Whether you’re still in recovery or planning your resistance against the incoming regime, there’s plenty of common ground in this the Winter 2025 issue of Writers Resist. Enjoy the art, poetry and prose and then join us for our virtual Writers Resist Reads, Saturday 15 February 2025, at 5:00 p.m. Pacific. Just email for the…

By Melissa McEver Huckabay Sapphire flowers on the roadside.Mountain laurels that smell like grapes.Yellow sulphurs that flit among blooms.Breakfast tacos and tiny salsa cups.Muddy bayous that swallow your feet.Pine trees that touch the sun.Whataburger lines circling the block.Dr. Pepper. Shiner. Blue Bell.Sticky shirt by 8 a.m. Sunburn by 10.Summers hiding in air conditioning.Wearing shorts on…

By Karen Crawford even though you’re late for class, you don’t run because in this neck of the woods running screams fear, so you walk briskly and with purpose, always acting like you know where you’re going even if you don’t and when you get to the subway, you never root around your bag for…

By Flavian Mark Lupinetti Never before has my hospital seensuch dismembered torsos and pulverized brains,results of a shooting with an AR-15. The speed of a bullet from an AR-15creates cavitation through muscles and veins.A shot to the shoulder can rupture the spleen. All of our doctors and nurses convene,yet it’s futile to treat what are…

By Ash Reynolds Today I learned the word “ecocide”murder of the environmentIntentional destruction of the soil, airof olive trees, strawberry fieldsMourn for all that is lostthe homeless animals, the rootless treesDon’t cry over spilled oilor plastic crowding the oceanColonizers raping an open woundhands stained copper-tongue carmineDear planet, look what they’ve done to you Today I…

By Beulah Vega To those who do not lookshe looks nothing like mebut we share that look the slow ashen gaze that says I’m tired of these forms that push messy spheresinto uniform squares. She/ I/ we are tired. Tiredin the marrow of our bonesthat share color and structure but not marrow matches tired of…

By Amritha York for now the red maple in the cloth flag remains the stain of a history attempting to come undone,but the other day i said bye to my friend and wasn’t sure if i’d ever see her again.the other day, a waste management person told me they were scared of what they’d find…

By M.R. Mandell             after Patricia Smith We woke ourselves up, brushed our own hair, cooked our own dinners, tuckedour sisters into bed. We were thirty at the age of thirteen. We needed nobody. Vogued to Madonna. Leather jackets, tattooed midriffs, clove cigarettes slippingoff our lips, kissing girls under neon, electrifying every part of our…

By Ria Raj my mother traces her fingers along my mahogany-skinand calls me kaala,hindi for black. my mother traces her fingers along a film photograph of her homeland,and calls it kala,hindi for art. i find it particularly lovelythat artis intrinsicto Blacknessin the hindi language ka(a)la the ubiquity of theenglish languageis contingent upon Black destruction and…

By Jennifer Freed I, too, have felt myself to be prey.            What woman has not?   But I livein a white body. If ever Idialed 911, afraid of a manprowling around my home,I would not need to say, when the officers cameto my door— no—let me rephrase: it would neveroccur to methat my very first words would…

By Salena Casha If we were really there for the battle of Hydra and Hercules, we’d remember the crab. Monstrous, the size of two buildings, difficult to miss with its burnt orange shell. As Hydra’s heads fell again and again to Hercules’ sword, the crab leapt from the murky water and wrapped herself around Hercules…

By Sheree Shatsky Artist Statement This collage reflects the connection of women past with women present and future, faced with the loss of civil rights fought for and won by previous generations. We must stand on the shoulders of those who came before, who struggled for the rights we have very much taken for granted…

By Laura Grace Weldon I post a thank you to the four pound bag of garbanzo flourwhich threw itself off a high shelf. It burst open in a spectaculardisplay of organic bean dust, coating my face and sweater.I’d been festering with worries about which waythe vote might go, but explain that snort-laughing helps. To whatever…

By Jennifer Karp The car shows 94 degrees after our dry desert hike. I write political postcards to Swing States while you drive. Dust in our boots, our clothes, the cracks around our eyes. They’re called crow’s feet, but you call them smile lines. I don’t know crows from blackbirds from ravens. Volcan Mountain, Iron…

By Mary Brancaccio                         after William Stafford has flown from Himalayan heightsto breed in Bialowieza, one of the lastprimeval forests in Europe. He perches,high in the branches of a leafy mapleand chirps out his rosefinch song as ifeverything in the world depends on it.It does — Earth needs more melody,more calls to joy and desire,…

By Livia Meneghin Archived recordings of Ainu, Aleut, Lushootseed, Quechua, Boon, Saami, Somray, Warluwarra, and other critically endangered languages.All traditional items stolen for foreign museums.Water.Parking at a hospital.(Parking at) the university you attend.To knock on your neighbor’s door asking for sugar or to borrow a drill or if they can water your plants while you…