-A Cento

Valued customer,

To ensure a safe environment
to ensure the health and safety of everyone while supporting our entire community
to ensure you have a safe, healthy and enjoyable flight experience
to help protect riders and drivers
to help you, our restaurant partners, and our drivers
to help keep you healthy, safe and comfortable when you fly with us
to support you and your travel plans
to keep our venue clean and hygienic and our patrons safe
to personally let you know that safety—your safety—is, and always will be, job one at our airline
to reach out to you personally about what we are doing here at Hilton
to ensure that every member of our Delta family is informed on an ongoing basis, including you
to assure you that we are taking every measure possible
to share with you what we are doing
to share some of the steps we are taking
to personally connect with you about the actions we’re taking
to share the actions we’re taking

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I am reaching out today

I personally want

I wanted

I wanted

I want

I want

We want

We want

We want

We want

We want

We want

We want

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The prerequisite for fun must always be safety.

In these uncertain times,

Rest assured that we are prepared.

Since January, our pandemic response team has been activated.

Not only is safety built into the DNA of everything we are as a company, but

We remain committed to offering you flexible booking options.

Your health and wellness are always our number one priority.

The health and safety of Lyft’s community is our priority.

Our mission is to show you a good time.

We at The Post fully understand our responsibility to keep you informed.

At Restoration Hardware, we believe there are moments in life that should be defined by our vision, values, hopes and dreams, not by a virus.

Your safe and reliable power is as important now as it has ever been.

We all got into this business to make magic happen.

We were one of the first to respond.

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We know that consumers have a lot of questions and concerns.

We know the current travel environment may limit your ability to stay with us.

We know Lyft can be a critical lifeline for communities in need.

We know that earning Hilton Honors Points and Status is an important way we show appreciation.

We know it is extremely difficult to get through to our call centers right now and many of you are experiencing tremendous frustration.

We know no words will do justice to everyone’s individual experience.

We know how important cleanliness is during these times.
 
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Our stores have elevated their already high standards of hygiene.

We have significantly amplified those and stepped up our “heavy cleans.”

We have increased aircraft cleaning each night, including the walls, windows, window shades, galleys, lavatories and floors.

Our porters and bussers maintain a regular schedule of sanitizing restrooms and other common areas, as well as tending to spills and messes as they occur.

Our team members are required to wear two disposable single-use gloves when working at the smoothie station, handling soups, or working with any other ready to eat foods.

Our bartenders and waitstaff all adhere to our strict protocol of regular handwashing.

Our teachers will no longer be providing hands on adjustments.

Our staff is required to not come to work if they’re feeling remotely unwell.

Our team members are highly trained in handling potentially ill passengers.

Gloves must be worn on both hands and must be free of any holes.

We’ve temporarily suspended hot towel service.

We’re keeping a list of names of our attendees through our ticketing systems and all employees must punch in when coming to work.

If we are notified of a rider or driver testing positive, they will be temporarily suspended from using Lyft until they are medically cleared.

We have received consecutive A ratings from the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

We do not expect any interruption of your service.
 
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Our stores have elevated their already high standards of hygiene.

We have significantly amplified those and stepped up our “heavy cleans.”

We have increased aircraft cleaning each night, including the walls, windows, window shades, galleys, lavatories and floors.

Our porters and bussers maintain a regular schedule of sanitizing restrooms and other common areas, as well as tending to spills and messes as they occur.

Our team members are required to wear two disposable single-use gloves when working at the smoothie station, handling soups, or working with any other ready to eat foods.

Our bartenders and waitstaff all adhere to our strict protocol of regular handwashing.

Our teachers will no longer be providing hands-on adjustments.

Our staff is required to not come to work if they’re feeling remotely unwell.

Our team members are highly trained in handling potentially ill passengers.

Gloves must be worn on both hands and must be free of any holes.

We’ve temporarily suspended hot towel service.

We’re keeping a list of names of our attendees through our ticketing systems and all employees must punch in when coming to work.

If we are notified of a rider or driver testing positive, they will be temporarily suspended from using Lyft until they are medically cleared.

We have received consecutive A ratings from the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

We do not expect any interruption of your service.

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Public health is a communal effort.

Travel bans, social distancing, and city mandates have made our businesses unable to support our employees.

We are in unprecedented times.

 
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Because the health crisis is so urgent and is likely to spare no one

In order to make financial health and our services as accessible as possible

For the next two weeks, we will offer

a complimentary choice of a probiotic, ginger, or turmeric booster with any made-to-order smoothie purchase

funds to drivers should they be diagnosed

hand sanitizer available to all who attend the event

contactless payment methods

a 20% discount

a substantial portion of our coverage free to all

at least one special deal surrounding our immune boosting products

To be clear, we can’t commit to reimbursing every single person in need.

We have no idea how many people will do this, and unfortunately, we don’t have unlimited funds.

Our store door will be left open to minimize doorknob contact.

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You can book with confidence.

Unfortunately during recessions, unemployment can be inevitable.

Small actions can make a big difference when everyone helps out.

At Hilton, we believe it is in challenging times like these that the power of hospitality is needed most of all.

We are going to continue to do what we do best.

All of the air in the cabin is, on average, completely changed every three minutes.

We’ll also clean the POS system screen as often as possible.

As always, we offer acupuncture and herbal supplements to help boost your immune system.

Now more than ever, it is time to apply yoga in our daily lives.

Thankfully, as of today there have not been any disruptions to our operation or service.

At the time of this email, we are shipping orders without interruption.

On behalf of our 23,000 crewmembers at JetBlue

We want you to have peace of mind when choosing Frontier.

Stay safe as we navigate through the next days and weeks.

Diversify your portfolio, follow your disciplined rebalancing strategy, and stick with your plan.

As we are not experts in healthcare or employment law, all information is to be taken as a suggestion.

News continues on many other fronts as well.

At this time all our events are continuing as planned until further notice.

As of today, authorities have not announced travel restrictions to any destinations where we fly.

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Laura Eve Engel is the author of Things That Go (Octopus Books, 2019). She is the recipient of fellowships from Provincetown Fine Arts Works Center, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and the Yiddish Book Center. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, PEN America, Tin House, and elsewhere. Find her on everything @lauraeveengel.

The concrete and filth,
an outhouse, cyclical, for the soul.
The Elect’s bodies, bodies, bodies
fitting between gears and silicon
wafers, folded into origami
swans, each held precious
by a mother once

Do not refuse
Do not refuse

Mantra of a calamity
of anti-care, not careless
just a cavity
where care should be

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Cameron Anderson is a graduate of Western Michigan University. He resides in Mid-Michigan.

A choice chew, the urine-soaked woodchip
of Master                  FILTH hides
         in the long hair     like Kings! Kingdoms!
   of harvested goats…and subsequently…goat-skin
              tunics… Comets, blue fires burning
     upside-down, when the greenheads learn
 to bite the face, after terraced and Annihilated
                                            generations. Ft. Bragg
          slouch against the sea, begs, for itself, for new
  angel tourists, less diseased, it was wrong
                to despise them, white-jawed, “in principus,
      eat eat eat, vorus” he said, his bush-slept pitbull
  on a string, its tiger stripes, dragging its bones
           through town, through painted line geometry
  here, treatment
      of the Thing, the Project of all Philosophy
as a buried pipe, in loose duff, in trench
  of severed worms, that we ourselves trenched vis.
     CREATED all ziggurats of sovereignty, force +
          fecundity: this is the way: he punished the rapist boys he
               turned them (mabinogi)
into pigs wolves deer so that they would mate
 with each other and produce children, changed back
    now human, these children, further sons, adopted + named
      by lord Magician,                         MATH
                               in charge
               of meaning, by plains gossip, month
          to month, those poor people, what   ENCHANTMENT?
 EDD, BoA: come soon. They can’t have
      what they have, down there, only in pumped
 image, like a dead +
        giddy planet in stooped grass, no triumph survives
   the flag-colored dogs

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Hunter Gagnon is a writer of poetry and experimental fiction. His work has appeared in Joyland, 7×7.LA, Cabildo Quarterly and elsewhere. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Slouching Beast Journal.  He lives in Kennebunk, Maine with his partner and two dogs. 

The multirainbows of the circle
Clouds like white cups above
          the unfolding
                                  flowers, the rage
       of the circle, as it leans there
in the wall’s arm, the river of pillbugs
               to Nippur, to canyon-land
   and plains a torn-open mouth
 yellow stone mouth to
                              gravel
                              hills
                              + poppies (for the CIA)
         / that guy in the cargo shorts
           waving us in
     ^cave gods swarm the burning
                   animal, its smoke, nourishment^
in the circle there is
a gun
…
in the beef stacked
there is a gun in the
netflix binged there is
a gun in the victorian
architecture there is a
gun in this just ineffable
sense of rightness of
place of coast of stars of
america of just enjoy it
there is a gun → HIS gun
           and an emotional therapist, lonely huge and
           sweating, blue
           frocked, at a tiny
           door, the one that goes inside, the only one

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Hunter Gagnon is a writer of poetry and experimental fiction. His work has appeared in Joyland, 7×7.LA, Cabildo Quarterly and elsewhere. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Slouching Beast Journal.  He lives in Kennebunk, Maine with his partner and two dogs. 

If this were a kitschy memoir, it’d be titled
something like When I could ollie, and it’d be
all about how skating saved my life, how it
helped me overcome prejudice and poverty,
and how I went on to get a degree from an
Ivy League school and now I’m a “social
entrepreneur” who “gives back” by encouraging
“at risk” youth to “find their voice” in skating;
and maybe it’d be a bestseller, I’d get invited on
Orpah or at least do a Ted Talk, and my next
book would be titled, And still I can ollie, the
New York Times would call me a “breath of
fresh air,” and, who knows, maybe I’d run
for Congress on a slogan like “We Still Have a
Dream”…

but I wasn’t born for all that, because my
memoir would be titled, Fuck suits! and Fuck
the police! because I was a skater, and that
was our credo; which is to say, skating
wasn’t for us a “sport” inasmuch as a habitus,
wild and rebellious, yes, but more accurately an
embodied speculative fiction: us remaking
worlds, worlds in which we’d progressively
innovate for pleasure’s and comradery’s sake
—no methodology, only mayhem; no plot,
just extrapolations on what is possible; and,
yeah, my memoir would talk about how
painfully white that ensemble was (even in sunny
southern Florida) and how me and my homie
Alvin, as black as mother Africa, didn’t get
invited to the backyard sessions and couldn’t
afford the skate-parks; and, yeah, all our black
and brown friends clowned us for “acting white,”
but mostly I’d tell you about how we embodied
the art of the misfit; how we “liberated” all the
wood from a Walmart construction site and built
our own ramps; how we’d listen to Public Enemy
as we rolled out to downtown Tampa, skated
its streets, ticky-tacky suits aghast and police
on the chase; and mostly, I’d tell you we always
got away and we never stopped speculating
on other possible worlds.

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Born in Puerto Rico and raised in southern Florida, Éric Morales-Franceschini is a former construction worker, US Army veteran, and community college grad who now holds a PhD from UC, Berkeley and is Assistant Professor of English and Latin American Studies at the University of Georgia. He is the author of the chapbook, Autopsy of a Fall (Newfound 2021), winner of the 2020 Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and the scholarly book, The Epic of Cuba Libre: the mambí, mythopoetics, and liberation (University of Virginia Press 2022).  His poetry and reviews have appeared at Moko, Acentos Review, Kweli, Witness, Bodega, Tropics of Meta, Newfound, Boston Review, and elsewhere.  

as i see it, a poet’s duty is is to avow
that not all proverbs are morally equivalent,
let alone translatable, but I didn’t
understand that, nor, evidently, did my kin
because when the island elders came to
reckon with the spectacle of us, they
didn’t oooh or aaah, they just unleashed
a heresy of words, this is only a dream,
you are already dead, is what I heard,
which of course meant that it’s not about
the gustatory animal we are, but this
naïve people we become, but, like I said,
no one listened; and so all the more
emphatically they said, here you live
to work, there we work to live, which
meant of course that it’s not about the
labor, it’s about the unpaid labor, about
all this surplus that avows an
impossibility: something for nothing;
and how could we not listen, not know
it would come to this—these boundless
days and mortal names, the peddling
of fantasies and no way home except by
heresy, the heresy of words and the
infidelity it all embodies
—so little
time, so many
utopias.

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Born in Puerto Rico and raised in southern Florida, Éric Morales-Franceschini is a former construction worker, US Army veteran, and community college grad who now holds a PhD from UC, Berkeley and is Assistant Professor of English and Latin American Studies at the University of Georgia. He is the author of the chapbook, Autopsy of a Fall (Newfound 2021), winner of the 2020 Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and the scholarly book, The Epic of Cuba Libre: the mambí, mythopoetics, and liberation (University of Virginia Press 2022).  His poetry and reviews have appeared at Moko, Acentos Review, Kweli, Witness, Bodega, Tropics of Meta, Newfound, Boston Review, and elsewhere.  

Time-lapsed recorded leaves arc with the soft

Star-light, staining sills & stilling legs leaving 

REM,  as if performing the wave. 

********I haven’t slept

sober. My dreams continue their evenings without me

placing orange-laced-boy-shorts

on a bread-crumbed plate. 

********We need to spoon.

The REM-battered twist around each other

thirsty as the leaves recorded 

mid-afternoon falling beside the bed sheet, 

********as the sound of soft flushing

from a flight above. Their voices & waste are

a sweet interruption. We’ve moved the Russian doll

from the book case. Its succession of 

********wooden bodies sounded

like someone was knocking on the door when we stumbled

to piss at night. I miss the flutter. I miss the possibility

of shifting presence. The bodies are always

********sleeping in these poems with the same loss.

First was the imprint of a hand

Now my name is painted on three bridges

& deemed degenerate preservation. It’s no good. 

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Patrick Redmond received his MFA at Brooklyn College. He currently teaches composition and creative writing at CUNY. Recent work may be found in The Hunger, Silver Pinions, Bomb Cyclone, Prelude, and elsewhere.

white sales
white sheets
white horses
white heat

white bread
white milk
white meat
white guilt

white cliffs
white sand
white lines
white lambs

white Christmas
white knights
white feathers
white flight

white fences
white trash
white noise
whitewash

white collar
white ties
White House
white lies

white flags
in sight–
who’ll turn
off white

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David Southward teaches in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of two collections: Bachelor’s Buttons (Kelsay Books 2020) and Apocrypha (Wipf & Stock 2018). His awards include the Lorine Niedecker Prize (selected by Tyehimba Jess), the Muse Prize from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets (selected by Mark Doty), and the 2019 Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry. David resides in Milwaukee with his husband, Geoff. Read more at davidsouthward.com.

a cloud that follows us
wherever we go becomes
the last stage, what is lost
our auras, mothers

our fathers’ disappeared
remote pilot opens a window
to feel the breeze, notices
the contestant in high def

a look of worry at the wheel
as time runs out
the audience explodes
into the future collateral damage

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Joshua Zelesnick’s poems and political essays have appeared in Jubilat, Drunken Boat/Meridian Anthology, Word For/Word, Juked, 8 Poems, POETiCA REViEW, Labor Notes, Counter Punch, Yes Poetry, Texas Review, DIAGRAM, and other journals. His chapbook Cherub Poems was published with Bonfire Books in 2019.  He teaches at public school in Pittsburgh where he lives with his partner and two young daughters in a garden co-housing community. With friends, he helps host a living room music and reading series.

hunkering down behind the soft
purple stone we cheat
the wind to eat a sandwich top
our pack, bearded grass keeps
the wool economy wax

paper wrap break—fast his silence:
the only thing that can’t
be manufactured is land. You can
tidy her up or let her run

derelict, but you can’t draw or erase the wild raw
sustenance she births, as we all must learn to bend even
moss & lichens most primitive
instinct lives beside the nettle red

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Patricia Connolly studied poetry at the University of Notre Dame, where she earned an MFA. Currently, she lives and works in Chicago, where she teaches sociology and literature for a community college. In 2021, her chapbook Yeats’s Teahouse will be released as the first Permutations multimedia 3D poetry chapbook from Michigan State Press.