What does it mean to get back to normal? My hope was that the pandemic would help communities make progress to something better. Not so, or at least not yet.
Two sonnets in Salamander examine our environment. “Particle, Little Part” holds what we breathe. “Morphology” shows the power of the spirit in breaking unhealthy patterns.
Keep the faith.
Arkansas passed a law that prohibits schools from having mask mandates. Case numbers here for children younger than 12 have increased almost 700% since April; of those hospitalized with COVID in July, 58% were younger than 12 (Arkansas Department of Health).
In less than 2 weeks, our children will be back to school on the physical campus.
The control we attempt to exert over the world despite lessons we should have learned, the resulting problems: “Of the Air” and “Conclave” reflect this in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of Sugar House Review.
How strange time has seemed during the pandemic. I could have sworn that I wrote “Enthalpy” during the storms we had this winter, but it was published months before then. It appears in Cold Mountain Review as part of a special issue on the Undiscovered. It speaks past time, to our situation, and the heat within.
Two poems that appear in the latest volume of Denver Quarterly continue what has become this week’s theme: work that originates with my youngest daughter. While “I have taken my daughter to the garden” uses free verse with slant rhymes, and “In the closets in the daytime, there are horses” uses two octaves with a quatrain, both poems turn around apples.
“Bedstone” appears in the latest issue of Cream City Review. This poem, maybe the closest that I’ve ever come to rhyming quatrains, began with how my youngest daughter once described being “good” in kindergarten: how she had to hold her words in the bowl at the bottom of her mouth.
Angie Macri 