Where Are We Now?
The image of a plate of pandemic drifted into my mind in 2020, while I was cooking. Life, disguised as a pandemic (or conversely, the pandemic disguised as life) had dumped a crazy mess on our plates. It had served us a situation that was frightening, bizarre, difficult, and hard to define. We humans, sitting at the metaphorical dining table, were forced to confront it, and whether we liked to or not, deal with it.
How to respond to this plate of pandemic is not just the business of policy wonks or the medical profession. It is the stuff of this magazine: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art. When faced with difficult situations, creative people respond by creating. Their work articulates, mirrors, illuminates, analyzes, and deconstructs emotions, patterns, and ideas that are catalyzed by the present crisis. This crisis grows, abetted by the failure to achieve herd immunity through vaccination. With the latest variant, Omicron, a contemporary of the Delta Variant of Covid, the horizon of reprieve that seemed reachable only a short while ago, has now receded. While this is unhappy news for humanity, since 800,000 Americans and millions of people around the world have so far succumbed to the disease, it means that A Plate of Pandemic will, like the Climate Clock in New York’s Union Square, continue for the near future.
With this Winter 2021-22 issue, we’ve reached the fourth quarter of our quarterly, the end of the publishing year and the beginning of the next. Submissions regularly arrive, providing ample material for the coming year. Clearly, there’s a lot going on in the minds and studios of the creative community. Our tech-and-design editor, Margaret Haynes-Lamont, continues to find amazing plate images and beautiful presentations. Putting together this magazine has given me hope that art, as well as vaccines, will be our salvation.
Selma Moss-Ward
Editor
December, 2021
.
Mixed Media Art of K. Johnson Bowles
Heartless/Gutless/Soulless (But She Was…), 2021 16 x 16 x 3 inches mixed media Hold On, 2021 16 x 16 x 3 inches mixed media Aid/Abet/Ambush, 2021 16 x 16
After The Season
After the season of several deaths, the house closed itself off. Masking tape over windows, brown cuffs that held the mangled cardboard skin – Lay Do, Side, Erator, jut out in dark green lettering like trash-born Sanskrit. The
Margaret in the Playroom
When Margaret enters the basement playroom, she is not surprised by what she sees, but she is enraged nonetheless. Her three children, slumped here before her, have not cleaned. They have not even tidied. That is to say,
The Unmoving Journey
What you don’t know is that death feels like your body in an abandoned car, field left, weeds, wild wheat in the wheel well, paint slips off in the hands of each autumn storm. Your form
Phase ∞ Clinical Trial
“…Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial…” — Bob Dylan, Visions of Johanna Voila second shot gets jabbed into left arm deltoid muscle so our last year’s interminable fear begins to recede a bit
The Rise of Post-Pandemic Microcultures
By Eric D. Lehman In the 1990s the rise of the internet and the globally connected culture of the post-Cold War era promised a new world of unfettered freedom. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many people