Author: Editor

2020 Summer Olympics: Tokyo Games Medal Count

By Tara Campbell

Table reflecting those harmed b y the 2020 Summer Olympics and the lack of recognition they recieved in the form of medals—none for any of them.

* as of July 13
** as of September 8

 

Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse. She received her MFA from American University. In addition to Writers Resist, previous publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, Booth, Strange Horizons, and CRAFT Literary. She’s the author of a novel, TreeVolution, and four collections: Circe’s Bicycle, Midnight at the Organporium, Political AF: A Rage Collection, and Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection. Connect with her at www.taracampbell.com or on Twitter: @TaraCampbellCom or IG: @thetreevolution.

Photo by Sam Balye on Unsplash.

Note from Writers Resist: If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Farmers Market, Eastern Shore of Maryland

Summer 2021

By Erin Murphy

Everything is free, it seems: parking, treats for dogs
whose owners browse free-range brown

eggs. Last month scores of documents
were found in a nearby attic,

dry rotted and tattered. One offered
30 dollars for the capture of

a Negro man named Amos

with coarse trousers, a tolerable good
felt hat, buckled shoes, and scars

beneath both eyes. It’s not enough
that this street is now emblazoned

with the words Black Lives Matter.

 

Erin Murphy’s eighth book, Human Resources, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, Diode, Southern Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her awards include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, The Normal School Poetry Prize, and a Best of the Net award. She is poetry editor of The Summerset Review and Professor of English at Penn State Altoona. Visit website at www.erin-murphy.com.

Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue via a Creative Commons license.

Note from Writers Resist: If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

New Deal, No Mule

By Julie A Dickson

 

Cotton familiarity, certainly,
reparation absent, disparity
of races, apparent then, in lack
of mule plus 40 acres promised,
disconcerted, hired workers
of color, tried to transcend past
inequity, berated frequently,
repeatedly as subservient, un-
respected and mostly suspected
crime, intrusion, caucasian
collusion to diminish pride, worth
taken from generations passed,
freed at last, initial celebration,
only to face abrasive resentful
looks; reduced to history books,
lacking accurate depiction;
emancipation but cost high,
standing by fields, fruitful cotton
yield, in actuality, little more
than poverty revealed after 150
years freed, more than 50 since
King; other than fortunate few,
in contrast, bring home a living
inadequate, still cast in ill light;
not much has changed, reality
skewed, not equal exactly –
time to review, renew deal.

 

Julie A. Dickson is a poet and young adult fiction writer who addresses issues of environment, human and animal rights, and nature. Her work appears in journals including Ekphrastic Review, Sledgehammer, Open Word and Avocet. Dickson advocates for captive zoo and circus elephants and shares her home with two rescued feral cats, Cam and Claire. She is a Push Cart Prize nominee and serves on the board of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Her full length works are available on Amazon.

Photo credit: Tyler Merbler via a Creative Commons license.

Note from Writers Resist: If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Backyard Musings in America at Twilight

By Ashley R. Carlson

 

6:52 p.m.

Summer, twilight, after a thunderous lightning-streaked monsoon that flooded streets and yards and sent trashcans floating into traffic-stalled intersections.

Seventy-eight degrees here in Phoenix, uncharacteristically tolerable for the Sonoran desert mid-August.

A breeze ruffles my hair, my German shepherd panting nearby as she lifts her long, jet-black snout to sniff the muggy air, nostrils flaring.

“What a wet summer,” they said earlier today at the tea room. I was the only person inside wearing a mask, save for one employee. We eyed each other across the small shop in solidarity.

Thank you, we said with our gazes, not our mouths, as the other patrons repeated their loud proclamations of “What a wet summer!” nearby.

“What a green summer, you know what that means! The wildflowers will be blooming like crazy next spring!”

But I knew the truth—I’d already read the latest IPCC climate report released August 9, 2021. And it will not mean rain for flowers.

It will mean unexpected, torrential downpours that end up killing four-year-olds seeking refuge on the roofs of their mothers’ cars during flash floods that come raging down from the foothills, washing them away so that their bodies aren’t found until four days later.[1] It will mean record-breaking wildfires that desecrate entire communities and burn hundreds of animals and elderly alive[2]; it will mean increased diagnoses of childhood respiratory diseases and risks of hospitalization and death from those “blooming wildflowers”[3]; it will mean more bleaching events like those that have already reduced the millennia-old Great Barrier Reef by more than half its size in the last thirty years.[4]

It is but a taste—a drop of cream in a teacup the size of Lake Michigan-Huron, a harbinger of the unprecedented (ah, but that horrific word that’s been overused and tarnished and will never not be met with disdain by English speakers again) climate disasters to come.

“What a wonderfully rainy summer!” they sing-songed in the tea room, and I smiled behind my mask and nodded because that’s what you do to be polite.

•

7:14 p.m.

The sky past my backyard is reminiscent of a Rococo.

Taffy-pink melting into periwinkle pinwheels, interwoven by muted grey and dollops of still-receding storm clouds in the hue of what I can only describe as London Fog—the descriptor jumps out to me because that was the name of the tea I bought for my mother-in-law today.

I hear tires on the wet asphalt of the street in front of my house. The distant traffic on the 51 freeway is an ever-present drone, louder now as the final wave of nine-to-fivers (or “seveners”) return home.

A young neighbor calls for their dog a few houses down. An air conditioner on the roof next to mine kicks on, humming good-naturedly.

A bird sings in the tree over my head—chiiiiirp, chiiiiirp, chiiiiirp, chiiiiirp, CHIRP, CHIRP, CHIRP!

A mosquito finds the only uncovered skin on my ankle and sucks, the skin grows itchy and red a minute later and begs to be scratched.

All is well.

All is safe.

There are no armed fighters pounding on my door with my name on a list,[5] ready to haul me away once the international press evacuates and a new crisis gets everyone’s attention.

•

7:37 p.m.

Afghanistan fell to the Taliban three days ago.

Reddit was flooded with news updates and pictures that quickly began trending, garnering 100k+ upvotes and thousands of comments like these:

“I feel so bad for the people who didn’t get a spot on that military plane. Why are there so many men inside and barely any women or kids?”

“Those poor young girls and women. Jesus fucking christ, what they’re going to do to them…”

“Look at the expressions of the people on that plane! The sheer relief!”

“With nothing but the clothes they’ve got on. Left their grandparents and their pets behind.”

I donated and I shared on social media and I emailed my senators and representatives through their website contact forms and received sterile, automated replies back, and then we spent the afternoon sipping tea from tiny cups painted with pink roses, and we talked about the people who’d fallen to their deaths while clinging to that military plane’s wheels.[6]

•

8:02 p.m.

The 2020 census count results just came out—I know because the two middle-aged white women seated beside me in the tea room were discussing them.

“They say the numbers of white people are declining rapidly,” they’d murmured between bites of scones smothered in clotted cream and sips of their oolong tea.

They’d clutched their costume pearls and wiggled their feathered fascinators—all plucked from a box in the corner of the room, beside a cardboard cutout of Queen Elizabeth II.

“They say in a few years white people will be the minority.”[7]

Their eyes were wide, wider than they’d been when the strawberry-and-chocolate-topped petits fours arrived at their table a few minutes before.

What will they do to us? their eyes said as they shoveled the finger-sized desserts into their mouths and plopped more sugar cubes into their steaming cups of oolong.

Nothing that we don’t deserve, was what I’d wanted to reply. I’d wanted to scream it, to swing from the crystal chandeliers overhead draped in multicolored fabric flowers and fake butterflies and fake robins in their fake nests and shriek it in their artificially wrinkle-free faces.

Nothing that they and their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents haven’t dealt with every single day of their lives.

Instead I sipped my tea, attempting to swallow a chunk of scone in a mouth that was much drier than before.

•

8:19 p.m.

The author of the book Sapiens says that the current—and only existing—human species of Homo sapiens first evolved 300,000 years ago, positing that they may have forced Homo neanderthalis, Homo erectus, Homo denisova, Homo solensis, and all other human beings belonging to the genus Homo into extinction in the years following.[8]

We’re in the midst of the sixth mass extinction right now.[9]

My good friend, a fellow childfree person, is much more anarchist than I. She often tells me, “Fuck it. Humanity doesn’t deserve to be saved—let us burn. Give the planet back to the animals who deserve it; the ones who survive, anyway.”

I want to be more like her. I’d cry and rage a lot less.

But until that day comes, if ever, I’ll keep donating and sharing on social media and sending emails that my congresspeople will almost certainly never read. I’ll keep crying and raging for the oppressed. For the raped. For the tortured. For the abused. For the left behind. For the traumatized. For the enslaved. For the murdered. For the exploited. For the neglected. And for the silenced.

And I’ll keep writing pointless fucking musings in my backyard in America at twilight.

 

Ashley R. Carlson is an award-winning writer and freelance editor whose short fiction was selected for Metaphorosis Magazine’s “Best of 2020” edition, and whose nonfiction has appeared in Darling Magazine, Medium, and elsewhere. She’s passionate about animal advocacy and biodiversity protection, the intersectionality between climate and social justice, and fighting against oppression in its myriad forms. She lives in Phoenix with her partner, their three furkids, and an ever-rotating series of foster kittens. Find her at www.ashleyrcarlson.com and on Instagramat @ashleyrcarlson1.

Photo credit: Marco Verch via a Creative Commons license.

Note from Writers Resist: If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

 

[1] Brian Webb et al., “Pima Police: 4-Year-Old Girl Who Was Swept Away during Flash Flooding ‘Did Not Survive,’” Fox 10 Phoenix, updated July 26, 2021, https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/pima-police-4-year-old-girl-who-was-swept-away-during-flash-flooding-did-not-survive.

[2] Hope Miller, “These Are the Victims of the Camp Fire,” KCRA-TV, updated June 17, 2020, https://www.kcra.com/article/these-are-the-victims-of-camp-fire/32885128.

[3] Maria Elisa Di Cicco et al., “Climate Change and Childhood Respiratory Health: A Call to Action for Paediatricians,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, no. 15 (2020): 5344, doi:10.3390/ijerph17155344.

[4] Amy Woodyatt, “The Great Barrier Reef Has Lost Half Its Corals within 3 Decades,” CNN, updated October 14, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/great-barrier-reef-coral-loss-intl-scli-climate-scn/index.html.

[5] Maggie Astor et al., “A Taliban Spokesman Urges Women to Stay Home Because Fighters Haven’t Been Trained to Respect Them,” The New York Times, published August 24, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/world/asia/taliban-women-afghanistan.html.

[6] Marcus Yam and Laura King, “7 Reported Dead Amid Chaos at Kabul Airport as Desperate Afghans Try to Flee,” Los Angeles Times, published August 16, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-08-16/chaos-panic-kabul-airport-afghans-flee-taliban-takeover.

[7] Hansi Lo Wang, “What the New Census Data Can—and Can’t—Tell Us about People Living in the U.S.,” NPR, published August 12, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/08/12/1010222899/2020-census-race-ethnicity-data-categories-hispanic.

[8] Earth.org, “Sixth Mass Extinction of Wildlife Accelerating – Study,” Earth.org, published August 10, 2021, https://earth.org/sixth-mass-extinction-of-wildlife-accelerating/.

[9] Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens, (New York: Harper, 2015): 21.

GAZA

By Kiran Masroor

Gaza did not destruct for us to watch.
The way the word Gaza stays in the back of the throat.
I didn’t know I loved Gaza until it became so small.
Small as a word in a sentence. We fit such enormous things
into our mouths and expect that the meaning still comes through.
You cannot say a country’s name over and over until it is
reduced to the last bitter syllable. You cannot condense a million lives
and strain them and slice them and dice them and season them.
You cannot fit every angle into the words you say.
You cannot hold the beating love story of every citizen
and move the camera to their feet and catch
the smirk when they turn the alleyway onto the main road.
You cannot capture the slap of their soles
or the bend of their ankles as they run. If you could grab
a pitcher full of water but the pitcher was as big and impossible
as the moon and you poured it all onto the page until
the water became an ocean and the faces of every
loved thing resurfaced, maybe then
you could approach the entirety of things—
the young boy splashing his face with water,
standing beside the others as prayer begins,
thinking about the girl he loves,
and the girl in the waiting room of a clinic
tapping her foot against the floor,
and the wind outside, rearranging dust,
carrying footprints to sea.

 

Kiran Masroor is a rising junior at Yale University where she studies Neuroscience and Evolutionary Biology under the pre-medical track. On campus, she is involved in TEETH Slam Poetry, Timmy Global Health, and Yalies for Pakistan. Her poetry appears in such publications such as the New York Quarterly, the Connecticut Literary Anthology, and the Yale Global Health Review.

Photo credit: Peter Tkac via a Creative Commons license.

Note from Writers Resist: If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Writers Resist News

New schedule, renewed resistance—and a new editor

We are delighted to introduce our new editor, DW McKinney.

DW is a Black American, multi-genre writer, and she’ll be collaborating with our poetry and prose editors. She pens 3 PANELS, a graphic novels review column for CNMN Magazine. Her work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Desert Companion, JMWW Journal, The New Southern Fugitives, Elite Daily, HelloGiggles, the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, and elsewhere. She holds a B.S. in biology and an M.A. in Anthropology.

DW has received nominations for Best American Essays, Best Microfiction, the Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net and was a finalist in Hippocampus Magazine’s 2020 Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction Writers. She received fellowships from Shenandoah Literary and the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. An Associate Editor at Shenandoah and a Senior Editor at Raising Mothers: A Literary Magazine, she is based in Nevada. You can say hello at DWMcKinney.com

Read DW’s essay “Legacy, Complicated” and please join us in welcoming her to Writers Resist!

New publication schedule

Along with DW comes a new publication schedule for Writers Resist: We are now publishing quarterly.

Our next issue launches Wednesday 22 September, so read our submission guidelines and send us your resistance poetry, prose and images.

Between issues, we will be hosting virtual literary events featuring our contributing writers, so watch for updates.

Why resistance?

We continue to embrace our theme of resistance for two reasons.

  1. There are powerful social and political forces that undermine our collective quest for social justice and a healthy planet for all.
  2. Donald Trump remains a dominant and detrimental influence on the Republican Party, many of its voters and, consequently, the entire nation.

This is why we are renewing our commitment to providing a creative platform for diverse resistance voices.

If you’d like to support what we’re doing at Writers Resist, please visit our Give a Sawbuck page.

 

Legacy, Complicated

By DW McKinney

A small queue is forming outside a set of locked glass doors when I whip into the parking lot. It’s the first time I’ve ever been to the Doolittle Community Center even though I frequent the park a few hundred feet away on a regular basis with my daughters.

I exit my car and power walk to the entrance. I’m seventh in line and as it grows and snakes behind me, I eyeball everyone else waiting. At 35, I appear to be the youngest person there by at least 10 years.

“So much has changed since I first lived here,” says an older gentlemen two places behind me. “I used to shoot rabbit right out here before all this sprung up.” He spreads a shaking hand across the parking lot; the other clutches his cane.

“Oh, there was rabbit running around the area here?” the woman behind me asks.

“No. Right out here. Right here.” He points to the ground in front of him.

“Oh, he’s talking about right where we’re standing. OK now! History in the making!”

Our laughter falls away to shared mutterings that it’s time to “vote him out” and “we need a change.” Then there’s a round of deep sighs like members of a weary congregation tired of listening to the same old preacher. We’ve heard it all before. Now we’re ready to start jumping out of our seats.

I turn back to face the community center’s windows, but stop when I catch our reflections. We are short and tall. There are locs, afros, bald and balding heads, and my own twists hidden in a head wrap. Everyone is Black. Seeing us reflected in the windows, unified in a collective purpose, empowers me.

I meet my own eyes in the reflection and smile. Thoughts of legacy uplift me. I am a link in an unbroken chain.

•

Before I stood outside in a brisk 48 degrees to cast my early vote in Nevada’s Democratic primaries, I called my husband—who is white—at a work conference in Seattle.

“I’m upset that I can’t be there.” He vents his frustration, and I hold my breath as I listen. I don’t feel the same way. Any investment I had in the election has been drained from me. The most I could do was drop our daughters off at school an hour early to beat the reported three-hour wait times at the polls. And at some point, I still have to work; if it comes down to it, I might have to choose between the two.

“If I can’t vote this morning, I don’t know—.” The rest is heresy that I would never admit to a number of friends. I don’t know if I would try again. I don’t know if I care to vote at all. Apathy has burrowed in my bones.

After the 2016 United States Presidential Election, I put one foot in front of the other. I tried to survive in a state of growing tension, racism, and injustice. Friends told me it would get better. “We’ll toss him out of office,” they said—all while quoting Anne Frank and Toni Morrison and reminding me of the oh-so-fantastic history of democracy in our nation.

I look at these non-Black friends and I think, “It must be nice.” The only quote I’ve been repeating is one that seems to have been born on the tongues of every Black friend and family member I have: “I’m tired.”

Despite the constant outrage, there were no significant changes over the years. Every new social movement seemed to stutter and stall before it got past social media. The economic and racial divides widened. I carried even more anxiety when running errands around the city alone or with my daughters—waiting to become one of the people caught in a confrontation with a racist like in the videos I’d watched on Twitter. Through it all, Black folks like me were saddled with more burdens wrapped up in the cute package of responsibility. And with every election, our responsibility was made clear as people hailed the power of Black women’s votes.

That’s supposed to be me. That power is mine. Yet, I just want to lie down and take a nap.

•

We file past classrooms and an exercise room toward a door marked, “VOTE HERE.” An electric moment pulses through the line and part of me wants to start a rallying cry.

A man toward the front of the line opens the door to assist the frail, elderly woman before him.

“We’re not ready! Don’t come in!” come the frustrated shouts from deep inside the room. The man immediately closes the door and we all stare at each other, baffled. It’s 8:00 a.m.; the polls should be open. A young white woman emerges minutes later. “We’re having Wi-Fi issues,” she mutters, as she hurries past the line, not meeting any of us in the eye.

The change is immediate. Our purpose deflates in unison. I feel foolish for allowing myself this hope, for thinking that I had any real power in this situation. We wait longer and an exhausted nurse fresh off night shift peeks her head inside to ask, “How much longer?” The terse responses repel her slumped shoulders back in line.

“Oh, I see what game we’re playing here,” a man behind me grumbles. Agitation alights from one person to the next, and we turn to each other in small groups to talk out our frustration.

“It makes me think, does it even matter? Does my vote matter?” I say to the woman behind me. She nods like she’s hearing a sermon. My words catch on to the people near us and they nod in sympathy too.

There’s a strange energy coursing through me. I am galvanized to say more. But sorrow takes over and I turn forward to blink away tears.

The polls open a half hour late and we trickle in. People ask questions about the inadequate voting conditions and the lengthy wait time. They are met with dismissal. Cold shoulders. A curt, “Yes, yes,” to get them to stop asking questions.

The young poll worker from earlier waves me forward. What happens next is so quick that I don’t recognize the sting of her blade until I am limping away, stunned and wounded. I hand her my driver license. She scrolls up and down on her tablet in silence. She can’t find my name. She questions if I misspelled it. She asks, “Are you sure?” when I spell it for her. Then she surmises that I must have registered as nonpartisan and can’t vote in the caucus—this despite me pointing to “DEM” on the voter registration card she brushed off earlier. The poll worker passively swipes the tablet again—stopping momentarily to interrupt and dismiss a voter who is asking the site lead next to us how she can help—then she decides I never registered at all, despite me showing her my current voter registration card, again. Thus, I can’t vote.

“You can register to vote here, if you want.” Her lack of enthusiasm is infectious.

A righteous scream gathers in the back of my throat, but I swallow it down. I sit in a solitary row of chairs at the back of the room with my new voter registration form. There are no clipboards and I refuse to kneel on the floor. So, I sit in one chair and bend over the adjacent seat to use it as a makeshift table. Gravity pulls the tears gathering in my eyes. I don’t want to do this. I hate this. I should walk out. I let out a gasping sob, wipe my eyes, and fill out the form.

It’s a dehumanizing experience. I keep thinking, Why me? I don’t deserve this. But who deserves to endure the slow stripping away of their rights? Who deserves to have their vote suppressed?

I turn to the door and a group has gathered at the entrance. The bouquet of Black faces peering inside looks like a painting.

I imagine walking past them, my vote not cast, and an older man stopping me to ask, “What’s wrong, young blood?” I wouldn’t be able to look him in the face and admit my failure. I hear the echoes of Black celebrities saying it’s a dishonor to my ancestors not to vote. But how many of my ancestors got tired of waiting in the voting line and walked off? We never talk about that.

I turn in my completed form and receive a ballot. I fill it out, turn it in, and leave. Standing outside in the cold, the stifled scream still burns the back of my throat, so I open my mouth and a sigh of relief comes out.

Walking across the parking lot, a banged up red car stops in front of me and an older gentleman exits the passenger side. I stop to stare at him; he’s dressed exactly like my grandfather, who recently died.

“Miss? Can you please tell me where the voting is?”

“Of course!” I say. I give him directions and I think to tell him about the wait, about the anger, about how hard it is. I want to save him the trouble. But instead, I smile and wish him luck.

There’s so much anger to manage, so many microaggressions to deal with, that I don’t have the strength in me to verbalize the extent of my outrage. And maybe that’s the problem. Nothing is changing because I’d rather swallow it all down than let it out and allow someone else to take ahold of it. Part of legacy is enduring the struggle that comes with making it. Maybe when I saw my reflection in the windows, I was seeing the link in the chain that had to do the difficult work of creating this change—not just enjoying its benefits.

 

DW McKinney is a Black American, multi-genre writer. She pens 3 PANELS, a graphic novels review column for CNMN Magazine. Her work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Desert Companion, JMWW Journal, The New Southern Fugitives, Elite Daily, HelloGiggles, the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, and elsewhere. She holds a B.S. in biology and an M.A. in Anthropology.

DW has received nominations for Best American Essays, Best Microfiction, the Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net and was a finalist in Hippocampus Magazine’s 2020 Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction Writers. She received fellowships from Shenandoah Literary and the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. An Associate Editor at Shenandoah and a Senior Editor at Raising Mothers: A Literary Magazine, she is based in Nevada. You can say hello at DWMcKinney.com

Previously published CNMN Magazine.

Photo credit: rediagainPatti via a Creative Commons license.

It’s June 19, 2021!

Welcome to the Writers Resist Juneteenth and Biden-Harris First 150 Days Issue

In this issue we celebrate, resist, and envision better things, along with pronouncing some serious condemnation when warranted.

But before you plunge into the issue, please consider these Juneteenth resources:

“What Is Juneteenth?” by Henry Louis Gates, The Root, 2013

“Making Juneteenth Great Again: The Caucasian’s Guide to Celebrating Juneteenth“ by Michael Harriott, The Root, 2021

and

“This Is Rich: Senate Passes Bill Making Juneteenth Federal Holiday While Republicans Are Working to Keep Slavery From Being Taught in Classrooms” by Stephen A. Crocket Jr., The Root, 2021.

Now, we hope you enjoy Writers Resist Issue 131,
The Editors

Oath: n. curse, vow, promise.

By Lea Page

 

The photograph: Vice-President Kamala Harris (let’s just say that one more time: Vice-President Kamala Harris)—a woman, a brown woman, a black woman, an Asian-American woman, a woman born of immigrants, a powerful woman, a fierce woman, a joyful woman—swears in a man whose husband—partner, third-gentleman (?), the love of the man’s life, his staunchest supporter and best friend—holds the Bible on which he places his left hand before taking his oath of office. The book is small with a yellowed cover. Its pages appear tattered, maybe dog-eared, and all I can think is: That looks like my old Roget’s Thesaurus. I know the man is devoutly Christian in the old-time love-your-neighbor way, so I believe the book is an actual Bible (turns out, it’s his mother’s), but I wonder what it would mean to swear on a thesaurus, on a religion devoted to all the possibilities, to an expansion of definition, to inclusion and nuance. Think of paging through that holy book for a synonym for vice-president and finding: woman, brown woman, black woman, anyone, everyone, you, you, you.

 

Lea Page’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Pinch, Stonecoast Journal, Pithead Chapel, High Desert Journal and Slipstream. She is also the author of Parenting in the Here and Now (Floris Books, 2015). She lives in rural Montana with her husband and a small circus of semi-domesticated animals.

Photo credit: The White House Flickr account.

Two Poems by Alice Rothchild

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Thoughts on walking by rippling grey water under a darkened sky

In the days before stretch marks,
second husbands,
morning stiffness,
encore careers.
In the days when we couldn’t imagine
finding weed and condoms
secreted under our teenagers’ beds.
Or knowing the location of
every hidden bathroom in innumerable coffee shops,
Whole Foods,
Farmers’ Markets.

In the days when we wore clunky platform heels and
mini-skirts,
tossed a lion’s mane of crazy hair,
never worried about bunions,
hammer toes,
aching knees.

In those days,
poetry spilled from our guts,
orgasms came easy.
The spirit songs rooted
in our less encumbered selves,
wended their ways to our melodious, defiant tongues,
buoyed by a million women marching,
bearded men burning draft cards,
the fervent possibilities of youth.

Now, even in our graying successes,
we are weighted by the stones
of our disappointed mothers,
of bruises and torn ligaments accumulated
by stumbling through life.

Now, the future has creeping limits.
We’re stalked by the next mammogram,
unrelenting cough,
crushing brick on the chest.
Now, we have silver haired urgency
nipping at our toes.

This is an old fashioned
Call to action!
Take heart.
Wear purple.
Poke amongst old embers.
Your sisterhood will hold you.

When you are drowning,
we will throw you a life raft.
When you are gardening,
hand you a hoe.
If you fall into a hole,
we will haul down a ladder,
bad backs and all.

But when you are singing,
we will dance

Within reason.

The Right to Choose

December 30, 1994
Brookline, Massachusetts 

On December 29,
twenty-two-year-old John Salvi,
thick black hair,
a wisp of a mustache,
eyebrows that knitted together
over the bridge of his nose,
drove to a hunting range
to practice his aim.

The following day,
less than two miles
from my home,
on a crisp, subzero morning,
forty pregnant girls and women,
partners, friends, mothers,
anxious, sad, frightened, resolved,
waited in a Planned Parenthood Clinic
for their turn.

Salvi strode into the clinic
carrying a black duffle bag.
If anyone had been watching,
they would have heard the quiet buzz
as he opened the zipper,
removed a modified .22 caliber Ruger 10/22 semi-automatic rifle.

He hit the medical assistant, Arjana Agrawal,
in the abdomen,
killed the receptionist, Shannon Lowney,
with a shot to her neck.

Screaming, blood,
a scramble for safety.
a shower of bullets,
five wounded.

He took his gun,
sprinted to his Audi,
drove west on Beacon Street
to Preterm Health Services,
two miles away.

Salvi strode into the clinic,
asked the receptionist, Lee Ann Nichols,
“Is this Preterm?”
Shot her point blank with a hunting rifle.
A security guard, Richard Seron,
returned fire.

Salvi dropped the duffle bag
containing receipts from a gun dealer
in Hampton, New Hampshire,
plus seven hundred rounds of ammunition and a gun.
He fled south to Norfolk, Virginia,
was captured after firing over a dozen bullets
into the Hillcrest Clinic.

The police arrived at Preterm
five minutes too late.

I trained before abortion was legal,
cared for women,
traumatized, mangled, infected,
by back-alley procedures.

I was an abortion provider
at the Women’s Community Health Center
and Beth Israel Hospital,
ten minutes from Planned Parenthood.

The next morning,
my eleven-year-old daughter
asked me, as I left for work,

“Mommy, are you going to die today?”

Alice Rothchild is a retired ob-gyn, author, and filmmaker who is writing a memoir in verse for young adults exploring her childhood in the 1950s and 60s and her development as a feminist physician and activist. Her poetry appeared in a collection of poems and essays titled Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine. Her other published nonfiction books and contributions to anthologies, blogs, and webzines are listed on her website: alicerothchild.com. She is inspired by the unheard and the forgotten, the awakening of women’s voices and truth telling in the twenty-first century.

Photo credit: K-B Gressitt.

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Sip-In: 1966

By Jesse Mavro Diamond

 

For LGBT Rights Activist Dick Leitsch

 

Carpenters, bankers, bricklayers, undertakers.
Why gay bars?
Because we could only be gay
In gay bars.

The N.Y. State Liquor Authority CEO:
no discrimination in bars. Why?
because bars had the right to refuse customers
not acting suitably. Therefore, disorderly.

Bankers, bricklayers, undertakers, carpenters.
And Dick, a former Tiffany salesman
all risking entrapment because
wasn’t flirtation with a cute, undercover cop
worth the risk?

At the West Village bar,
John, Dick, Craig and Randy
dropped the “H” word bomb.
We are homosexuals and we want a drink.
Dick, Craig, John and Randy
I can’t serve you!
You’re not suitable! Therefore disorderly!

It’s true:
when a carpenter has sex with a banker
or a bricklayer has sex with an undertaker
or a John has sex with a Craig
or a Randy has sex with a Rick

being orderly is simply not suitable.

 

Jesse Mavro Diamond’s latest book of poetry, American Queers, will be published in 2022 by Cervena Barva Press. Her poetry has been published in many journals in The U.S. and Ireland. Her awards include first place in Eidos magazine’s international poetry competition for “A Very Sober Story,” the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival’s One of Ten Best Poems in the U.S. for “Swimming The Hellespont,” and “Chetwynd Morning,” chosen by Lascaux Review for its prize anthology. “An Elegy for Devron,” was musically scored by composer Mu Xuan Lu and premiered at Jordan Hall, Boston, in 2008. For many years, Mavro Diamond taught writing courses in Boston area colleges and high schools. She initiated and taught the first creative writing course Boston Latin School ever offered in its 386-year history.

Photo credit: USC Doheny Memorial Library.

My Black Ass Is Resting

By Sarah Sheppeck

 

“I want to hear all of you.”

“Do I have to tell it in order?”

“However you’d like.” She takes a cigarette, lights it, hands me the pack. “The only condition is that you have to tell it all.”

“Okay.” I exhale a thick plume of smoke. “All right. Here goes.”

•

It’s Saturday, so I wash and oil my hair. It’s spiritual, sensual, the way the curls alternately clutch my fingers and yield to their touch. I exit the washroom a goddess, the very image of Oshun. The white woman who lives here points at my head and asks me what happened, says she’s never understood African hair.

“At least,” she says proudly, “I have never felt inclined to touch it.”

•

The white man to my left at the bar asks if I’ve ever been with a white man. I drink my wine. He continues, “I was raised not to see color. I just see a soul.” I sip. Another Black woman enters and sits three stool down. He takes the empty one beside her.

The white man to my right says he’s not usually attracted to Black girls, but I am beautiful. “What are you mixed with?” he asks.

“Blood and skin,” I say.

He laughs, but, “No, really,” he says, “you look good in black. Actual Black people don’t look good in Black.” He continues, “Your nose isn’t wide like Other Black People’s.”

My wine ends up in his face. The bar kicks me out.

•

My first love has left me. My replacement is small and thin and blonde and very, very white. I comb through his email, look for clues that he still loves me. He has written her that he will never date a Black woman again. She replied, “She’s not even Black. She’s almost as white as me.”

I do not check his email again.

•

After my first rape, I go back to work. I am writing for a white woman, a memoir for which she will receive all the credit. She says something that reminds me of It, and I begin to weep. She insists I tell her everything, so I do. She lays her hand on my hair and tells me I am well spoken even in distress.

When the memoir is published, my story is a part of it, but now it is hers. She is a star now. She does interviews and tells the story of her tumult, tells of the pride she feels in the help she has been able to provide other survivors. She is rich. I have stopped writing.

•

I stub out my cigarette. I stare at her, expectantly I suppose, though I couldn’t say what it is I’m expecting.

“So that’s it,” I say. I look for something for my hands to do. Always aware, always in tune, she takes them.

“Oh, baby,” she says, motheringly, “Never give a white woman anything you aren’t prepared for them to steal. That includes your trauma.”

 

Sarah Sheppeck is a graduate of U.C. Riverside’s Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts. She earned her B.A. from the University of Rochester and her Master’s in Secondary Education from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Born and raised in upstate New York with stints in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and the woods of northern Maine, she is now kicking it in Brooklyn with her beloved nephew and her dog, Chloe. Find her on Twitter @EpicSheppeck if you like thirst traps and loud opinions.

Photo by Daniele Fotia on Unsplash.

January 6th

By Sherry Stuart Berman

 

when they are ants
world is colony is home
is superorganism

single-file, no ears
they feel vibrations
with their feet
rely on scent
for instruction

they are trash-handlers,
excavators, swarm
when called to

and when their king
corrupts their wings
and rots the wood
and steals their eggs
they carry him
(they are very fine)

how grateful are they
how grateful are they
world is colony is home is white

 

Sherry Stuart Berman’s poems have appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Guesthouse, 2 Horatio, The Night Heron Barks, Atticus Review, Rise Up Review, and in the anthologies Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books. She is a psychotherapist in private practice and lives in Staten Island, NY, with her husband and son.

Photo by Thomas Kinto on Unsplash.

In Praise of Boredom

By Suzanne O’Connell

 

The past four years have been like
having a dad who sells all the furniture
while I sleep,
breaks the windows over the sink,
throws out my stuffed bunny and lava lamp,
then promises to take me to the Ferris wheel.
He’s so loveable,
until he isn’t.
Like when he shoves me, yelling.
“Don’t bother me, wash those tears off your face.”

Later he bought me the gold lamé purse
that had tiny cells, making it collapse
like a golden puddle in my hands.
It had a handkerchief inside, lace
around the edges, ‘Thursday’
embroidered in pink on the front.

Thursday is the day the nice grownup
took the other one’s place,
stood with his hand on the Bible,
said, “My whole soul is in this.”
The grownup man has never lied to me
or sold our furniture
or broken my toys.
Not even one time.

 

Suzanne O’Connell’s recently published work can be found in North American Review, Poet Lore, Paterson Literary Review, The Summerset Review, Good Works Review and Pudding Magazine. O’Connell was awarded second place in the Poetry Super Highway poetry contest, 2019. She was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She received Honorable Mention in the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, 2019. Her two poetry collections, A Prayer for Torn Stockings and What Luck, were published by Garden Oak Press.

Photo by Agnieszka Kowalczyk on Unsplash .

the arrogance of illusion

by conney d. williams

 

the hope of this people,
like tectonics, quake
under the abusive weight
of impostors sitting
upon its collective breath
still engulfed in protest
dissenting to comply
with its own extinction
and these impostors
or parasites
would pillage
even the safety from victims
even as they
disintegrated in obscurity
human waste
inside foreign landfills
there is no mention
of memory
or ancestors
because super predators
eat the bone
suck the marrow
claiming copyright & discovery
over souls still starved
like refugees excommunicated
from access and accomplishment
this is the way of colonizers
and disease
never ask for introduction
infect every cell
with their own freedom
their own salvation
antidote and recovery
are not options
only the arrogance of illusion

 

Conney D. Williams is a poet, actor, community activist and performance artist with two collections of poetry. Leaves of Spilled Spirit from an Untamed Poet (2002) and Blues Red Soul Falsetto (2012); two critically acclaimed poetry CDs, River&Moan and Unsettled Water. His new collection, the distance of observation, will be released August 21, 2021 by World Stage Press.

Photo by Randy Jacob on Unsplash .

The Hold

By Pat Andrus

For Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, George Floyd, seven-year-old Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones, Eric Garner, Dante Parker, Atatiana Jefferson, ninety-two-year-old Kathryn Johnston . . .

 

A broken baton
a dead rat
5 jailers with guns.
How the life loses its state
of pure being.
How a bone breaks
and one rose falls.

I live in my own isolation
chosen, without blood
smeared on my dreams.
And the color of weak
is a white picket fence,
a story painted with
craven words
and a rule
of division and
unequal equations.
Can the body
find its healing laws?
Can a language
bandage the sores
of a society’s broken moons?

The colors of red
and brown
and yellow
make possible for mended wounds
if the dam finally breaks
and washers clean
the bottoms of
twisted stories and
fallen guns,
of cracked memories
trying to bandage
a lie in
the histories of the burning white suns.

 

Pat Andrus, having just completed her third work of poetry Fragments of the Universe (but right prior to the pandemic), has fully settled into her new home, San Diego, California. An instructor for several years at Bellevue College outside Seattle, Andrus also served two years as an artist-in-residence for the state of Washington. She also was fortunate to study modern dance with Seattle-based choreographers and with choreographer Debra Hay for a four-month residency. Today you can find Pat co-coordinating two monthly Poetic Legacy Workshops with Christophver R, sharing her works with San Diego State University MFAers at the Wine Lovers monthly, singing with her spiritual center’s choir, and giving support when financially possible to Voices of our City and Border Angels.

Photo by Oscar Helgstrand on Unsplash .

Stop Light

By D.A. Gray

“Embrace diversity.
Unite —
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those that see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
or be destroyed.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

 

The light works for now.

We’re stopped at an intersection
beside the Walgreens and its half-full
parking lot, safely in our lanes,
east – west traffic moving steadily
across our path.  The barber shop
across the street, quiet,
its door opening once in this minute
of stillness.  No walls coming down
to separate us, just a belief in order
that’s still holding this moment
on the smooth black-topped road,
and the smooth skin of our cars
stays smooth because we believe
for now, that’s the way they should.

A shock jock is screaming over
the radio waves about givers and takers.

A truck races through a yellow light
with a confederate flag streaming.

So many would destroy this rather
than see it shared.  I’ve deployed
to third world countries, aware
of how long it took to build this.
I’ve guarded voting lines, aware
of how hard to make sure
everyone knows this matters,

and guarded trucks so the road
crews could lay the asphalt.

I’ve come back knowing what we have
to lose – and it’s not enough when
we’re electing people who rise
to power just to watch it burn.

The light changes.  We may move
forward, only if everyone on this road
notices the light and knows it means forward.

 

D.A. Gray is the author of Contested Terrain (FutureCycle Press, 2017) and Overwatch (Grey Sparrow Press, 2011). His poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Appalachian Review, Writers Resist, Comstock Review, Still: The Journal and Wrath-Bearing Tree among others. He holds Masters Degrees from The Sewanee School of Letters and Texas A&M-Central Texas. A veteran, Gray now teaches, writes, and lives in Central Texas.

Photo by wu yi on Unsplash.

The Wizard of Roz

By Marleen S. Barr

 

“I thought the Donald would evaporate in a poof of orange smoke, ending a supremely screwed-up period of history. But the loudest mouth is not shutting up. And Republicans continue to listen, clinging to the idea that the dinosaur is the future.”

– Maureen Dowd, New York Times, May 9, 2021

 

Professor Sondra Lear, suffering from pandemic induced claustrophobia, stepped out on her Manhattan apartment roof in the early evening to get fresh air. She looked up and noticed an unidentified flying object careening toward her. Upon closer inspection, she realized that she was viewing a flying, chartreuse 1960s Lincoln Continental complete with silver edged tail fins and whitewall tires. The Lincoln landed on her roof. The door opened. A bleach-blonde bouffanted woman in her forties, wearing an A-line, pink-and-purple paisley knee-length dress, a three-strand beaded necklace, and white tennis shoes, emerged from the flying car. Although a feminist science fiction scholar and used to extraterrestrials, Sondra was baffled as to why this particular alien was a dead ringer for her dead mother.

“Why are you appearing as a replica of my mother coming to visit me at my 1960s summer camp?” Sondra asked as she tried to remain calm. “Who and what are you?”

“I am Rozie6812, an emissary from the planet Roz. We are controlled by the big giant head, an omniscient, omnipresent computer named Roslyn. We call Roslyn the Great and Powerful Wizard of Roz. As a card carrying Rozie, I have to follow the computer’s orders—and she ordered me to find you. She admires your academic interest in science fiction written by women.”

“My mother’s name was Roslyn.”

“All of the billions of Roz inhabitants are versions of your mother. We are interested in accomplishing two things. First, we want to know if you are married. Despite our ability to find out everything, we want the answer to come directly from you.”

Sondra felt dizzy.

“Steady yourself. Just answer the question.”

“Yes,” said Sondra as a sky-blue rotary phone materialized and floated in front of the Rozie.

“Excuse me while I call home,” said Rozie6812 as she picked up the receiver. “Hello. Roslyn. Sondra said yes. She is married.” The Rozie then turned to Sondra and said, “Everyone on Roz is deliriously happy and giving you a standing ovation. Now, turning to my second directive, I have come to put an end to President Trump. No one who spends her professional life writing about feminist superheroes should be subjected to his misogyny.”

“You’re too late. Biden is the president. Trump is tweetless in Mar-a-Lago.”

“Too bad. Since I cannot accomplish my second objective, Roslyn will order me to return,” said Rozie6812 as she opened the Lincoln’s driver-side door.

“Wait. Stop. Trump is not nullified. He’s perpetuating the Big Lie that he won the election, proclaiming that he will be re-ensconced in the White House, and threatening to run for president in 2024. Someone smarter and, I shudder at the thought, worse than Trump could succeed Biden. Help!”

“Roz is a very bureaucratic planet. But I’ll see what I can do. Let me apprise Roslyn of the situation.” Rozie6812 spoke into the telephone.

“I am afraid to ask, but what did Roslyn say?”

“She says that because you are married. she will make an exception even though I arrived too late to carry out the original Trump removal mission. But, according to Roz regulations, changed mission objectives impose additional requirements. Roslyn will not allow me to assist you unless you bring me Donald Trump’s broom. Her decision stands. Resistance is futile.”

“In order to save America from the Big Lie, an eventual Trump second term, or an even worse political fate, I have no choice but to comply. I’m off to Trump Tower on a quest to bring back Trump’s broom.”

“Good decision. I’ll drive around the Milky Way while I wait for you. When you have Trump’s broom in hand, return to your roof, and I will tell Roslyn that your mission has been accomplished.

Sondra put on her face mask and walked up Fifth Avenue to Trump Tower. She sat against the wall near the entrance, dejected and trying to discern what to do. A piece of straw fell on the floor nearby. As a lifetime New Yorker who grew up with myriad anti-litter bug campaigns, Sondra picked up the offending material and placed it on the seat beside her. Something that resembled a lime-green sea horse appeared and hovered above the straw.

“Thank you for rescuing my nesting component,” said the flying entity.

“You’re welcome. I am sort of afraid to ask, because I already did this today, but who and what are you?”

“I’m a dragon.”

“Aren’t you a little small for a dragon?”

“Size doesn’t matter. Just as a hummingbird is as much an avian as a Great Blue Heron and a chihuahua is as much a canine as a Great Dane, I am a bona fide dragon. I was in the middle of building my nest in one of the atrium trees when this straw fell out of my claw. Thank you for retrieving it.”

“The atrium is devoid of trees.”

“It was supposed to contain several 40-foot trees. But Trump chopped them down because he didn’t like them. His disrespect for nature made me mad. I restored all the trees and ensconced them within an invisibility cloak. Believe me, although you can’t see them, the trees are here.”

“I believe you,” said Sondra in the middle of having a brainstorm. “Could I possibly have some more of your straw nesting material?”

“I am happy to share, but why do you need it?”

“It could help keep Trump from having the ability to destroy swaths of the American natural landscape.” The dragon flew away and quickly returned with a bunch of straw.

“Thank you,” Sondra said. “I have one more request. Please bring me an atrium tree branch and make it visible.” The branch appeared next to the straw pile. “It was nice to meet you. I wish you well with your nest building and I hope you successfully raise your offspring amid the invisible trees.”

Sondra gathered up the straw and used the original piece to tie the bunch around the branch. Because the broom was made from materials garnered from within Trump Tower, she was certain that Trump, by default, owned the broom. She was ecstatic.

Sondra returned to her building’s roof and said to Roz6812, “Here’s Trump’s broom.”

“If it looks like a broom, and it sweeps like a broom, and you say it is Trump’s broom, thus it is,” proclaimed Roz6812. The rotary phone reappeared. “Let me clear this with Roslyn.” She spoke into the phone. “Good news. Roslyn says because you have fulfilled the quest, I am cleared to nullify Trump. As I speak, the Mar-a-Lago resort is being turned into a roach motel. Trump is permanently checked in and he can never check out. A cheeseburger and a can of soda will appear whenever he gets hungry.”

“Great job!” Sondra said as Rozie6812 flew off.

Sondra returned to her apartment and found a baby lime-green mini dragon flying loop-the-loops above her sofa.

 

Marleen S. Barr is known for her pioneering work in feminist science fiction and teaches English at the City University of New York. She has won the Science Fiction Research Association Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction criticism. Barr is the author of Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory, Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond, Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, and Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies. Barr has edited many anthologies and co-edited the science fiction issue of PMLA. She is the author of the novels Oy Pioneer! and Oy Feminist Planets: A Fake Memoir.  Her When Trump Changed: The Feminist Science Fiction Justice League Quashes the Orange Outrage Pussy Grabber is the first single authored Trump short story collection.

Photo credit: William Warby via a Creative Commons license.

Passing On Fire

By Joyce Frohn

 

My grandmother called herself a “tomboy.”
She bragged that she could chop wood and bale hay as fast
as the men.
And then they sat down and read the paper while she baked
fine biscuits and pie.
She loved hunting, motorcycles and gardening.
She raised four children in a boxcar,
teaching the boys to cook and the girls to love learning.
and that dairy farm sent four children to college.

Her daughters called themselves “new women” and “liberated.”
They marched in protests, fought discrimination on the job and
balanced motherhood and jobs.
They aimed for medical school and seminary.
They fought for their children,
you win some, you lose some.

I call myself a “feminist.”
College was assumed.
I love poetry, slime molds and frog cells.
I signed petitions as soon as I could write.
Some days old battles stay on and
sometimes new problems arise.

We’ve fought for so long.
What will my daughter call herself?
Will she be the one to say “woman”?
What battles will she fight?
Her great grandmother holds her small soft hand
in a stiff callused one and passes on the fire.

 

Joyce Frohn has been published in Nothing Ever Happens in Fox Hollow, Strange Stories, and Page & Spine, among other places. She is married with a teen-aged daughter. She also shares a house with two cats, a lizard and too many dust bunnies.

Election Day

By Elizabeth Edelglass

 

We stand in line beside our mothers’ stockinged legs, line snaking through the gymnasium, where yesterday we’d also snaked through same gymnasium, mouths agape for the healing cube, sugar our mothers said, but bitter, live virus, our parents had said, to save us from the deadly virus, their voices husky with fear, when they thought we couldn’t hear from our secret perch on the upstairs landing, aliens landed from our beds in the sky. Now our mothers lift us high with strong arms, purposeful fingers, click the levers, pull the arm, part the curtain, we the people whisper our secret choices. Then home to our fathers in their fatigues from the war, fathers who’d already voted, forsaking sleeping houses at sunup, as always, though no work today, so rake the leaves, let us jump the piles, crisp and sharp, then watch our fathers set the piles aflame, red and orange and crunchy brown, smoke soaring to the sky.

We stand in line in our fathers’ fatigues from the war, line snaking through the gymnasium, where yesterday we square-danced, dosido, allemande left, allemande right, line snaking, choose your partner, change your partner, kiss your partner behind the bleachers. Old enough now to snake on our bellies through Asian jungle, if we were boys, old enough to click the levers, pull the arm, part the curtain, assert our choice to save the boys we think we love from snaking through the jungle mud. Then home to huddle in those boys’ strong arms under percale piles, to scream and husky cry, election stolen by dirty tricks, as bombs keep crying from the sky, until at last those tricky fingers flash the famous V before boarding a chopper to fly out of sight, rotors roaring into the sky.

We stand in line with our kangaroo pouches, babies snuggled at our breasts, toddlers at our denimed legs, line snaking through the gymnasium, where yesterday we were chosen, or not chosen, for the team. Line snaking through the gymnasium where soon our babies will be chosen, or not chosen, we pray for them as we click the levers, pull the arm, part the curtain, affirm our choices, big and small, win or lose, year after year, school board, zoning board, firemen’s budget. Then home to rake the leaves, we let our children jump in the piles, when they think we cannot see, freely fly across grass and sky, then rake again, into bio-safe bags, saving the smoke, restoring the sky.

We stand in line in our pantsuits and pearls, behind our masks, line snaking outside the gymnasium, six-foot circles on grass as green as far-off jungle, leaves painting rainbow sky, sun shining as if God knows, line snaking one-by-one, dosido into the gymnasium, where tomorrow our grandchildren will all be chosen, everyone a winner now, though they know truths we think they don’t. Yesterday we helped our mothers, safe on Facetime, mark their ballots with brittle fingers, will they touch us once again before they soar to unknown sky? We’re determined to stand in line, though old enough to be at risk, we shout our choice to save the world from sneaky virus, snake-y words, both sharp with spikes that can kill. We mark our ballots with gloved fingers, slide into scanners, what happens next we do not know, missing the click of levers, the pull of arm, the reassuring slide of curtain. Then home to rake the leaves with bony fingers, aching arms, anything to avoid the blaring TV voices, we lift our eyes, imploring the sky.

 

Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer and book reviewer who finds herself writing poetry in response to today’s world—personal, national, and global. Her first published poems recently appeared in Global Poemic and Trouvaille Review. Her story “An Implausibility of Wildebeests” appeared in Writers Resist in November 2020. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

Photo by Patrick Schöpflin on Unsplash.