.” And the three carrots I ordered are giant. They are so big that at first I don’t even know what they are. They are as long as my forearm and almost as big around as my wrist at their base. They are like cartoon carrots.
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A Non-Comprehensive List of Our Blessings Accounted for During the Pandemic
by Bridgette Hylton
I am grateful for the continued health of myself, my children and our immediate family who, for no other reason than living where we do and having the privileges that we have, have mostly endured this pandemic personally unfazed.
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The Class
by Rod Martinez
She glared back at the screen. Her entire classroom of nine middle school student faces were evenly shared on
her huge monitor screen.
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Inferno in the American Forest
by Paul Dresman
Here is a hole where an eye could be seen,
there a siren—warning, blaring.
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Of Zoomed Realities and Facetimed Dreams
by Jerin Jacob
I stared agape -
black numbers locked in vintage boxes, static, frozen,
exuding fumes of euphemism vehemently reflective of an eerie globe
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All the Times I Tried to
by Julia Halprin Jackson
for Scout
The rosebush looked thin and malnourished alongside all those beautiful blooms in the city garden and yet underneath it all, something blossomed. I liked to think it was you.
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The Ring Bearer
by Jay Chesters
Then came exchanging rings. The ring bearer, whose luscious coat had been so lovingly brushed for the occasion, stepped forward almost on command.
What came next will be analysed for decades.
(thumbnail also by Jay Chesters)
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What if we do not go to the Forests
by Sivakami Velliangiri
Unusual cries of birds, unseen flashes of wings.
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Andromeda
by Vasilios Moschouris
In class today, we learned that many of the stars in our sky might be long dead; their light takes so long to reach our eyes through the void that by the time we see them, they are already gone. I wonder if one day I will look and find one missing—consumed or collapsed, it wouldn’t matter; it would be gone, and there would be nothing left to see.
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Eggplant Parmigiana in the Time of Pandemic
by Kathryn DeZur
We disguise our longing in layers
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Two Poems
by Wilda Morris
And how could I
communicate with my smile covered
in cotton?
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The Scream of a Floating Heart
by Murzban Shroff
It will take me to my fields
and to the open skies
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Is it Beer O'clock Yet?
by Kate Tyte
I’m tired of baking banana bread
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Two Poems
by Patrick Hansel
Take out the last “e”
and the verb vanishes
into the air
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Two Poems
by Mark Saba
If I become immersed
in my own thoughts they beckon me
with a gentle creaking, having passed it
from one to another along deep roots.
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A Letter to All of the White Girls I've Ever Known
by Renee Chen
I remember feeling a sense of smug satisfaction and frustration when my friends called me a Twinkie or a banana — yellow on the outside, white on the inside; satisfaction because being white or close to it seemed supreme, frustration because I would never look white. When a pretty white girl told me I was the prettiest Asian girl she’d ever hung out with, I beamed with pride, but there was something else too, some other feeling — a hesitation — I couldn’t quite understand or articulate then.
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Making Myself Up
by Kat Bodrie
Like trying on lipstick
during a pandemic
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