• Corona Chronicle,  Nonfiction

    In Remembrance of Summer by Gina Chung

    June 5, 2020 /

    Above: Standing Girl, Back View by Egon Schiele

     

    Of all the things that I’d like to be doing now, instead of waiting for things to get better, waiting until there are no longer sirens haunting my neighborhood every hour with their banshee wails, waiting until it feels safe to no longer feel so afraid—I’d like to be wearing a light cotton dress on a hot summer day here in Brooklyn, on a rooftop that’s really just a glorified patch of silver-painted asphalt but feels like something holy in the orange glow of a July sun.

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  • Corona Chronicle,  Poetry

    “Danger” with Artwork by Sally Doyle

    May 29, 2020 /
    Underneath  this room  is danger.  You can  feel it  when you walk  across  the
    floor.  This evening you feel it as you  sit in your  small chair reading.  But still
    you  cannot  name it.  The other  members  of  your family who are  staring at
    their phones  don’t appear  to be concerned at all.  You stop  reading  to listen,
    and rumination turns into trance. Right at the moment when you are thinking,
    “Someone has been abandoned,” a woman wearing a surgical mask enters the
    room.  
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  • Art and Photography,  Corona Chronicle,  Poetry

    “26 Letters Refuse to Whisper” by Lynne Jensen Lampe with Artwork by Carrie Wilmarth

    May 16, 2020 /

    Above: “UNTITLED,” 2020. Oil on Wood Panel, 9 x 12″

    As for saying goodbye, we don’t know how.
    Shoulder to shoulder we keep on walking.

    —Anna Akhmatova

    _
    As for saying goodbye, I know how
    but don’t want to surrender to these
    changed lives & cautious moments. COVID-19,
    death-o-matic, that’s what I call you. A period jabbed into the heart of a sentence.
    Each day I look out my window &
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  • Corona Chronicle,  Cross-Genre,  Poetry

    “ode to summer” by Cheyanne Anderson

    May 2, 2020 /
    every time I go onto my balcony
    bare feet on dusty cement
    and look down the street
    towards the subway
    towards the market
    towards the road straight to the beach
    the air gets a little warmer
    and I can feel the spring preparing,
    about to pass me by
    _
    and I hope I’ll make it out in time to buy a new sundress
    and a pair of sandals
    because summer somehow always catches me by surprise
    and by the time I’ve thought to embrace the way humidity sits on skin

    there’s a bite in the air and it’s gone again
    _
    I keep dreaming of ways to catch it
    like a firefly in a jar
    (only temporary)
    so I can see it up close
    so I can remember to notice the sweat on the back of my neck
    and the proof it serves
    that     I was alive that day
    so     I can skip down sidewalks
    so     I can lie in the park
    so     I can chill another bottle of wine
    s    o I can kiss and kiss and kiss
    s    o I can forget to put on sunscreen
    s    o I can walk until my feet ache
    s    o I can embrace the way my hair frizzes from my scalp like a crown
    s    o I can fall in love in ways I’m not sure I deserve
    s    o I can remember to admire the way the fire hydrant down the street
    (    somehow always breaking open)
    w    ashes away cigarette butts and receipts and regrets
    a    nd makes a babbling brook on Bushwick streets
    j    ust until the repairman comes on Monday
    j    ust until I can bring myself to open the jar and let it go
    a    nd whisper well wishes into the first breeze of autumn

    my heart is too big for this bedroom,

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  • Corona Chronicle,  Cross-Genre,  Poetry

    “Social Distances” by L.B. Browne

    April 24, 2020 /
    There is a man
    wearing dark glasses
    and a blue paper surgical mask
    in the fluorescent sun of the grocery store.
    Hey buddy, 6 feet!
    a young woman shouts
    as he backs up, nearly touches her,
    outrageous,
    she does not see
    the white cane he slides in small arcs at his feet,
    tip tapping the way

    down ravaged empty aisles.

    There is a woman
    with a 3-day-old cough
    and a nasal drip that runs down the back of her throat,
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  • Corona Chronicle,  Poetry

    “Quarantine” by Rimas Uzgiris

    April 19, 2020 /
    By day we count like clocks the dust motes
    And wait for the hour of maximum sun
    When the forest folds us in

    Like the first morning, Eve yet to meet a snake.

    The passage back is through the cemetery
    Haunted by the occasional human
    Shuffling from grave to grave,

    Pottering with plants and sloughed pine.

    We park ourselves before electric iridescence
    Trying to feel our way towards a future:
    Seeing only fear and desire and no Eightfold Path,
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