Writing is an act of resistance
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Declaration of Defendence
By Conney D. Williams I save my tears for weddings and presidential elections while America the beneficent thrusts anthems up our spleens the pasty ballot of deprecation without representation please GOD, bless Ol’ Glory with sufficient stars and stripes to vandalize my person until even bowels lose their allegiance I am a casualty of…
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Consoling My Poem
By Rebecca L’Bahy Imagine him at night, sleepless in his tacky golden bed. How he tosses, turns, finally rising at 3 a.m. to check his phone, its glow a salve to his tiny soul. What if it were you lighting up his screen, what would you say? Think hard, dear poem, be brave. It’s true…
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Winning Campaign, a poem by Karthik Purushothaman
I wear 140 characters as pinstripes and say what I think without thinking. My superpower is fitting both feet in my mouth and projectile vomiting the stuff between my toes. I save the reporters from jumping off buildings, leaping across canyon -deep cracks and swimming upstream to the source where the current is strongest and…
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The Unofficial Recap of Trump’s Perfectly Normal Post-Election Press Conference
By Amy Porterfield Levy This will be the first in a new series called “The Unofficial Recaps of Trump Pressers.” If Trump is impeached soon, it will be a very short series. It will also be short if your recapper is murdered by angry men dressed as Pepe the Frog. So, here it goes. ……
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Where to turn when the truth burns our retina
By Sarah Bigham down down down they fall face-planted spread-eagled side-sprawled knee-buckled skull-cracked gut-shot arm-splayed gaping-mouthed tears fall and hopes fall and families on coffins fall and believers on knees fall and children’s dreams of fathers’ pride fall but fists rise and knees bend and arms link and…
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Black Lives Matter? Will Our Stories Save Us?
Black Lives Matter, Essay, Slave narratives, #BlackLivesMatter, #WritersResist, Amy Abugo Ongiri, Asa Sullivan, Khalil SullivanBy Amy Abugo Ongiri Asa Sullivan didn’t want to go back to jail and he shouldn’t have had to. But, on June 6, 2006, neighbors in a rapidly gentrifying area of San Francisco called the police to report what they believed to be suspicious behavior. Though they did not have a search warrant, police…
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The Streets
By Raya Yarbrough My aunt took me down to Harlem, down to Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. She talked to me about history, and struggle, and my head took it in, as the history of struggle. And my life went on. Colorless conversations. Happy white-noise. Then I woke up, and her words were not…
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Blue Plate Special
By Sara Marchant The little girl in the booth behind me is bouncing on her vinyl seat in excitement, and I stop chewing my crunchy salad in order to better eavesdrop. My back is to her, and her back is towards me, so I can hear her breathy voice over the bouncing creak of…
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Don’t Make America Great Again
By Tawana “Honeycomb” Petty I got a fever for the flavor of liberation, a quenching for the thirst of vindication. A country built on slavery must pay reparations, or at the very least stop their racial propagation. Black bodies still suffer from redlining, and segregation, then get displaced from safe havens by gentrification. They poison…