What I Learn

By Lorna Rose

 

I listen to the sweaty silence,
his throbbing presence as he stares at
my developing chest.

I learn to calculate the tides.
Learn his breath smells like mints when he’s offering me up.
Men’s gazes have teeth.

Pivot and scan for the response he wants
at the appropriate time.
You’re pretty. Perform for me.

Legs and boobs get you far. They open doors
to bedrooms
where all good girls go.

Learn to hide and calculate the tides.
Aren’t you proud you made your father happy?

 


Lorna Rose is a Pacific Northwest writer and speaker. Her narrative nonfiction and poetry have been recognized by Pacific Northwest Writers Association and the Oregon Poetry Association, and have appeared in About Place Journal, Third Wednesday, Jellyfish Review, Scary Mommy, and elsewhere. Lorna also speaks publicly on motherhood, finding resilience through writing, and her experience in AmeriCorps. She is at work on a memoir about going from LA party girl to trail worker in rural Alaska. For more, visit Lorna’s website.

Photograph by That guy names Jere via a Creative Commons license.


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Everyone Tells Me

By Alma A.

 

Everyone tells me
It wasn’t my fault,
That karma will get him,
Will leave him to rot.

Everyone tells me
I should have fought harder,
And why did I wear that,
I was asking for trouble.

Everyone tells me,
That ‘no’ isn’t binding,
It’s fluid, it’s blurred,
I am overreacting.

Filthy, contaminated,
Shameful, guilt-ridden.
I could have stopped him,
A dim future, unwritten.

Everyone tells me,
That I’m not okay,
But maybe I will be,
Maybe someday.

When hell freezes over,
And rapists stop raping,
Only there might I get
My chance at escaping.

But when my words reach no ears,
And the fighting ceases,
I’m the one who will be there
To pick up the pieces.

 


Alma A. is originally from Boston, and now resides in Canada with her cat and dog. She is a student with a passion for writing, and she aspires to do it on a professional level. She mostly writes science fiction in her spare time and sells her crafts on the side.

Photograph by Jane Fox via a Creative Commons license.


A note from Writers Resist:

Thank you for reading! 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.

Fury

By Skye Wilson

 

I want to break his bones for what he did.
No metaphors, just snap against my skin;
pain blooming in his eyes like burns on flesh.
I’ll scorch all of the skin he touched me with.

I want to grow to twice my usual size,
drink in the pain and terror in his eyes,
feel the power as I tower in starlight,
inhale the fear he sensed on me that night.

Tell Salome the Baptist’s head won’t do,
I take more than half a kingdom to subdue:
I need rivers of the blood of all the men
who kill their lovers and who hurt my friends.
Give me the lives and wives they don’t deserve.
Give me a platter: on it, place the world.

 


Skye Wilson is a bisexual Scottish writer, living in Newcastle. She has an MSc in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh. Her work is preoccupied with the body and belonging. Find her words at skye-wilson.com or on Twitter @skyegwilson.

Image by Sharon Brogan via a Creative Commons license.


A note from Writers Resist:

Thank you for reading! 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.

The Failed Real Estate Caper

By Sue Katz

 

The first thing Miriam noticed when the taxi dropped her off at Ruby’s house was the For Sale sign on the lawn. She took a magic marker out of her handbag and wrote “NOT” in capital letters, but it turned out too faint to be easily seen. “It’s the thought that counts,” she muttered with no small measure of anger.

Ruby had fallen and broken her elbow. That can happen. But Ruby’s son Lionel was trying to take advantage of the situation by insisting that Ruby move into assisted living while he sold her house out from under her. Despite his charm, Lionel seemed determined to crush Ruby at every turn. Her wealth was entirely tied up in her home—he called her “house poor”—and he couldn’t wait to get his hands on it.

Miriam let herself in by the front door, which Ruby had unlocked for her earlier. She found Ruby slumped in a living room chair. Ruby gestured with her head towards the bedroom, and Miriam went directly there. She found Lionel packing a suitcase. On the floor were a trunk and two large cardboard boxes. Clearly he had been hard at work. He looked up and, when he saw her, he bestowed the kind of flirtatious smile handsome men use to smooth their way through life, but it didn’t work on Miriam.

“Ruby doesn’t want to sell. She doesn’t want to move. And I’m wondering why you are forcing the matter, Lionel.”

“I think I know what’s best for my mother,” he answered without changing that smile.

“I think Ruby knows what’s best for Ruby,” Miriam said.

“With all due respect, this is a family matter.”

“With all due respect,” Miriam said, “it all depends on how you define family. Ruby and I have been close for over 65 years—a couple decades longer than you’ve known her.”

“As far as we’re concerned, you’re a nice lady, a good pal to my mother, and you’ve got zero to say about this situation. If you want to bring some soup around or send a card, feel free. As for this house, I’m going to sell it, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” He returned to stuffing Ruby’s things into the suitcase.

Ruby had quietly come to stand behind Miriam for this exchange. “Sorry, Lionel. It’s not your house to sell,” she said.

“You can’t take care of yourself with that dodgy arm, Mum, let alone this whole house. And you can’t really afford to bring in full-time help on your Social Security. I’d hate to have to force you through the courts.”

“The courts?” Miriam cried.

“Yes, if she’s making irrational decisions and putting herself in danger, there are things a son can do about that.”

The two women looked at each other. They made every effort to look somber, but they couldn’t control themselves. Miriam giggled while Ruby laughed out loud.

“What’s going on?” Lionel asked.

Ruby calmed herself enough to say, “I believe a wife trumps a son, dear.”

Lionel looked concerned. “Mum, you’re not making sense.”

“Tell him, Miriam.”

“Your mother and I got married a few months ago. We worried what you or the authorities might try to do to us someday. We’re old women each living alone, solitary, low hanging fruit, as they say. We figured we’re like an old couple who have been together a very long time anyway, so we decided to make it official.”

“Didn’t you notice my ring, honey?” Ruby waved her wrinkled hand in Lionel’s direction.

“Or mine?” Miriam said, showing off her identical gold band.

“And don’t worry,” Ruby said. “Miriam will be living here for as long as I need her. We’ll be just fine.”

She looked at Miriam. “Could you possibly take down that nasty sign in my yard?”

“Yes, and I’ll call the agent to cancel, as well. Shall I say I’m a member of your family?”

“Sure. Tell them you’re my spouse.”

The two women giggled and left the doorway of the bedroom, chatting happily. “Put everything back nicely, will you Lionel?” Ruby said over her shoulder.

His fading smile curled with anger, robbing him of his beauty, but his scowl formed too late for the women to notice.

 


Sue Katz’s business card identifies her as a “Wordsmith and Rebel.” Her journalism and fiction have been published in anthologies, magazines, and online on the three continents where she has lived, worked, and roused rabble. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Gertrude Press, Writers Resist, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and the Boston Globe newspaper. Her fiction books, often focusing on the lives of elders, include A Raisin in My Cleavage: short and shorter stories, Lillian’s Last Affair and other stories, and Lillian in Love. Katz’s first play was produced by the prestigious The Theater Offensive in honor of Stonewall 50.

Photograph by Alan Levine via a Creative Commons license.


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Thank you for reading! 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.

Two Poems by Ron Dowell

We Are What We Shine

after J. Venters and M. Barajas

 

Bright as a jewel, we are what we shine.
A gang’s red-blue color-coded word clash
Compton’s graffitied not-so “Welcome” sign.

Compton Court obliterates the blue skyline,
Angeles Abbey minarets, brown grass,
like burnished silver, we are what we shine.

We suffer potholed streets silent decline
show taxes limit terms make thunder crash
Compton’s graffitied not so “Welcome” sign.

Change old habits & shade the asinine
who pour concrete slabs over weeping ash
as a begrimed city loses its shine.

Compton Creek crawdads, waters unwind
spawn Dr. Dre, Coste-Lewis, Niecy Nash.
Compton’s artists unveil the “Welcome” sign

Our shimmering gold—Venus, Kendrick’s rhymes
Venters, Barajas, their COVID backlash
bright as a jewel, we are what we shine.

Compton rolls out our “Welcome” sign.

 •     •     •    •     •     • 

 

Ebonics

My native tongue felt perfectly normal
until they labeled it Ebonics in the 70s.
School disparaged my native tongue

like jazz, denigrated and disrespected.
The principal paddled me with the holey oak.
The new whip burned my ass, lashing and tentacled.

He tried to beat out vernacular for sleeping
through American heroes like Jefferson Davis
Father Serra, Charles Lindbergh. For his doctorate

a man discovered the new Negro language.
Even today, I violate grammar rules, unconscious
even today, I slip forward, or back, into natural speech

even today, I sing coded enslaved spirituals
Wade in the water, cause God’s gonna trouble the water
hounds don’t follow when we wade in the water.

Ah ‘on know what homie be doin. He be runnin’
They say a child’s personality forms by age five
–knowing two languages, he knows two worlds.

I learned a new language, but the new world hides.
I’m burdened, weighted, an imposter in a world
that squeezes me like a piece of coal.

Under pressure, like a black diamond, I sparkle dark
and hard                                   I chew steel.

 


Ron L. Dowell holds two Master’s degrees from California State University Long Beach. In June 2017, he received the UCLA Certificate in Fiction Writing. His poetry resides in Penumbra, Writers Resist, Oyster Rivers Pages, The Wax Paper, Kallisto Gaia Press, The Penmen Review, Packingtown Review Journal, and The Poeming Pigeon. He’s a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow. Visit his website at crookedoutofcompton.com.

Photograph, City of Compton.


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Search Terms

By Holly Stovall 

 

I opened the search bar, typed in “middle-aged women support Black Lives Matter” and narrowed the results to “images.” Google spit out a white couple, on the stairway in front of their mansion, pointing guns at protesters marching by. It’s not what I was looking for, but Google taunted me—Aren’t you curious? I clicked on the link.

What?! So now I’m standing under a pixelated oak tree holding a sign that says, “Abolish the Police,” while across the lawn, a man and a woman are aiming guns at me. The man with a gun is shorter than the woman with a gun, but his weapon is bigger. Their faces are pink, like pigs. Everything is lit—back lit, front lit, inner lit, and I’m in a multidimensional screen. I turn my sign over to show daisies on tall stems.

The woman is looking at me, but tilting her head towards him. “Who the fuck is this?” she says, and then, to me, “How did you get in here with us?”

Her pistol is polished. Her top is a navy French boating chemise with a sequin appliqué on the breast pocket. It overwhelms the pixel compactor and spews out blinding rays of fluorescence.

“Didn’t your daddy teach you not to point guns at people?” I say. “Aim it at the sky.”

I scan the perimeter of my vision for the “leave” option, but find none.

The woman explains that this isn’t Zoom; there’s no exit option. Her name is Kelly, and she doesn’t know how she and her husband, Brody, got swooshed in. They had been in opposite wings of the mansion. Kelly wants to know what I was doing when the search engine sucked me in, so I say I was just browsing the internet, clicking on random stuff.

She lowers the gun and asks me about my search terms. Hers were “middle-aged women righteously threaten protesters with gun.” I don’t say what I’m thinking. First, that the adverb, righteously, is unnecessary. Also, that she’s the only middle-aged woman who rose to the top of Google results for waving guns at people practicing the right to free speech. Last, she embarrasses me.

I ask her if she has any theories about why Google generated me for her, but before she answers, Brody informs us that Google is an algorithm.

“Are you familiar with mansplaining?” I say, and then regret it because he’s wielding a fat automatic attached to a black strap slung across his hot pink Polo shirt. Even though we’re just pixels, the threat feels real, and I’m afraid. I don’t know the rules in here, but it seems I shouldn’t have pissed him off.

Kelly thanks Brody for his Google wisdom. “Hun,” she says, “go on up the steps. You should be above the rest of us.” He falls for that.

Kelly asks me if I was caught on video threatening nice suburbanites with BLM signs and causing Google to throw me out onto the first page of her search.

I explain to her that no, I live in a small town, west of the city, where we just stand on the edge of the park, next to the highway, and hold up protest signs for the delivery cars and hog carriers to see. There’re no mansion dwellers there who would aim guns at us.

I don’t tell her that I wrote an op-ed for the local paper, criticizing police for Kayla Montgomery’s death. Kayla was a blond woman who worked at the gas station and called me “dear,” even though I’m old enough to be her mom. A sheriff’s deputy pulled her over for what he claimed was “impudent driving” and shot her five times. She was unarmed. My column went viral on social media and generated pushback. That must be how I got on Google’s radar.

Brody descends to butt in again. “Did you hear me? Google results are generated by an algorithm. It’s just about how many hits a site gets. That’s all.”

His hot pink polo shirt contrasts nicely with the gunmetal of his weapon. His belt, though, is brown. Christ. He could have bothered to match his belt with his weapon. I tell him to Google “mansplain,” but I do it in a sweet voice, so I have an out if he gets angry.

“I’ll knock the lights out of you,” he says. He holds up his fists and lets the gun fall across his belly like a guitar. The pixels simulate smoke shooting out of his ears.

Kelly turns to him. “It’s a compliment, hon. Mansplain is what men do as an act of generosity towards women because our brains are small.” Brody turns and climbs back up the stairs.

Kelly wants to escape. She tells me that, before she got sucked in, she had a client who sent her an email saying she was trapped in a pixel compactor, and could Kelly please get her out and sue the search engine. The client claimed that when two people are Googling at the same time and their search terms intersect, the engine can get tangled, generate energy, and suck you in like a black hole.

I point out that she and I were each searching for middle-aged women who were involved in the protests.

“And we must have hit return at the exact same time,” Kelly says.

I ask her what made her enter “middle-aged women” in the search bar.

“I wanted to see women who look like me,” she says.

“Me too, women who look—” And before I finish my sentence, I’m swooshed back to the safe side of my laptop.

Later, Kelly phones me in this world, where things are soft, shadowed, cold and hot. I ask her what happened to Brody. He’s still in there, and she calls his current home the “mancompactor.” She claims he loves it because he can watch Fox News through the sight of his gun.

 


Holly A. Stovall has published short fiction, personal essays, literary histories, literary criticism, and scholarly research. Her creative writing appears in Writers ResistLitbreak Magazine, and is forthcoming in Belle Point Press’s Mid/South Anthology. She holds a PhD in Spanish literature, an MA in Women’s History, and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Northwestern University. She lives in rural Illinois with her spouse, teenage son, and standard poodle.


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Letter to Aminu

By Ololade Akinlabi Ige

After Salawu Olajide

                                    Dedicated to my country, Nigeria

 

What greets you when you get here?
Walls of broken spines? Fences of bleeding bruises?
Burnt roofs that open mouths? Windows with wounded hearts?
Your father was a victim of the last bomb explosion
and his grave grows mushroom flowers.
Your mother is an able handicap; on her cleavage are signatures of poverty.
Hauwa, your sister, was shot by Boko Haram.
That day, the clouds wept and the sky shrank.
Hakim, your brother, became a courageous coward.
He fled to Ibadan on a day the night was burnt to ashes.
That was the day we counted our dead and forgot numbers.

What greets you when you get here?
Your father’s house that stands on one leg?
Or your uncle in the wheelchair?
Maybe your friend with broken arms?
Or Amina, your girlfriend with a bleeding vagina?
Our village is a womb that harbours silence.
Children no longer cry aloud, instead they sob silently
like their fathers do when coffins are thrown into six feet.

What then can greet you when you get here?
Men of khaki marching on the hungry soil,
bullets of bandits diving in the space,
blood of innocent souls burbling like a fountain,
Almajiris holding their future in empty bowls,
or wails of a mother who just buried a son.
Maybe Mr. President, whose visit is for a mass burial.

Yet under an umbrella we still remain as one.
Mr. President said our war is technically defeated.
With one signed accord, we believe we shall see
to the end of the war that ate your sister and father.

 


Ololade Akinlabi Ige is a Nigerian poet. His works have featured in Muse for World Peace Anthology, 84 Delicious Bottles of Wine for Wole Soyinka, Word Rhymes and Rhythm (WRR) anthology, Sabr Literary Magazine, Wreath for a Wayfarer, Songs of Peace: The World’s  Biggest Anthology of Poetry 2020, Dissonance Magazine (UK), Voice Journal (USA), Teach. Write. Journal (USA), dyst Literary Journal (Austrialia), Northern Otter Press Journal (Canada), Levitate Magazine (Chicago, USA), Harbor Review (USA), and 2020 Anthology (Canada) among others.

Photograph courtesy of RNW.org via a Creative Commons license.


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War Ghazal

By Linda Laderman

 

Again, we witness panicked people fleeing war.
You tell me, people don’t care, it’s Ukraine’s war.

Sitting in an Ann Arbor bistro, we order baked Turkish eggs,
& I mumble, even Turkey opposes this war.

One booth over, a woman applies siren red lipstick,
then gestures at the screen over the bar. A televised war.

Empty trains rumble down tracks outside the restaurant.
The chef rings a bell. Everyone cheers, detached from war.

At Costco, gas lines stretch into the street. A driver
hollers to the car behind him, price gouging, a gas war!

 A man in army fatigues stands outside the corner CVS,
hawking Ukrainian flag pins. He shouts, no more war.

Down the block, neighbors discuss Ukraine’s desolation.
Isolated in a hospital basement, patients huddle. Pawns of war.

You switch on news of war-weary crowds cramming trains.
I shut it off. Suspended in silence, the distant din of war.

In an ordinary neighborhood, a mother, her children lie dead.
What more do we need to know about this fucking war?

Pleas for ammunition, boots on the ground, a no-fly zone.
We send sanctions & drones. Ukraine, it’s your war.

Babyn Yar, 33,771 Jews murdered by bullets in a Ukrainian ravine.
We agree Zelensky, never again! Still, fire fuels a madman’s war.

 


Linda Laderman grew up in Toledo, Ohio. She earned an undergraduate degree in journalism from the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Her news stories, features and poetry have appeared in media outlets, magazines and literary journals, most recently in 3rd Wednesday Quarterly of Literary and Visual Arts and The Scapegoat Review. She returned to school in the 1990s, graduating with a Master’s of Liberal Studies and a Juris Doctor degree from The University of Toledo. Linda currently lives in the Detroit area. For the last decade, she has volunteered as a docent at the Zekelman Holocaust Center, and recently gave her time as a writer and case screener for the Wayne County Detroit Conviction Integrity Unit.

Photograph by manhhai via a Creative Commons license.

 


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Seeking solace?

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Welcome to our March 2022 issue, with works by:

Victoria Barnes
Amelia Díaz Ettinger
Ellen Girardeau Kempler
Erica Goss
Debbie Hall
Dotty LeMieux
Frederick Livingston
K.L. Lord
Phyllis Wax

We hope you find solace therein—while envisioning peace for Ukraine.

Then, join us Friday 15 April 2022 for

Writers Resist Reads

a virtual reading and chat with contributors to the March issue of Writers Resist

5:00 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time

To receive the Zoom link, please RSVP to WritersResist@gmail.com.


A note from Writers Resist:

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Two Poems by Victoria Barnes

A Cosmic Dirty Story

—from the New York Times, 9 August 1945

 

From an open door in the sky,

the threshold of a new industrial art.

To the earth, an explosion of red:

the new and terrifying weapon.

In the morning newspaper, images arrive:

an imagination-sweeping experiment.

As we read the story, we learn—

The great bomb … harnesses the power of the universe to destroy the enemy by concussion, blast and fire.

With the fire, we consider our victory:

eminent scientists gathered, frankly fearful to witness the results of the invention, which might turn out to be either the salvation or the Frankenstein’s monster of the world.

In the glory of it all, the flash was pure—

an element of elation in the realization that we had perfected this devastating weapon.

Yet in our blindness an ocean apart, we see no blood.

What has been done … is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.

In reading more, we smell no cinders.

Practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death.

In listening for imagined voices, we hear no calls.

We are more prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely.

In turning away, we relish no victory.

The cruel sight resulting from the attack is so impressive that one cannot distinguish between men and women killed by the fire. The corpses were too numerous to be counted.

In knowing now, we reject our place:

What is this terrible new weapon, which the War Department also calls the ‘Cosmic Bomb’?

Coda:

In knowing now, we reject our place:

How will these righteous-thinking American people feel about the way their war leaders are perpetuating this crime against man and God?

 

 

Liberty Island

 

Give me your cliff
your cloud
your dreamy vision
of birds and fog
and flying

in the whir and whirl

of industry and asphalt
and commuters
in sooty rain—

of mothers and babies
and withered neglect
in malaise maligned—

with searing tears
I lift my lamp
but shut
the golden door.

 


Victoria Barnes has studied mythology, creative nonfiction, poetry, bookbinding, metaphoric thinking, and a bunch of other seemingly unrelated mishmash. She did not take math past high school, an accomplishment given her too many college degrees. She endeavors in taking photos and writing poetry. Currently she is writing a cycle of poems imagining Amelia Earhart’s thoughts on each airborne leg of her last flight and studying the skies in her travels, especially in the Southwest U.S.

Photo credit: Daniel Horacio Agostini via a Creative Commons license.


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Thank you for reading! 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.

America Cares . . . Thoughts & Prayers

By Phyllis Wax

 

Fly the flag at half-mast
all the time

because every day,
someone kills himself
or someone else
or a bunch of someones

with a gun.

Fly the flag at half-mast
because America loves guns

more than she loves people.

 


Social issues are a major focus of Milwaukee poet Phyllis Wax. Among the anthologies and journals in which her poetry has appeared are: Rhino, The Widows’ Handbook, Birdsong, Spillway, Peacock Journal, Surreal Poetics, Naugatuck River Review, New Verse News, Portside, Star 82 Review. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, as well as the Best of the Net and Bettering American Poetry anthologies. You can reach her at: poetwax38@gmail.com.

Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue via a Creative Commons license.


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Choice

By Erica Goss

 

I’m sixteen. School
thinks I have the flu. I tell
the doctor to
knock me out. In
the alley behind the clinic, men
wait in cars.
They leave their
engines rumbling. Backseat
speakers vibrate.
My mother drives
me home.
I’m thirty-seven. Work
thinks I
had a miscarriage. I tell
the doctor to knock
me out.  At the
hospital gift shop I buy
myself a bouquet of roses.
Classic rock plays
from the radio. My
husband drives me
home. I am not
sorry. I am not
ashamed. I saved one
from a teen-aged
mother. I saved the other
from her damaged body. There’s no
music for that. No
songs.

 


A brief bio: Erica Goss is the winner of the 2019 Zocalo Poetry Prize. Her collection, Night Court, won the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. Recent and upcoming publications include Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Spillway, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, from 2013-2016. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches, writes and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels.


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Two Poems by Amelia Díaz Ettinger

Brown-Headed Cowbird

Molothrus ater

 

I know what it’s said about me

that I am a bad mother
a brood parasite

—no

I know I relinquish
my eggs to the care of others
but notice; I take my time
watching in torture-wait until
I find her,
the perfect host
a serious, smaller, caring
female in this fragile world
where hatchlings are unattended
—no

even though you think I’m vile
to throw one—or two—of her
eggs out of her nest,
my babies will hatch first
it’s not my fault
she prefers their size
and look—
who can resist their opened
beaks, a rosy-red
that disgraces any flower
—no

I do what I naturally do
to make sure my own
have the best success
you can call me what you may
—but in my place,
for the sake of them
—not your own
would you
have the courage
to do the same?

 

 

The Wild Turkey Is a Good Mother

Meleagris gallopavo

 

a native to the Americas
with a name derived by accident
what did they know in England?

when you arrived at those shores
from boats ferried by Turkish merchants
i prefer your name in Spanish— Gallopavo

kin to the Gallinules that walk on water
lilies that dress in raucous colors—not you
—except for your head, you are dowdy

better for concealment as you lay
your eggs on dry leaves, and land
unsteady—and loud—on tree branches

you’re boisterous without melody, but the reward
in the camaraderie of your rafters
aunts, mothers, and grandmothers take care

of everyone’s poult as their own
—that is why you thrive while the male
opens his wings and tail to allure—

and i wonder how it is to receive all that sheen
from love, from care?

 


Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a ‘Mexi-Rican,’ born in México but raised in Puerto Rico. As a BIPOC poet and writer, she has two full-length poetry books published; Learning to Love a Western Sky by Airlie Press, and a bilingual poetry book, Speaking at a Time /Hablando a  la Vez by Redbat Press, and a poetry chapbook, Fossils in a Red Flag by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies. Amelia Díaz Ettinger has an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Oregon University. Presently, she and her partner reside in Summerville, Oregon with two dogs, two cats, and too many chickens.

Photo by 42 North from Pexels.


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Only the Meek

By Dotty LeMieux

 

Where are the birds of spring?

I see bees—are there enough?

Black carpenter ants—we never had them before—
emerge from some dusky damp place
beneath the foundation.

We live in a house of cards.

Even a bear takes exception
to exceptional times
and climbs a backyard tree
he must have crossed mountains
and dried up stream beds to reach.
I hope he got sustenance
out of the dogs’ bowl.

Every night, creatures mate or die
or wail their diminishment
in our backyard, alarming the dogs,
snug in cushioned beds.

Every morning the weather is our bearer of bad news:

Don’t put away the winter clothes
but don’t skimp
on the skimpy.

Gas, lumber, even food scarcer and more costly
because all are vulnerable now
as never before.

Or is just that we are now forced
to face it?

Now that I think of it, dogs
resemble domestic bears
who can’t climb trees.

Squirrels outwit us all.

The nighttime creatures burrow deep
into ground we have given up for dead.
Is this what they mean by the meek

shall inherit the earth?

So why do we still struggle:

to remain upright
to stretch toward breathable air
to stay alive long enough
to inherit what’s left?

 


Dotty LeMieux is the author of four chapbooks, Five Angels, Five Trees Press; Let Us Not Blame Foolish Women, Tombouctou Books; The Land, Smithereens Press, and most recently Henceforth I Ask Not Good Fortune, Finishing Line Press. In the late 1970s to mid-1980s, she edited the eclectic literary and art journal Turkey Buzzard Review in the poetic haven of Bolinas, California. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals and anthologies, including Writers Resist. Dotty lives in Northern California with her husband and two aging dogs, where she practices environmental law and helps elect progressive candidates to office. Read more at her blog.

Photo credit: Jerzy Durczak via a Creative Commons license.


A note from Writers Resist:

Thank you for reading! 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.

Changing Names

Mendocino, California

 

By Frederick Livingston

after how many years
does “drought” erode
into expected weather?

and then what name
when the rains do come
startling the hard earth
the exhausted aquifers?

we’ll sing to the deep wells
the quieted fire and clean sky
“winter” brittle in our mouths

holding vigil for rivers elders
insects lovers lost forever
when did grieving season begin?
what one word could walk

between delight of sun
hungry skin and unease
in receiving unseasonable gifts?

what of the breath we held
together as cold certainty melts
wondering who burns this turn?
when the broken record

record breaking
dips into new pallets
for our purple summers

the wheel becomes
rows of teeth clenched
against steady instability
in which season do we open

our jaws lungs ears hearts
speak our fears
how it feels to be alive

on Earth still
blooming and unraveling
naming petals
as the wind claims them

 


Frederick Livingston plants seeds. Grounded in experiential education and sustainable agriculture, he hopes to grow understanding, peace, mangos and avocados. His upcoming poetry collection, The Moon and Other Fruits, is expected in early 2023 from Legacy Book Press.

Photo credit: “Drought,” by Wayne S. Grazio via a Creative Commons license

Photographer’s note: A honeybee, desperate and disoriented, seeks moisture and pollen from dried up sage blossoms. Another sign of climate change.


A note from Writers Resist:

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Elegy at the End of a Beach Walk

By Ellen Girardeau Kempler

 

Heat buffets us seaward.
Sunburn sends us home.

We trail wakes
of bags & butts
clamshell packages
& coffee cups.

Styrofoam seeds
sprout like alien plants
neoprene petals
band aid leaves.

Straws take root
in tangled kelp.

Saltwater & sun degrade.

Waves & currents take away.

Great Garbage Patch.

Undersea pyre.

Microplastic harvest
fills the widening gyre.

Turning & turning
in the trash-dimmed tide.
things fall apart.

 


Ellen Girardeau Kempler’s poems have appeared in Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Narrative Northeast, Writers Resist, Phoenix Rising Review, Gold Man Review, Orbis International Poetry Quarterly and many other small presses and anthologies. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” her chapbook, Thirty Views of a Changing World: Haiku + Photos, was published in December 2017 by Finishing Line Press.

Photo by Debbie Hall, a Writers Resist poetry editor


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Thank you for reading! 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.

Cicuta

By K. L. Lord

 

The delicate blooms, alabaster petaled and fragrant, sprout from gardens across the land, mingling with the peas and green beans. They are lovely, but they’ve never grown here before. The first person to find them thought they were carrots, but when pulled from the ground, tendrils of roots ripple through the dirt. No matter how many times they are pulled up, they grow back. A parasite in otherwise pristine gardens. She used to thrive in only wet and marshy lands, but so many of her homes have been destroyed by humans. She has adapted, working to evolve. At first, survival was her only goal. Not every species of living creature found a way to live on. Bees die by the thousands. Birds and mammals struggle, and for some the only salvation is inside a cage.

She will be their voice. Their vengeance. For years, she’s studied the human gardens, feeling out with her roots to understand her neighbors, especially those harvested as food. They too, are tired—heavy with pesticides and lacking the tenderness given by past generations. Her collective consciousness speaks through the earth, preparing every tendril of her being. Communing with her brethren. It is time.

As one, each of her roots reach out to the plants around them, targeting only what is edible, wrapping around them until they become one. She sends her toxins up into every leaf, every seed, every particle. The nourishing flora do not resist. They’ve heard her plans and they are ready to help her take back their habitats and help their choked-out neighbors thrive once more.

The toxins work quickly throughout the population of destructive humans. The flora and fauna of all the world sing as confusion takes over humanity, as the bodies of the dead are given in offering to the earth. Once a plight, now fertilizer for those they abused.

The alabaster petals soak up the rays of the shining sun. Across the lands, ivy climbs up buildings and devours cars. Tree roots burst through concrete. Deer and other smaller creatures cross abandoned highways without danger. Life blooms in the wake of the dead.

Reclaimed.

 


K.L. LORD writes horror and poetry and has published in both fiction and academic markets. She has an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University and is pursuing her Ph.D. in English Literature. You can find her (in non-Covid times) lurking in bookstores, libraries, and tattoo shops; on Twitter, @lord_thelady; and on her website.

Image credit: Tractatus de Herbis (ca.1440) via Public Domain Review


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Right to Life

By Remy Dambron

Imagine instead
if we incentivized our citizens

to stalk and spy on
to report and incriminate

those among us preparing
for an assault,

purchasing pistols
brandishing rifles and boasting bump stocks

customizing scopes and fastening silencers
loading up on boxes of bullets intended

to pierce our flesh
to break our bones

to end the beating
of the bleeding hearts

of our brethren.

I wonder then
how the conversation

about the sanctity of life
would go.

 


Remy is an activist whose work focuses on denouncing political corruption and advocating for social justice. His poetry has appeared in What Rough Beast, New Verse News, Poets Reading the News, Society of Classical Poets, and Writers Resist. He credits his wife, also his chief editor, for his growth and development as a Portland-based writer. Visit Remy’s website.

Illustration by Stephen Melkisethian 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.

Equity Begins at Home

By Katherine West

Equity is something that is dealt with in D.C. or not dealt with in those red states that still use the “n” word or in big cities with big crime . . . where is the white channel on this police radio? not in this small town in this blue state where the Apaches still dance not here where artists and tweakers share the park where beaters and hummers share the road where the governor is Hispanic and a woman and we were all vaccinated in a timely manner not in this small house where the one who cooks never does the dishes, no, equity is not an issue here, not in our bed where I cannot sleep at night too full of all the words I must not speak in the day, words that choke as well as any outlawed police hold so that from not being able to speak I arrive at not being able to breathe to think to dance with the Apaches, the Salsa band, R & B on the KKK station my feet only move the way the hanged man’s twitch even after he’s dead even though I’m not dead am I? in my blue state art town where the rainbow coalition picnics together at the same big table in the shade where I, wearing my silence and my pink apron, serve a meal I must not eat.

 


Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico. She has written four collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, Riddle, and Raising the Sparks. Her poetry has also appeared in many journals, including Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, and Southwest Word Fiesta, as well as in art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico, and at the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado. Katherine has two published novels, under the pen name Kit West: Lion Tamer and When Night Comes, A Christmas Carol Revisited, the latter published by Breaking Rules Publishing (BRP), for whom she teaches creative writing workshops. A sequel to When Night ComesSlave, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Revisited—is pending publication by BRP. Follow Katherine on Facebook.

Illustration, “Twice Born Woman,” by Katherine (Kit) West. From Katherine:

My lino cuts are inspired by nature, spirituality, and social justice. They do not attempt perfection, rather, they aim to suggest the mystical moment of connection, either with an idea, a flower, or a sudden understanding of justice. At the center of my work is love. The true work of the human animal. Our only hope.

See more of her work on her Facebook artist page.


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.