PANDEMIC POETRY

  
  
covid19 hay(na)ku for march 15

what’s the problem
with staying
home?

we’re healthy, have
food, water,
internet,

time
to ponder
this new normal

covid19 hay(na)ku for march 20

i used to
believe in
god

but angels and
demons are
everywhere

sometimes you can’t
tell who’s
who

haiku for march 24, 2020

it hasn’t touched us.
yet. But it will my friends, it
will. are you ready?

hay(na)ku: my dogwood tree this covid spring (3/26)

salmon pink buds
unfurl slowly
stretching

in the warm
spring breeze
while

we, sequestered inside,
observe their
glory

hay(na)ku for march 30

zooming in from
china and
truckee

from dallas and
oakland san
jose—

my students seem
okay so
far

we discuss the
syllabus grading
finals

but I really
want to
ask:

have you eaten?
are you sleeping?

are we safe?
for how long?

MELINDA LUISA DE JESÚS is Associate Professor and former Chair of Diversity Studies at California College of the Arts. She writes and teaches about Filipinx/American cultural production, girl culture, monsters, and race/ethnicity in the United States. She edited Pinay Power: Peminist Critical Theory, the first anthology of Filipina/American feminisms (Routledge 2005). Her writing has appeared in Mothering in East Asian Communities: Politics and Practices; Completely Mixed Up: Mixed Heritage Asian North American Writing and Art; Approaches to Teaching Multicultural Comics; Ethnic Literary Traditions in Children’s Literature; Challenging Homophobia; Radical Teacher; The Lion and the Unicorn; Ano Ba Magazine; Rigorous; Konch Magazine; Rabbit and Rose; MELUS; Meridians; The Journal of Asian American Studies; and Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures.
 
Melinda is also a poet and her chapbooks, Humpty Drumpfty and Other Poems, Petty Poetry for SCROTUS Girls’ with poems for Elizabeth Warren and Michelle Obama, Defying Trumplandia, Adios Trumplandia, James Brown’s Wig and Other Poems, and Vagenda of Manicide and Other Poems were published by Locofo Chaps in 2017. Her first collection of poetry, peminology, was published by Paloma Press (March 2018). Melinda was the Muriel Gold Senior Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada in 2019 where she co-created the Pinay Power II: Celebrating Peminisms in the Diaspora conference. She is a mezzo-soprano, a mom, an Aquarian, and admits an obsession with Hello Kitty.

Link to Table of Contents.