NewVerseNews Friday: Covid Emergency “REMNANTS” and “MYTHINFORMATION”
poems by Liz Ahl and Philip Stern
REMNANTS
by Liz Ahl
“The U.S. national emergency to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic ended Monday as President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan congressional resolution to bring it to a close after three years — weeks before it was set to expire…” —NPR, April 11, 2023
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Still, these tattered masking tape traces on the scuffed tile floors, hieroglyphs of our attempts to demarcate safe zones of coming and going through the narrow public vestibules. The box of “take one” surgical masks still perched on its pedestal at the entrance, offers only its lonely cardboard; empty, too, each strategically placed hand sanitizer dispenser, which exhales a sad, shallow breath when pressed. Some smudged plexiglass remains, having been more difficult to erect and therefore more bother to remove. Outside, the windswept tumbleweed of a facemask, its torn elastic bands flapping their tired fronds against the asphalt with the other winter trash. Refrigerator trucks rededicated to the chilled storage and transport of anything but the human deceased. Small town campus ice arena bearing the slightest scars of cot-legs and privacy screens, the strange dream of soldiers fading to fragments. A ghost of myself, figment out of phase, measures distances, haunts the far edges of what bustles and churns, a clamorous bullying desire for “normalcy” almost passing for “normalcy.” And of course, the counted dead, the dead uncounted. The brutal and insufficient arithmetic. The long and the short, the landmine damage lurking in bodies, biding time until the next innocent footstep.
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Liz Ahl is the author of A Case for Solace (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022) and Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017). Recent publications include a poem about Buzz Aldrin in the anthology Space: 100 Poems (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and poems in recent issues of TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, and Revolute. She lives in Holderness, New Hampshire.
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MYTHINFORMATION
by Philip Stern
written in serious wordplay
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Now the emergingcy is over, caution and funding are over. Yesterday, one of our leaders went mything. He said it was a hoax. Then said it would not blast. Then sold equine and oquine and proposed bleach to the fringe bleacher seats at his attent show. He watched as the wildfirus burned ungoverned, saw it sprinkle hot ashes on refrigerated covid wagons circling hospitals where breathless bodies stiffened. Yet mythed messages still burn, about dangers of masking and vaccines that damnage DNA, still cause national dysfusion. So do we now just forget that we gallowed over one million deaths to happen?
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Philip Stern is 95, had a poem published in The Atlantic in 1957, wrote pop songs in the 60s, and started writing poetry again after retiring from college teaching.