#covid poems

[foetry]

Spring Coronal

BY HYEJUNG KOOK

Again this year I’ve failed the peonies that came to us

when we bought our house in summer, not knowing what

pink and white glory grew in the northwest. After the first May,

still childless, seeing how a single bloom could overflow

the cup of my hands, the stems bowing to the ground

under their weight, I bought cages to circle the red shoots

after they crowned but only used them once. Arrow-like

as they emerge from the earth, the just unfurling leaves

look like fingers, reminiscent of intestinal villi and sea anemones,

moving with unexpected purpose. It is the force that through

the green fuse drives the flower, drives me to try and fail

again to conceive, which turns the leaves green, my eyes green,

everything greening and growing before my scaffolding

is in place. Again this year I’ve failed, but I haven’t been outside

in eight weeks without precautions against “the sickness”

as we’ve come to call it in our house, long days spent only

with my children, four and six, and my husband. A surly demand,

a dropped dish, misplaced keys, and I find myself wearing a crown

of overtowering rage, like the sun’s corona flaring,

the outermost layers of atmosphere flung violently into space,

invisible to most instruments except during a total solar eclipse,

as in 1869, when scientists detected a spectral green line,

possible indication of a new element they called coronium,

but in 1943, that grassy green was identified as iron

in a forbidden transition, half its electrons stripped away

by heat exceeding a million degrees. The world is burning

while I drift in a bubble of comfort but seized by anger

day after day until one evening I step out to find the peonies

that have managed to stay upright now reach my hips,

the pinks already perfuming the air, the whites still closed

tighter than a fist. The next morning I wake

with my grandmother’s voice in my ears, something

about mislaid glasses, and for long moments, I can’t recall

if she’s dead or alive. When I remember she’s gone,

I sob, unable to control my shudders, waking my daughter

who uncurls from my side and asks, “Why are you crying?”

How to explain the weight of loss pressing down

after a brief reprieve. The weight of a knee on a neck.

Children in detention while pandemic spreads. I don’t.

Instead I say, “I miss my grandmother who died.”

She gently pats my cheeks, then presses her forehead

against mine, so close all I see is the dark Cyclopean

blur of her eyes. Maybe it’s better to be unmoored

by rage and grief, to burn away that which binds us,

enriching the earth, making space for new growth.

Maybe my inability to cage a living thing isn’t

a failing at all. Better to let the green drive us

in a wild unfettered tangle, blooming or not,

to feel the comfort of my daughter’s touch, the renewal

of pain a small price for my grandmother alive again

in my mind while the peonies dive headfirst into the dirt.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2021)

#HYEJUNG KOOK #spring #pregnancy loss #miscarriage #women poets #peony #gardening #covid poems

[eggwhiteswithspinach]

Darkened skies, rumble of thunder imagined, internal? or not. The emotions brew, deepen in dark violets attractively luring me in with the shimmer of bronze as I drown in its poison. With increasing fatigue, I know my thoughts become more negative, decisions made rashly instead of through careful planning. And so, today I will make better choices and leave those moments for self-care routines instead of being placed in the hot seat for important life changes. I feel better this morning, simply by having rested, maybe dreamed, something weird.

lucy dan // i feel better this morning // the brain is a noodle

#poetry #healing #COVID poems #COVID poetry #poemblr #lucy dot txt

[ce-archerhelke]

(via The Sealey Challenge: Gazing Down On It)

#the sealey challenge #Lauren de Sá Naylor #Ugly Duckling Presse #Gazing down on it #prose poetry #covid poems #covid poetics #poetics of covid #2020 in poetry #dreamscape poetry #nightmare poetry

[grouchydairy]

Darkened skies, rumble of thunder imagined, internal? or not. The emotions brew, deepen in dark violets attractively luring me in with the shimmer of bronze as I drown in its poison. With increasing fatigue, I know my thoughts become more negative, decisions made rashly instead of through careful planning. And so, today I will make better choices and leave those moments for self-care routines instead of being placed in the hot seat for important life changes. I feel better this morning, simply by having rested, maybe dreamed, something weird.

lucy dan // i feel better this morning // the brain is a noodle

#poetry #healing #COVID poems #COVID poetry #poemblr

[outragedtortilla]

Darkened skies, rumble of thunder imagined, internal? or not. The emotions brew, deepen in dark violets attractively luring me in with the shimmer of bronze as I drown in its poison. With increasing fatigue, I know my thoughts become more negative, decisions made rashly instead of through careful planning. And so, today I will make better choices and leave those moments for self-care routines instead of being placed in the hot seat for important life changes. I feel better this morning, simply by having rested, maybe dreamed, something weird.

lucy dan // i feel better this morning // the brain is a noodle

#poetry #healing #COVID poems #COVID poetry #poemblr

[phoenixonwheels]

[ID: Tweet from Plague Poems @PlaguePoems 1/1/24

“I have not bothered

to make a resolution

you see, several years ago

I resolved

to survive the pandemic

and as this new year begins

I’m still quite busy

trying to fulfill

that old resolution.”]

#Covid 19 #plague poems #wear a fucking mask

[jojosbizarrekakyoinobsession]

Jotaro is a boy who makes me, a girl, love to see him in love with a boy named Kakyoin, and the boy loves that boy back, and that makes me, the girl, happy and in love with those boys too. Boy, the circle of life is beautiful.

Tldr; i love jotakak

#idk #covid posting #my mind is fuzzy rn #my poem #beautiful right? #jotakak

[etakeh]

(source)

#sag strike #actors strike #plague #covid #pandemic #doom 2023 #poetry #plague poems

[raven-runes]

my lungs

polar paws

mawl

my innards

merciless

as I build

a palace

of ice

under the aurora

borealis

#long covid #chronic pain #poem #mine #my poem #my poetry #original poem #diary #Lungs #northern lights #North #Polar #Aurora #aurora borealis #ice #palace #my writing #spilled ink

[speedyslothboi]

I spent an hour making a flower crown today. I'd never made one before. It didn't turn out very good; clumsy knots and and sticky fingers and broken petals but I still put it on and smiled. I never got that kind of childhood. I wondered if this is what healing feels like: sitting on a picnic table, gently warmed by the sun, breathing in the world. I have so much to do (an ap psych test in three days, ethics bowl nationals and science olympiad state to prepare for, a read through for the play on Monday) and instead I went outside and listened to the birds.

Then I got home and cried. Because 30,000 people will never get to make a flower crown again (and how many never had? It took me 17 years. That's more time than many of them ever got). I haven't breathed clearly in 6 months; a weight on my chest and a pit in my stomach but for one hour, I felt like I could breathe, the smell of grass unfamiliar but comfortable (and how many died in that time? Trapped under rubble? The weight on their chests real).

I feel like I've been sitting Shiva for strangers halfway across the world but I'll die before I finish mourning (575 years is a lot to ask of this body). I'm not doing a very good job. But what else can I do but remember? I don't know know what to do with myself. I'm heartbroken and horrified and I am so angry. I go to school and hear kids talk about tik tok drama and I want to grab them and shake them and yell "how can you think about anything else? How can breathe around your guilt well enough to speak?" I feel like I know to much and too little, never informed fast enough. I feel like I'm grieving and like I have no right to grieve. I'm tired. I'm not doing well (I can't remember the last time I brushed my teeth and I still need to schedule my fillings and do my laundry and change my sheets) but I feel so selfish doing anything to make myself happy, like I'm stealing joy I don't deserve. And I know that I'm burnt-out (years into it) and that I have to take care of myself too but I just don't know how to carry all this grief. And this isn't about me (I'm making it about me, aren't I?)

This will be the first presidential election I get to vote in and I can't vote for him, I can't. And I'm scared. People keep saying it's selfish not to but I'm the one who will face the consequences. I'm one of the "vulnerable" people (does that make it self-sacrificial? Does that make it okay? To risk my communities if I am at risk too?)

Paul Alexander died three weeks ago. I can't stop thinking about him. (Most of the articles won't tell you why though; that one of the most vulnerable members of society was abandoned to a disease that has killed 3 million). I keep seeing inspiration porn articles about how he didn't let his disability "stop him" (I feel like I'm "letting" mine stop me). None of them mention "I love the sun, but I haven't felt it in a long time. It's lonely." (I feel lonely all the time but I didn't feel lonely at the park, with dirt in my fingernails. I don't really believe in heaven but I hope it exists so Paul can sit in the sun again). I think of Paul and I am filled with rage. 5,000 people die of covid every week; that's one person every five minutes (how is that okay? how could you abandon us for "normal"?) and I'm one of three people out of 2200 at my school who still wear a mask. I got the most recent booster two days ago (the one only the "vulnerable" can get as if long covid isn't becoming an increasingly documented mass disabling event. And the genocide is one too. And what about the countries we blocked from getting vaccines with patents. How dare we condemn the global south to suffer without vaccines only to stop getting them). And I need to buy more masks (yet another expense to exist while disabled) and they aren't free anymore so it's another 3 hours of work. Cases keep rising despite the lack of testing and wastewater doesn't lie. And whats the new variant? News isnt reporting on it anymore because "no one cares" (I care. I need to believe others would care if they knew. Maybe thats just wishful thinking) I still have at home tests but their negatives feel like taunts (a positive is a positive though, I remember)

I don't really have any friends. I have acquaintances and people I work with for projects but I don't want them to be my friends. My mom and my therapist keep telling me to reach out and do things with them (I know it would be good for me to socialize but doing so would put me at risk. They can't even wear a mask, and I'm supposed to choose to spend extra time with them?) Neither my mom or therapist wears a mask. (My mom fought for me when doctors didn't believe anything was wrong. Fought for 7 years to get a diagnosis and now she won't protect me.) I go to the doctors and even they aren't wearing masks (didn't you learn your lesson?).

I've seen people complain about "boycott fatigue" and I'm just wonder how you are surprised? I lost faith 2 years ago when people decided that disabled people's lives weren't worth discomfort (I used to value the nuance, how it isnt that simple. Now my compassion is shot. My empathy used up on three million deaths. But it is, isnt it? Simple that is. You just dont care enough). When the accessibility we begged for for years that had been "impossible" was suddenly "easy" when everyone needed and then taken away just as quickly. The second you could leave us behind, you did. So how could I be surprised people would do the same for Falastin? I love theatre, and I'm excited for too much light. But half of them will walk in with Starbucks on Monday (and none of them will be wearing a mask) and I know these people will never truly be my people (I resent them and love them but mostly I'm disappointed.)

I've been crying alot. I never used to cry. Sometimes I feel like that means I'm healing (some of the time I wonder if I have the right to heal right now). It's like this grief keeps overflowing but the world keeps turning (and how can everyone keep living right now?) and homework keeps coming and the genocide keeps happening and I need to get back to making my magma composition notes. (I left the flower crown at the park. I felt guilty about picking the flowers; that must be bad for the environment, right? How selfish, to kill things just to make a silly crown, and I didnt even do it very well. It fell apart within a minute. An hour of work crumpled in my hands. A moment of enjoyment stolen at the cost of life, what a bad vegan I am. Anyway, i left the flowers there, to decompose where they were born)

#free palestine #from the river to the sea #free gaza #covid #long covid #wear a mask #poetry #? #does this count? #poem #i guess #vent #also the 575 year number is real #i did the math and started crying #and then i wrote this

[foetry]

Pancakes Keep Coming to Mind: A Sestina Commemorating the Demise of Aunt Jemima on the Pancake Box 

BY ARTRESS BETHANY WHITE

June 2020

I invoke my great-great-grandmother’s name on exhaled breath,

the vowels arranging themselves in shorts and longs,

syntax and semantics duking it out.

Mima, that could have been birthed from an African tongue.

Enee, meene, mima, mo, respectable marriage of village,

continent, and town, without a diabolic Je like a pendulum swing

to the scarlet kerchief blooming in my brain, pancakes on my tongue,

unwilling to utter that name over black families now living out

their American dream. Like reinvention, how the heart longs

to reconcile past and present, within a village

raising a newer child clawing out of epicureal stink to swing

free from stereotypes, auction block, and Aunt Jemima’s mealy breath.

Instead, pancakes every time my forebears’ syllabics touch my tongue.

Mima sans  Je, not Meema, or Mi’ma[e], coy notes stepping out

of a history where grits and flapjacks were birthed in a village

to skirt my teeth or strut ’cross my lips on exhaled breath,

that ample bosom and backside mocking me, she who longs

to rear up and bark Breakfast! and Brunch! on a revolving door swing.

You are not my Auntie or Aunt pronounced like the creature crawling out

over cadavers of supermarket boxes choking my breath

on a collapsed lung of shady marketing to keep bodies bound in a village-

cum-ghetto of stranger than strange imagined black things, girl-on-a-swing

dreams culled from western imaginings of what that colored gal longs

to do over a hot stove, flipping and flapping ’cause the griddle got her tongue.

Names as revenue monikers on revue, line dancing on a hip swing.

Oh, how daring to cogitate on destiny, each syllable a village

of preferred ubiquity, once the Ghanaian name Afua translated out

to first girl child born on a Friday, sonic genealogy on the tongue,

but changed to post-baptismal Mary, a rigid catechism of colonial breath

blowing across centuries of arid longing.

Food me, fooled me, sold me, told me, held me, bled me, tongue

afire with dreams of love, life, and freedom a profusion of days swinging

between something and more. My village compound, my village

quarters, my village a city block, each century censuring my breath.

What I seek is what I speak, not handed a script of nostalgic longing.

Jemima wrenched from shelves, but a litany in my brain still playing out.

Ain’t nothing but a jonesing to tweak culinary history so my village

knows my branches are thick, swaying and swinging with longing and breath,

rolling descendancy off my tongue, blessing consumption out. 

Source: Poetry (May 2021)

#artress bethany white #pancakes #race #intertextuality #sestina #women poets #covid poems

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

friend: *has conflicting schedule for something church-related*

friend's mum: hey do you [meaning me] want to run it

me, instantly: absolutely not.

#i haven't been to one of these things since before covid i barely remember how it's even run #ive already been stupid enough to offer my services to read poetry in case we can't get enough people to do things (it's an aged care #entertainment thing) #any poem suggestions are welcome. a small and mad part of me wants to read one of my own poems but i might just Cry so i won't

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Thoughts on writing and poetry from one of my favourite contemporary poets Jaclyn Desforges

I won’t speak for other lit scenes but in Canada the chronic fear of being blunt and therefore incredibly vulnerable is a bane on our poetry. Everyone feels they must be coy or emotionally removed or hyper intellectual and it, to my mind, results in bad poetry.

Fear of being direct, of being blunt and, perhaps, ugly, of saying what we mean—all of that makes for bad writers.

And gods know I suffer from the same knee jerk reaction of wanting To Be Poetic and To Be Intellectual and Smart in my writing and in doing so forget what I’m writing about

I remember talking to a poet, brilliant brilliant woman, Robin Richardson, and she asked me “tell me exactly what this poem is about in plain language” and I did—step mom stuff, childhood trauma stuff—and I was having that Voice Cracking Looking At Ceiling So I Don’t Cry moment

And the poet said, “your poem needs that in-your-face pain. It needs to be a hurt seven year old. Are hurt seven year olds coy and overly poetic? No, they’re blunt. Try that and see how you go”

And of course this doesn’t mean you don’t use imagery or metaphor or things like that—but at the core you can’t be afraid of ugliness and bluntness

Best advice I ever got as a writer.

Anyway, some random Saturday morning musings brought to you by Jaclyn Desforges and Robin Richardson.

(Also, Robin’s thoughts on the unsympathetic voice are great too—can’t grab the link but the essay is titled “the unsympathetic voice in poetry” and it’s in the North American Review from like 2015)

#Jaclyn desforges #she is a gift #poetry #poems #writing #Robin Richardson #I will always love her even though she’s gone a little off the deep end #tried to start a cult or something during Covid #it was a whole Thing in the can lit poetry scene #back in like late 2020/2021 #but I was always respect the poet and teacher she was and still can be

[wrenhavenriver]

i have lies of p and ff 16 installed and ready to go so i can do something mildly enjoyable my last few days before the school/work death spiral starts up again and instead i'm just sitting here refreshing Webbed Sites and watching nothing interesting appear like

#quite predictably i did in fact get sick at the 3 day long work training held during a massive covid/flu surge #i was masked except for meal/photo times and am up to date on vaccinations tho so thankfully it's just a mild cold #but i'm just sort of tired and unable to focus on anything #honestly tho they could have easily done all those presentations over Teams and been done a lot earlier :/ #the weather was really bad the first couple of days too and i know a lot of commuters would have really appreciated doing it virtually #but i guess that wouldn't have let us do all our ~fun~ icebreaker and ~team building activities~! #idk Employer Mandated Socializing and Fun Times just inherently irritate me on a cellular level #tell me how you want a job done and then let me go do it #having us write a group poem about our department for arbitrary points accomplishes literally nothing but wasting all our time #kathryn vs higher education #assorted work nonsense

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

A poet RIP.

After testing positive with COVID, Patricia Horan, the poet, passed away.

Below is her final poem, written with insistence and ferocity via text from her hospital bed according to her friend Elizabeth Sabo.

Notes on a Stay in a Hospital Quarantine Cell

© Patricia G. Horan :: December 27, 2020

“I swallow my pride and it tastes like honey and salt.

The air has embraced my private body and has approved, and it quietly rejoices in its revelations and the liberation of its childlike spills and neediness. How I reach to love it suddenly, this stranger I’ve kept in a fifties New Jersey suitcase, only removing it for one afternoon on a nude fire island beach.

Now it is truly liberated in a small windowless quarantine room in North Carolina.

The machines behind me beep, shining little christmas trees, watching my pulses, systems, and disturbances like grandmothers, occasionally clucking, unfashionably faithful through the night. I am pinned head to toe to a proud family of counters, weighers, and witnesses. This little womb and its divine protocols.

Shame is peeled from the human body when the body is wet with sweet tears and shocking love. It has suckers like snails and they make marks. The shameless body houses the soul proudly instead of shrouding it.

My mother tells me I began to walk on my first birthday. Today I took steps alone from the commode to the bed, to the applause of my caregiver. Eighty years has incensed up in a laughing swirl of smudge smoke. A laughing swirl of smudge smoke and ageless birthday courage.

Echoing a hated preachment, I see that my life is just where it belongs, that mistakes are potholes filled in with diamonds.

If this dream goes away in the glare and blare of rough reality I will lovingly remember it the way I recall my dying mother squeezing my hand that is now identical to hers. My tenderness spills over in tears of recognition and reconciliation.

Message from a Quarantine Room.

Little womb of a room.”

#COVID #poem #poetry #Message from a Quarantine Room #nebulizer #Patricia Horan #2020

[haveyoureadthispoem-poll]

“...enough of the high / water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease, / I am asking you to touch me.”

Read it here | Reblog for a larger sample size!

#reading note (for context): this was originally published during the first covid quarantine #open polls #polls #poetry #poems #poetry polls #poets and writing #tumblr poetry #have you read this #the end of poetry #ada limón #the new yorker #the new yorker magazine