Statement of Record

TagCoronavirus

Perpetuum Mobile

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Alexander Graeff

translated by Mark Kanak

I used to complain about my long-distance relationship. I wrote heartwarming letters full of longing and “what if” speculations—once I even wrote a story titled “Empty.” That’s how I often felt after our encounters, empty. Our professions prevented us from visiting each other every weekend. Worse still: the damned job was the reason...

Rooms and Clarinets

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Clifford Thompson

Malcolm X has been on my mind lately. I’ll get to that in a moment.

In my early and mid-teens, I played the clarinet, badly. I gave it up after that, and I don’t even know where my old clarinet is. But I have another one now, given to me by a friend who found it in her apartment, left behind by a previous tenant; my friend thought of me as she herself was...

After Ginger

A

Alice Stephens

Isamu Noguchi found it was easier to get himself into an internment camp than it was to get out.

Confined at home these past months due to the Coronavirus, I think often of the Japanese and Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II. 

After five years of research and writing, I had recently completed a historical fiction novel based on...

Corona Diary

C

Joan Juliet Buck

Thursday April 2

Woke earlier than I’d wanted, boiled up a compress for the eyes, carried it back to bed. And because my eyes were closed, I meditated. The other day, when I was having the horrors, I got tough love from Anjelica, who said “Don’t you have a mantra? Just do it. Don’t be sentimental.” I can dole out that same cold shower when someone close calls...

Quarantine Diary (excerpt)

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Matthew Vollmer

Trying to read David Markson’s Reader’s Block during a plumber’s visit. Yesterday, E, my son, clogged up the toilet in his bathroom. Upon further interrogation, he admitted that he’d flushed something called a “Magic Eraser” down the commode. Spent twenty minutes pumping a plunger, trying to get the turds of a person I helped create to disappear down the...

Halted Time

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Christian von der Goltz

Behind the news, behind the curves and theories, behind the ongoing argument over who says what, behind all the noise of the internet, a ghostly silence has been spreading into every aspect of daily life. More than all the talk of numbers and statistics, it’s this silence that is changing people’s behavior. Social distancing isn’t the cause of this silence, but...

Excerpts from Another Love Discourse

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Edie Meidav

To circumscribe

Here in the time of the great panic, people retreated to their bunkers, the people of the past come forward. Yesterday we found a path at an odd road, named as if after a bad blues song, like Coffinnail Cove: I’m going there to find my beloved. But this was true; at the mouth of the...

WINDOWS

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By Beverly Gologorsky

The comfort of the couch is an unexpected joy. The early dusk enters the room to brighten the lamplight. Nothing new in the way of decoration has been added, so most everything within sight is at least half my age. Objects long held, whether paintings, photos, worn chairs, even the plants along the windowsill, feel dearer at my age than they once did. What...

The Daisy Assassin: Incidents from a Time of Plague

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by David Winner

Most risks have immediate consequence.  If you get caught in a riptide, you drown.  Not that afternoon, not the following month, but then. But if I catch a dribble of Covid sputum on Lookout Hill, I may wake up one morning two weeks later not with one of the mild sore throats that have been scaring me but a deep exhaustion so I can barely make it to the bathroom to pee. A...

The Double Feature

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By William Cody Maher

To go out with me for fresh air or for some sun and to listen to the birds. . . to go out with me is to watch behind my back to be anticipating what is ahead to look for kids suddenly lurching out of the bushes out of my mind. . . to be out with me is not to be out with me and I don’t know how I can change that unless all the stop lights remain green and no one...

Corona Report

C

Andrea Scrima

The invisible enemy hit Italy just as I was preparing to leave Florence; containment measures had begun a week prior to my departure. At first the “red zones” of Codogno and other municipalities in Lodi were subject to quarantine, then the whole of Lombardy together with provinces in Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Piedmont, and Marche. And then, on...

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