Writing in the Time of the Global Pandemic: Summer 2020

We were blown away by your huge response for our special issue. Thank you!

We chose prayer flags for the banner image. It is said when the wind blows them they spread much-needed compassion and peace. The colors, blue, white, red, green, and yellow, represent the five elements, sky, air, fire, water and earth. You’ll find them woven throughout these pages.

Water invading from leaky pipes, and pandemic worries, send Irene Baker and her husband to seek refuge in sea-green waves in our opening piece From Barrio to Coastal Bluff. “How to hold it all? How to possibly hold it all? This beauty, that horror. This gentle, wide-open space of sky and sea, that teeming, crowded lack of safety.”

We look to the blue along with Christie Cochrell in her “zoom mosaic” At-Home and Far-Away when she visits a glass house and imagines herself there “writing the skies, looking at stars,” and again in Dev Berger’s poem What You Have Made Us: “Watch as we blend together and become one under sheltering skies.”

In Sheryl Bize-Boutte’s Girl of the Sunflower two women form an unlikely friendship built on solid ground out of which emerges the harrowing story of a young girl in her favorite yellow dress.

Reading Joe Cottonwood’s post-its from a virus we find ourselves grateful, as he is, for every precious breath of air. And in Susan Terris’s poem …Nana Just Like You Told Me… a boy finds comfort in the naming of white things: “Sails of a ship, summer clouds, bedsheets on a line Calla lilies, mushrooms, polar bears.”

June Jackson’s poem Covid19 reflects the fiery red element found within:
“millions of collective bodies producing massive amounts of heat fighting back with fevers – their only defense –”

In Pause by Angie Minkin we are reminded of just what we need right now as we work to be resilient in this moment. “Can you find balance as you trudge earth that now feels groundless?”

Please join us in reading these pieces and all the other terrific contributions here, and share widely!

Also a big thank you to David Wakely for the beautiful photograph of the prayer flags and of Birdland that introduce this journal.

From Barrio to Coastal Bluff: In the Time of the Pandemic | Irene Baker

What You Have Made Us | Dev Berger

Springtime, Covid19 | Diana Donovan

Pandemic |Diana Donovan

The Wonder Vacuum | Judy Field

we get along with oaks | Joe Cottonwood

post-its from a virus | Joe Cottonwood

Cat’s Eye or Love in the Time of Covid-19 | Susan Terris

NANA, JUST LIKE YOU TOLD ME | Susan Terris

Quarantine of the Hothouse Roses | Leah Browning