Plague Diary: How Often This Thought Occurs
October 6, 2020

An eerie thrill of gundamentalist fervor
displays in phallic barrels
and testicular magazines.

I want it to end despite other dreams
(I spoke with my father from a high ladder
he came back from the dead to steady;

I met a woman I once had loved
and told her my life had since been a blank,
while recalling all that later occurred).

I want everything gone, except for what was
nothing special in the days before the fool
came with his bag of recycled hatreds:

flimsy and failing hates, yet seemingly as sweet
as lead paint flaking from the master’s house
where power is just another form of fear

and strength is a pantomime of courage
played for the lights of a burned out marquee
before an audience eroding one by one—

some decomposing where they sit, the rest
just rising to forget they ever came.



Plague Diary: Invested
October 22, 2020

To some you give your elbow
and to a rare few others your hand,
while others still will tell you it’s nothing:
they had it last winter when no one knew,
before this fake moon landing tyranny.

Others hunker in dugouts going mad
from the bombardment of coverage,
wanting to jump on the parapets and scream
both defiance and invitation.

I still run patrols down the nearest alleys,
behind walls where you still can believe
in a normal you can’t quite remember.

And I still imagine futures — people I’ll see when we can meet again, as if nothing happened worth mentioning but a few sad names.


Plague Diary: Lines From the Starving Fortress
December 6, 2020

On a wind whipped winter day at Missionhurst,
stucco pseudo-Gothic in a park
unfrequented by any but neighbors
I try to envision her waiting.

I end up performing a kind of penance.
Memory, that is, and what isn’t in it,
which is a kind of memory too:
the native village never quite existed.

Now we hear not six months more
as the relieving forces assemble.
We’ll leave the cellars to move around,
and go beyond the ruins of our walls.

Never far, but always forever away,
I thought of you from another plane of time.
What would I do to see you manifest,
but everything, where nothing could prevail.

M. A. Schaffner lives with spouse and pugs in a house built cheaply 110 years ago in Arlington, Virginia. Their work has recently appeared in The MacGuffin, Illuminations, The Writing Disorder, and the anthology Written in Arlington. Earlier appearances included Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland, and The Tulane Review. When not avoiding home repairs through poetry, M. A. wades through the archival records of the Second United States Colored Infantry (1863-66) with a view toward compiling a regimental history.