Art in the Time of COVID-19

Available now on Amazon.

A portion of all proceeds will be donated to Doctors Without Borders, in thanks to all the healthcare professionals around the world who labored so hard to help us.

We received some terrific entries in our informal contest. Submissions are now closed, and we are working as fast as we can to get the project finished.

Rather than wait, we’d like to share some of these with you now.

What You Notice *
Ronna Magy

What you notice is…a yellow dishtowel damp on the rack flowered cup in the sink

Chamomile tea thinly swirled along its bottom green-glass plate of half-eaten salmon blue sponge waiting for soap. These objects fill your days. The air in this house smells of Clorox hospital clean everything hygienic sheets cornered tight. 

Here limited by front door latch and back door key small rose garden behind light

begins with dawn falls away with dusk. You wonder if this house will survive 100 years. 

In some ways you are glad to be in this space roaming corners of rooms finding travelworn British Museum guides photos of the Forbidden City dated 1982 cracked chips of faded green wallpaper paint. Here there is upheaval every paper magazine lesson plan pile of books notebook stack re-examined outdated pages thrown in the trash. 

You wonder when you will go back outside enter life as it was the other day commenting

Our lives will never be the same. Until then you examine fearful sweats that appear in the middle of the night breathe in the texture of epidemic times ask the meaning of growing old.

*With thanks to www.persimmontree.org.

The View From London
Colin Pink

From the poet: Lately I've been working on a book of new poems, which I call triadic couplets, that all consist of just six lines organised in three 2 line stanzas. I've written these three in a design of a triptych, like a painting with a larger panel in the middle.

I Yowl

That yowling cat at five-fifty AM pulled the stopper
on sleep. It’s quavering wails a cross between pain

and desire, the rise and fall of distress and fear or
frustration made it impossible to climb back into

the bottle of oblivion. It unwittingly sang the mood
of the city. Suddenly it stopped. I made a cup of tea.

II Normal

This month I had lots of plans; now they’re all dust,
seem dated like a fifties girdle or a mullet haircut.

The phones keep cutting out, the supermarket shelves
are suddenly empty. Something ripped the page off

the calendar and the new picture is unlike any other.
What was normal, taken for granted, recedes from sight

to be replaced by something far less comfortable,
a thing which I fear might become the new normal.

III Revolving

The revolving door of time flips open
the pages of the seasons. One by one,

before our vision, the zoetrope of life
unfolds its flickering images, dancing

in a circle that seems eternal like the
devotion of the waves licking the shore.

Pharmacy Clerk: March 2020
Paige Gould

Shelves are empty, wiped clean of all the essentials leaving behind acne creams, Airborne vitamin powder, the pharmacist placing our last box of facemasks,
two bottles of hand-sanitizer, and a handful of blue
nitrile gloves in a locked cabinet with the
narcotic drugs, muttering: just in case
before tucking the key in his back pocket.  

Standing at the front counter, I am the first person to ask, yet with the least medical experience, my school
closing its doors for a month to curb the spread.
It feels like the beginning of a horror movie-
everybody knows something is wrong but
we go about our lives trying to pretend nothing
has changed, still patients coming in frantically demanding we fill their scripts not due for
another month, fear of a shortage and being
left without. Whispers around the store,

frantically asking what they are supposed to do,
others laughing and talking about their make-shift
precautions no more effective than tinfoil hats
on their heads. I am torn between not wanting
to incite more panic, and trying not to negate the risk.
A man approaches my counter, a normal-looking
man with a scruffy beard, his hand holding tightly
onto his small child’s. 

Do you have any more facemasks? But you don’t need them if you aren’t sick.
It’s not a big deal then right?

 The death toll at the time nearing five-thousand,
and the numbers projected to rise, a vaccine at least
a year away, hospitals in Italy overcrowded,
not enough respirators, and having to decide who needs it more: the forty-year-old
mother with two children or the seventy-year-old
grandfather with fluid in his lungs.  

The news channels airing the content non-stop,
providing information and inciting panic.
Conspiracy theorists claiming the government
released the virus to distract us. Distract us from what?
They have no real answer, just another thing to talk about.

 I’m young and healthy,
I shouldn’t need to worry.
It’s just like the flu on steroids. I may be
a lucky survivor but my diabetic father
may not be so fortunate. 

I give the man the facts as I know them,
his eyes skirting to the side before
he lowers his voice,  

Should I avoid Asian people?  

There are some things a facemask
can’t stop the spread of.