by Daisy Zamora

There she is
            leaving the store

            a pale, overcast sky
the color of her face

            dark clouds, gray horizon

traces of beauty
            still in her face

this young one,
            hollow eyes in a void

            crossing Nineteenth Avenue
in morning air

            clenching a brown bag
and the world inside it
            to dive in
                        eclipse
like a moon on the darkest night.

by William Carpenter

In the old horror classic, The Thing, they brought
the monster to the quonset hut frozen in ice.
The corporal or private on sentry duty tossed
a blanket over its face, only the blanket was
electric, it was plugged in; you watched the ice
melt, you saw the shadow rise over the soldier
reading his book. Watch out! you said. Behind you!
with every kid in the Majestic Theater, but
the man heard nothing and was strangled or his skull
crushed. That way the Thing entered the human world,
your world, and you walked home squeezing your eyelids
closed, trying to forget what they had seen:
the Thing out in the blizzard tearing up the huskies,
the clusters of spore pods in its hand.
Now you have kids yourself. One of them’s at the shoe plant,
one’s away at school. Your wife is on sabbatical.
You are the only person home. You’re thinking
about the future, how it grows smaller and closer
every time you sleep; so you stay up, you walk
from room to room, you choose the guest bedroom with
the electric blanket and you turn it on. Outside, it’s
January. The moon changes the snow to an albino desert,
miles of cold sand twisted into hills, and, beyond that,
the snowy mountains. You turn the blanket up and read.
You hear a sound somewhere, like melting ice.
There’s movement. Something is thawing out, something
frozen stiff for a long time is rising under
the electric blanket. Its shadow fills the bedroom wall.
It’s larger than you thought. The phone is useless.
There’s nobody for miles. The Thing.
It has been walking towards you all these years.
It throws its covers off. You wait for it to kill you but
it’s smaller than you remembered and its face is human;
it looks tired, like someone carrying a message
that no longer counts. You are not scared. You’re not
a child at the movies but a grown man standing
before a mirror in a vacant house, a man shaking
from coffee and insomnia who wants something to be
final the way the Thing was final in its time,
a root vegetable with all the answers, hairy
and bulletproof forever, the thing inside us that
could save us, maybe, from the thing we are.

by William Carpenter

I stood on the front porch last night after
the news, listening for owls. A big one
called somewhere downhill from Sig’s house
near the river. Who. It called
and waited, then asked who again. Who?
I tried waking you up to hear it, but you
were dreaming. Your eyes remmed under
their lids, your hands treaded the covers
like someone struggling to stay afloat.
I went back out. Another owl had started,
and they were closer, one on each side
of the house, both of them asking who.

I knew, and I still know; though I
could no more say it then than I can now.

by Terry McDonagh

The borders in me are the ones
I share with myself —
myself alone in Lockdown
but back then hitch–hiking
on the Mayo Galway border
in Ballindine — even in rain —
didn’t phase me nor did
I wallow in political romance
with my dog–eared copy
of The Communist Manifesto
hidden away in my head
crossing frontiers to Poland,
Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
I was lord of never say die,
a Walkman–sleeping–bag–loner
in sweat–stained t–shirt, dreaming
of an emblematic someone
I would never know. Of course
there were currencies, customs,
tongue–twisting words and
borders thou shalt not cross
to be taken in my stride. I smiled
for a keepsake before crossing
into East Berlin at Friedrichstrasse
and paid up when called upon.

Dylan Thomas:
Oh, easy for Leonardo.

And most of the time, there was
two–and–four–stroke–splutter,
market–racket, purr and siren
to help me flaunt the mayhem
of ordinary stuff but it was

the mazy silence without borders
between dusk and dawn that had me
hyperventilating and coming up for air.

I’m sitting inside my window
trying to connect then with now.
I have spent nights
drinking wine with monks,
bought new runners and
tinkered with my mobile.
I talk. I talk about the limits
of speech in day and dark
but the borders in me
are the ones I share with myself —
myself alone in Lockdown.