The WOA Distancing Project is a virtual space for local Sacramento area writers and artists of all genres to share their art through Zoom readings, pictures, video, radio and this website. Below is poetry, storytelling, verse, music, much of which has come from our abrogated lives and former routines. But not all.

The physical space is now a virtual space.

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Zoom042720-Nick, Jeremy, Gena, Rose Ann, Ivy, Todd

Distance by Frederick Foote

Isolation on a remote station

six feet outside my reach is

my untouchable destination

just beyond the flattening curve

ball life has pitched me

a novel virus that

reads like a

doomsday thriller

in Manila

ZOOM420a-Rose Ann, Joanne, Nick, Todd, Lynette

ZOOM420b–Mary and Robin

Andy Laufer-The Owl Box

Zoom, April 13th, 2020 Reading

Zia Torabi

Invisible by Ziaeddin Torabi

We are prisoners in our homes

without locks or chains.

We are imprisoned

so we circle ourselves

circle

circle

circle

until we feel dizzy

fall and die.

We are prisoners in our homes

without locks or chains

and we know

our enemy

the devil

lurks outside.

The invisible enemy

we cannot see or feel

but he can

and he is waiting there

to catch and kill us

the devil

the invisible enemy.

*****

The End of Convenient Fictions by Mirah Lucas

Painting lips  with goodbyes,

an empty mouth of soft sounds—

a slow, long howl gliding like strings of a cello 

in double-stop unison—

my breath, your breath—

inhaling, exhaling 

the dissonance of our unexpected nows.

I pour my fictions onto you, a mix 

of memories, of misrememberings,

a muddled gouache on your body.

Today is the end,

as the swollen starts to rot, starts to grow

a masterpiece of ruin.

Today, we will not fold the world inside our arms, 

and instead say

I love you

forever. 

Vicki Carroll

Joanne Leilani Carpenter

Andy Laufer

Mike Pickering

Ivy Almond

Karen Durham

Lynette Blumhardt

Jennifer O’Neill Pickering’s Journal

 March 19^th, 2020

I am trying to keep a Coronvirus journal during this trying time. I had been hearing reports of the virus during the winter in a city in China, Wuhan that I’d never heard of.  The reports were scary but seemed far away. It was about this time I came down with the worst sore throat I remembered. On the second day I had a strep throat test that proved negative. For four days I could barely swallow, my glands were swollen, and I got a temperature of 102, which broke after a day. On the fifth day my sore throat had improved, and I had no fever but was weak from lack of food. I posted my symptoms on Nextdoor, the local neighborhood social media site to see if anyone else had the same symptoms. A few had and suggested several home remedies one that included whiskey. There was one person that suggested I might have the Coronvirus, though I had not been abroad or in the Bay area where a woman had developed it. I didn’t think much more about the virus or the 4-day bout with a sore throat. I couldn’t imagine the wakeup call that was coming.

On March 5^th,

sister-in-law called with distress in her voice to tell me that her husband and my twin brother had had a major stroke from a blood clot to his brain. This is how I found out that there was a person in Sacramento with the virus and that person was being treated for the virus at UCD Med Center where I was headed at eight o’clock that night. On route to the NICU (neurological critical unit) and wandering in the hallway I was almost run down by a speeding gurney. My twin brother was strapped to it and I saw he was alive as I cried out his name. He had just come from surgery to remove the clot to his brain after being air lifted from a Chico Inloe Medical Center. I waited Tondering if he would make it. My husband had a bad swollen ankle caused by an infection on his calf and needed to elevate his leg and so had to leave me alone. After an hour and a half, a young woman who did not look old enough to be a doctor took me in a private room and explained the prognosis. She gently said in clinical terms “That I should not hope for much.” Parts of his brain were gone. He was hospitalized at the Med Center from March 5th, four days before our 68th birthday, on a ventilator for a week and unconscious for several days. I visited every other day, washing my hands before and after visiting. By the 7th day he was awake and alert and had pulled out the ventilator tube. By the 8th day he signed his name perfectly to a Power of Attorney form and was breathing on his own alert and answering questions, though his speech was garbled. I need to thank the medical staff at the UCD Med Center for their skills and amazing intervention and saving, my brother, Buck.

Stubbornness and determination are so important in recovery and it runs in the family. He has been moved to a skilled nursing facility still struggles with swallowing, can’t stand without assistance as these areas are compromised by the stroke causing paralysis on one side of his body. I can only see him through a window in his room. Skilled nursing centers are quarantined from outside visitation as they need to be .

March 22^nd

Today I went to Trader Joes at 9am when it first opened. The store was rationing how many people could enter the store. As soon as one person exited another was allowed in. There was a line of people with scrubbed down disinfected carts waiting to get into the store that wrapped around the building.  I started to turn around and then asked a clerk if they had a time period where just “old people could shop?” He said well you don’t look old (in all fairness I had on my mask on). I removed it and he said, “You have young eyes.” “I, am 68.” “When the next customer leaves you can go right in.”

I was never so glad to be old since I received my first retirement check.

March 21^st

Spring is here and there is so much rebirth and renewal everywhere it is hard to believe that we are in a pandemic and catapulted into the Great Depression of my grandparents. Unfortunately, President Trump’s tax policies (cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans) have positioned us for more pain. He needs to reinstate taxes on the very wealthy, the 1% immediately as a “war measure.” It is the patriotic thing to do, but I haven’t heard anything about this mentioned at his moronic press conferences (excluding the science people who by the way are not practicing safe distancing)…nothing to diminish the deficit we are racking up.

March 22^nd

I can’t sleep and it is 12:30. We are almost out of TP and PT. I can’t find bleach anywhere. I miss shopping. I saw my first Ladybug today on a leaf of a very hearty sunflower volunteer. I have never had so many volunteer sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, and sweet peas. The calendulas and Echinacea are also, coming back, but they are annuals. I love working in the garden. My moments there are centering and comforting despite the controlled chaos around me the sun is warm on my back and the lady bugs are busy taking care of my plants.

Mike and I took a long bike ride to the river. It wasn’t too crowded. I am afraid to go to the store. There is no hand sanitizer, but a friend told us how to make our own from liquid Aloe Vera and alcohol(60% alcohol to 40% Aloe Vera).

March 23rd

I feel crappy today mainly because of continued shoulder pain in my right shoulder. It hurts when I breathe deeply on my right side. Also, I didn’t sleep well. I just want to stay in bed. I have allergies.

March 25^th
I wrestled with getting back to sleep after waking at 3am this morning.

I have been waking in the middle of the night since the days have gotten longer and before the Coronvirus outbreak. I wake and can’t get back to sleep with thoughts popping like kernels of corn in an air popper. I get up and rattle around in the kitchen wiping down the counters with disinfectant I concocted from bleach and dish soap. My husband cleaned up the kitchen last night, but I am more thorough. I toss my pea filled heating pad in the microwave to assuage the persistent pain in my shoulder, that I am afraid to get X-rayed because clinics and hospitals are full of sick people, and some with the Coronvirus. My doctor concurs.  But when I take a deep breath I hurt on my right side. I remind myself I have had similar pain in the past from bursitis in a shoulder blade area, but then that was before my twin brother was recently diagnosed with suspected lung cancer.

I climb back into bed next to my husband who is snoring contentedly. I try reading a paperback real book, by Elian Hilderbrand. It is called Summer of 69 and brings back my own memories of that uncertain, violent, and hopeful period. I read a little and then pick up my IPAD and go on Twitter, a mistake. The Lt. Governor of Texas has just asked grandparents (and I guess that means those who are over 60 who don’t have grandchildren) to make the sacrifice of themselves to allow the economy (which has mostly been shut down) to return to business as usual. I tweet,” Ok why don’t you set an example for us all by being the first in line to be sacrificed.”

Tomorrow I visit my brother at the skilled nursing facility where I can talk to him 15 feet away through a crack in the window or over the phone. When I get there, he is vocal about wanting to go home and I don’t blame him.  Most of the staff are millennials or of the Generation X age group. on and I fear he will develop the Coronvirus too and there won’t be a ventilator available or bed or both.  I just heard on the news that this age-group has the highest incidence of the Coronavirus. I am now his Power of Attorney and jumping through hoops with Medicare and Medical which has made me a huge fan of universal healthcare.

It is 7am and there is no hope of going back to sleep. I have started my 3^rd journal entry to document my experience during the Coronavirus. I will make myself go for a walk or the dog will make me take her. I will get out in the garden and putter about with the abundance of annuls all volunteers that reaffirm life. It is a beautiful spring and the sun is a comfort despite all our troubles, I will create. There are short stories that need their happy endings, I will make art 

because I am an artist and this work requires solitude. I will login to Zoom and connect with other writers to share the uncertainty of our lives living in a in a pandemic. I am grateful to social media to be able to connect with others remembering my grandmother did not have such luxuries during the polio epidemic and the Spanish Flu pandemic. She’d recount stories of how they were shunned because her little brother developed polio and a notice of Quarantine was posted on their front door with crossbones

Too cheer myself up I even ordered a pretty summer dress because Mike, my husband will be taking me out to our favorite restaurant when this is over. I feel ashamed of relenting that my hair won’t be cut this month, or my pedicure will be put off and that I can’t get a massage or go away to the ocean for a few days. I feel ashamed because my brother can’t get up and leave the skilled nursing facility and that panic and suffering is the next “breaking news “on the television that seems always on in his room. I feel ashamed because there is so much suffering all over the world and the best and only thing real way I can do to help is shelter in place, help my brother, and pay my hair stylist and pedicurist, though they won’t be providing these services in April. I am not a seamstress and don’t know how to sew well but if someone will show me, I will.

 Hope everyone is safe or as my friend Sue says, “6 feet or six feet under.”

 Jennifer

A New Poem by Alexander McCall Smith, written as a response to the current situation and forwarded by Andy Laufer

“In a time of distance”

The unexpected always happens in the way The unexpected has always occurred: While we are doing something else, While we are thinking of altogether Different things — matters that events Then show to be every bit as unimportant As our human concerns so often are; And then, with the unexpected upon us, We look at one another with a sort of surprise; How could things possibly turn out this way When we are so competent, so pleased With the elaborate systems we’ve created — Networks and satellites, intelligent machines, Pills for every eventuality — except this one? And so we turn again to face one another And discover those things We had almost forgotten, But that, mercifully, are still there: Love and friendship, not just for those To whom we are closest, but also for those Whom we do not know and of whom Perhaps we have in the past been frightened; The words brother and sister, powerful still, Are brought out, dusted down, Found to be still capable of expressing What we feel for others, that precise concern; Joined together in adversity We discover things we had put aside: Old board games with obscure rules, Books we had been meaning to read, Letters we had intended to write, Things we had thought we might say But for which we never found the time; And from these discoveries of self, of time, There comes a new realization That we have been in too much of hurry, That we have misused our fragile world, That we have forgotten the claims of others Who have been left behind; We find that out in our seclusion, In our silence; we commit ourselves afresh, We look for a few bars of song That we used to sing together, A long time ago; we give what we can, We wait, knowing that when this is over A lot of us — not all perhaps — but most, Will be slightly different people, And our world, though diminished, Will be much bigger, its beauty revealed afresh.

Frederick Foote Contributions

Simplicity

Complexity breeds arrogance and self-centered reflection

that re-enforce the bias that complex creatures are the apex predators

Viruses invisible to the naked eye slay that conceit with a wicked blade

that cuts to the bone and unseats complexity from her throne

crumbles economic kingdoms, disrupts domestic tranquility,

soils every sanctuary, darkens every future courtesy of

“a nucleic acid molecule in a protein coat”

A simple creature indeed

_{Author of the short story collections,} For the Sake of Soul _and Crossroads Encounters. 

Rose Ann Goodwin

Janice Burt

Todd Boyd