Here’s the link to these three Corona Sonnets, published on August 7, 2021.
And here are the poems themselves. Thanks to the Sonnet Corona Project for support and inspiration!
April 2020 Not our call, boy. Pronounce your own sentence, And let its cold raw taste linger, bitter – A stench of unform’d words and off syntax, Sour milk fingers just now refresh Twitter. And what about their words, that last longest? Dead again today, pinned between covers, Hot, in quarantine that lasts through August, Verses of voyages, expiring brothers. The Friar’s letter never was delivered. The searchers of the town locked him in. Slant-rhymes fish-like were silvered, And burn hot in my throat like old man’s gin. It is a mad thing to read on a book. Outside’s a place not to touch but to look.
May 2020 Is here again and I cannot hold them both -- Or “is” or storm: two choices only. All night The surge splatters my house. Third month Of quarantine splashes disorder tight. To shore curls a wave, delicate, reveal- ing wind’s ruffle over ocean’s taut skin. It traps dry feet on narrow shore, conceal- ing routes beyond the seas they underpin. Soliton waves don’t last forever, Though they outpace horse and rider, pinch high Through the narrows, vanish behind heather, A twist in time’s river, bubbling, terrify -- Waves never break without shoreward going. In my neighbor’s yard an ark is growing.
May 2020 I don't really know, but at least they're home. That’s what I mouth to hollow pre-dawn air, In vacant hours of teenage sleep syndrome. My black coffee, meditation, despair Hold me still in don’t-wake-them quiet -- nowhere Or watching a poet’s pot that never boils Because the burner’s in need of repair Or the back garden’s full of gargoyles That lure me to combat – I bring my oils – With thump and thwack and splash and grab and screech Until the monsters’ heads hide ‘neath subsoils. Conquering Dad-hero my task I preach: Hunker down or hightail to the highlands: I cleave these two from so many thousands --
Steve Mentz is a writer who lives on the Connecticut Shoreline and teaches in Queens. His poems have appeared in the Glasgow Review of Books, Underwater New York, Blood and Bourbon, and in the book Oceanic New York. His most recent book is Ocean, part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series.