Colm Scully is from Cork, Ireland. He is an engineer and poetry film maker, as well as poet. He has been published in Cyphers, Crannóg, Philosophy Now and many other magazines and anthologies His poetry films have been shown in festivals around the world, including The Film and Video Poetry Symposium Pasadena, The International Film and Video Poetry Festival Athens, REEL Poetry Houston, Carmarthen Bay Film Festival, Dublin International Short Film Festival and Cork Indie Film Festival. His films have won prizes at Rabbits Heart Poetry Film Festival 2018 and MicroMania Film Festival, New York 2021 You can watch them at 
Published
April 1, 2021
2021 Pandemic Anthology
Publication Date: Fall 2021
Pandemic Poem Winners
FIRST PLACE
Diana Donovan: SPRINGTIME, COVID-19
I want to remember us this way
outside on the deck at twilight
each with a half-drunk glass of wine
joining the nightly neighborhood howl
its mournful trumpet solo at the end.
I want to remember this very morning
how we walked to the trailhead in the fog
amidst April’s reckless explosion—wisteria, calla lilies
rain-soaked eucalyptus—the smell so fragrant
you’d swear it could keep our lungs alive forever.
A lone gray fox crossed the fire road
looked over as if to say
Living is no laughing matter
walk purposefully into the woods
vanish without a trace.
SECOND PLACE
John Sibley Williams: Self-Portrait as Lacuna
What do we do with a body
severed from other bodies,
with a child who cannot weave herself
into & out of embrace?
When the plastic stars glued to her ceiling
supplant the celestial, dreams
& hungers cast only so high, prayers smacked
hard against drywall & blue paint?
Into the burn barrel out back, everything I hoped
would someday wear her name. Family,
only a state away, already dimming to memory. Only
my face to remind her of her own.
A miniature dollhouse world, prematurely on fire. This
afflicted air. Breath. When breathing
becomes the barbed fence between neighbors.
Cover yourself, love. Please.
It is my splintered cross to keep you safely distanced
from humanity. Here, another promise
I didn’t mean to break. Here, another kiss as apology.
A board book to show what it was like
before. Talking animals to prove the world can be
wildly unquiet. & innocent. A sky
made up of myths. & stars. Honest-to-goodness stars.
All gas & flame & unobstructed whimsy.
Here is someone else’s tree to carve your initials into.
Here, love, is the tree of my body
to learn to climb. Far from here. From me. To touch
whatever’s still up there, beautifully above us.
THIRD PLACE
Mayowa Oyewale: Silence
after Gbenga Adesina
Silence of the hostel and the body of the boy in it.
Silence of his songs & little dances.
Of the walls, silence of the
shadows.
Silence of doors opening in slow motion, like
remembrance,
silence of forgetting.
Silence of the daily news, of the numbers in the news,
of people dying inside those numbers.
Silence of the empty hostel and the
emptiness in him.
Silence of the many bodies cut off from his body.
Silence of ringing calls in the evenings, of the boy’s mother, of
her soft sobs becoming one with the nights.
Silence of the windows, opening always
to nothing.
Silence of his books & brown dust
on their many lipe.
Silence of his
calendar, the days
in the belly of its months—
silence of this ball, aka time, rolling & rolling
into countless holes of
darkness.
Anthology Finalists
Megan Aldridge, Andrew Analore, K.P. Anderson, Brianna Arnold, Elliot Chapman, Deborah DeNicola, Diana Donovan, Gail Ford, Robert René Galván, Emily Hosler, Sean Huh, Karen Kovacik, Gabrielle Langley, Zev Levinson, Naomi Lowinsky, Darren Lyons, Katharyn Machan, Mari-Carmen Marin, Megan Merchant, Mayowa Oyewale, James Penha, Neethu Prasanna, Yiskah Rosenfeld, Joel Savishinsky, Sharon Scholl, Kristina Stapleton, Holly Venus, A. Garnett Weiss, John Sibley Williams,
Selected by:
Martha Serpas' latest collection is Double Effect. She has also authored Côte Blanche 2002); The Dirty Side of the Storm; and The Diener February 2015). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, and in many anthologizes. She has taught at Yale Divinity School and the University of Tampa, where she served as poetry editor of Tampa Review. A native of south Louisiana, she remains involved in efforts to restore Louisiana’s wetlands. Since 2006 she has worked as a trauma hospital chaplain.
Maya Marshall is a Chicago-based writer, editor, and poet. She is co-founder of www. underbellymag.com. Marshall holds fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her chapbook Secondhand was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2016. Marshall earned her MFA from the University of South Carolina, and she serves as a senior editor for [PANK] and as a manuscript editor for Haymarket Books. Find her on the internet; @mayaamarshall Twitter; @maya.marshall.16 Insta and FB.
Vickie Vértiz’s first full collection of poetry, Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut, won a 2018 PEN America literary prize. Swallows is published by Finnishing Line Press. A 2018 Bread Loaf Environmental fellow, a Macondist, recent CantoMundo Fellow, and seven-time VONA participant, Vickie was also the 2015 Lucille Clifton Scholar at the Community of Writers. Her work was chosen by Natalie Diaz for the 2016 University of Arizona Poetry Center Summer Residency Program.Her writing is featured in the New York Times magazine, Huizache, Nepantla, the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others..
