Category Archives: Twenty-First Century

By Stephanie Powell

pausing at street corners
to see if my flesh becomes brick.
Shin bones straight like
streetlamps- face lit only by phone-screen light.

By Bernard Horn

Consider your so-called life, that is,
if your hemming and hawing between
stolen life and pre-life, stolen life and pre-life
can be dignified by that term. Sure, there are
adjectives we living beings are driven
to apply to you: rapacious, single-minded,
flexible, dogged, but that’s just how we are,
driven to deny the nothing that is not there,
while you, like a snowman, do not see a thing.

By Mark Cassidy

In sanctuary of an unlatched porch
I’ve laid my cycle down.
The door is thick-strong oak:
long hinges brace nail-studded beams,
an iron ring for handle.

By R. G. Jodah

You can hear the rumpus rumbling all the way from aisle four
where some heavyweight contenders are arguing the score.
The champ has got a trolley-full, her challenger sod all.
They’re going at it toe-to-toe. The writing’s on the wall

By Frank William Finney

Sitting in the bleachers of a raucous
rally, we listen as they pack
our old suitcase with wrinkled
shirts and holey socks
A week’s worth of laundry
that stinks up the room.

By Daniel Hinds

On the first day of lockdown, I stopped my watch
And hung it on my writing desk.
To slip beneath the wrinkles of Time’s face
And sleep within the sandy trench.
I hope I will wake.

By Paul Francis

The way it’s supposed to work is this:
she goes into the trenches, fights disease
and thanks to her and others folk get well.
This isn’t Disney. There are some they lose.
The odds are, mostly, reasonable.

By J. C. Niala

As we attuned to lockdown
we forgot how life had once worked,
our soundtrack gone like
an interrupted livestream.

By Tina Cathleen MacNaughton

I note, not without bitterness,
that this sadly says it all.
As if a rectangle of blue plastic
with strings and a squirt of
antiseptic was ever going
to be enough.

By Amanda Jones

My pandemic panorama
Produces a plethora of play.
Inside my cage of drama
Comes a theatre each day.