Vacuum

By Guyon Prince

 

 


Artist’s Statement: This collage takes a smiling, vacuuming lady from a 1950s LIFE Magazine advertisement and recontextualizes her. As we know, in the 50s it was largely (and incorrectly) assumed that most women were happy to stay home and tend the house and kids every day, while men went out into the world. But in the new context the lady is now a superhero of sorts, vacuuming up ethical toxicity in the setting of our time—social media. However, I like to believe that her smile in the new context is sincere.


Guyon Prince, raised on the cotton farms of the West Texas Plains with Choctaw blood flowing through his veins, spent his formative years hunting arrowheads and carving makeshift arrows out of roofing shingles with his stilt-walking grandfather, his namesake. Eventually, the Texas winds carried him to the desert storms of Iraq as Sergeant Prince, leading troops in combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom and subsequent campaigns. Upon honorable discharge and restless with patriotism and disillusionment, Guyon enrolled in West Texas A&M University under the G.I. Bill, studying under Dr. Bonney MacDonald and Dr. Monica Hart, scholars of American and British literature, respectively. Renewed by Whitman’s verse and Emerson’s prose, Guyon obtained his teaching certifications in English and Fine Art. He currently commutes 30 miles a day to teach senior English to at-risk students. He lives with his partner, Sarah, their two children, and various domesticated mammals in Canyon, Texas.


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.

26 Oct. 2020: A rap on Barrett’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court

By Kathleen Minor

The dude who refused to denounce white supremacy,
tried to nuke a hurricane and our democracy,
puts kids in cages and promotes segregation.
That dude? Rewrote the Declaration.
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
If you ain’t white, you must be irrelevant.

Listen.
There seems to be some confusion.
We’ve been called violent and angry and useless
and brainwashed, educated and clueless.
With RBG gone, we are Ruthless.

They want us defeated and silenced.
But we built this country to protest a tyrant.
We waged war, and wrote a Constitution
in order to form a more perfect union.
So God bless your trickle-down caste system, yo.
This is America.
The caste system votes.

 


Kathleen Minor graduated in May 2019 from Berry College with a B.A. in Creative Writing and now volunteers as an assistant coach for the Berry College speech and debate team and as a leader for the Democratic Party of Georgia. Her work has appeared in Ramifications Magazine, Riggwelter Press, and Terror House Magazine, and her poetry received the Academy of American Poets Award from Berry College. She currently lives in Dalton, Georgia. Follow her on Instagram: @thoughttrainderailed.


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.

Suffocating

By Keily Blair

 

The smell first strikes me while we’re traveling down the road, confined to a car. Brutal citrus and bitter herbs mingle in the air, gagging me. My grandmother notices this, and a rushed apology flees her lips despite the fact that I’ve told her countless times that strong scents send me straight into sensory overload. Still, she won’t allow me to roll the windows down for countless, meaningless reasons she lists off as if they’re scripture.

Oils are prominent in the Bible, after all. They anoint. They heal and cast out demons. They drive granddaughters insane with their potency and general awfulness.

As the stench envelops me, I am drawn back to an earlier moment, to a kitchen in Alabama. The air is electric with heat, anger. I am raw and desperate for someone to help me. A combination of teenage hormones and bipolar disorder rages in my skull, and I need my grandmother. All I can do is spit out the words.

“I hate God.”

I say them because they’re true, but also because I need her to understand how far gone I am. She turns from me, and for a moment, I’ve gone too far. Then she returns and smears oil across my forehead. She grabs hold of me and prays in gibberish—tongues to a believer. The humiliation and anger I feel bubble up higher, reaching a point where the memory darkens. The argument ended, I wash the oil from my skin, cursing God and my grandmother.

Later, I will find peace in a steady diet of lithium and writing.

I will achieve some successes, even more failures.

I will open up my phone one day to see words that wipe the smile from my face and make me touch my forehead in remembrance.

I will know my grandmother encouraged my aunt to accuse me of being possessed by not one, but seven demons, because she loves me. Because she loves her God.

There will be other moments:

When I wear a hoodie with a skull pattern and my grandmother purses her lips and loudly states that she “doesn’t like that.”

When my first publication arrives in the mail and she takes one look at the cover and says, “What kind of book is that?”

When I accuse my aunt of insulting my profession, and my grandmother doesn’t look at me.

And because she is a second mother to me, a woman who had more than just one hand in raising me, I will reach for her and beg to be held, comforted by the barbs she spews from her lips.

For now, I am in this enclosed space, this safe trap of glass and plastic and metal. My grandmother’s perfume fills the space, and although I want to be free of her, I can’t be. Her words echo in my head, the babble she claimed would heal me mingling with the words she spoke through my aunt.

For now, I am suffocating.

 


Keily Blair (they/them) is a neurodivergent, queer writer and editor. They hold a BA in English: Creative Writing from UT Chattanooga, where their nonfiction won the Creative Nonfiction Award. Their fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies such as The Dread Machine, Trembling With Fear, and Good Southern Witches, and is upcoming in Dream of Shadows, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and others. They are currently at work on a dark, high fantasy novel. You can find more details about their work at www.keilyblair.com. They live in Chattanooga, TN with their husband, dog, cat, and four guinea pigs.

Photo credit: Tracey Holland via a Creative Commons license. See more of Tracy Holland’s artwork on her website.


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.

Deputized

By Holly A. Stovall

 

Congratulations! You are Deputized!

Abortion after 6 weeks is illegal in Texas.

Help enforce the law by reporting an illegal abortion in the anonymous form below!


How do you think the law has been violated?

I’ve had three spontaneous abortions (that’s doctor lingo for miscarriages) in three years, each at 8 or 9 weeks, and that’s illegal. I know this sounds CRA-A-A-AZY, but my Yankee cousin in Chicago says that multinational fossil fuel corporations are poisoning my babies in my womb, and this is causing my babies to self-abort (that’s practically suicide)! I don’t want to sound like I’m not a good, patriotic Republican or anything, but why can’t I stay pregnant? These companies must be arrested under this great new abortion ban, and then you can make them pay for the cleanup of the chemicals they leave in the air and then maybe my babies will want to live. (Not only that, my family and friends got bad cancer. My aunt died. Everybody knows someone who died of cancer.) Here in Texas, we believe in pro-life through and through. I know you agree.

How did you obtain this evidence?

I found blood and red sinewy stuff on my panties. And then I read a report from some OSHA website (I think they meant to write “OCEAN,” because it’s probably some society that doesn’t want chemicals in the ocean) and the Mayo Clinic (that Yankee hospital), that everyday chemicals the multinational corporations put out there are causing my uterine babies to abort themselves. I know. Cra-a-a-azy, right? Except that I’m desperate for one of my womb babies to live. I’ll try anything, even reporting them for suicide so maybe you can do something to stop them.

Clinic or Doctor this evidence relates to:

Clinics of Hydrocarbon Gasses. Clinics of Mining, Quarrying, & Oil & Gas Extraction.

I’d add, in addition, The Clinics of Plastic Water Bottles, The Food Packaging Clinic, The Fossil Fuel Clinic, the Paper Mill Clinic, the Toxic Dyes Clinic, and the Off-Gassing Mattress Clinic. Clinic of White Male Lawmakers.

Don’t mess with Texas.

City Crowell
State Texas
Zip 79227
County Foard

 


I’m an MFA student at Northwestern University. This spring, I published my first short story in Litbreak Magazine. I’ve published essays, literary histories and criticism, and scholarly research in various news outlets, scholarly journals, and blogs, including Letras Hispanas, Peace and Change, In These Times, and Inside Higher Ed’s “University of Venus Blog.” I hold a PhD in Spanish literature and an MA in Women’s History. I was a tenured professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Western Illinois University until WIU eliminated my department and my position with it. I went to high school in East Texas, where my mom’s family is from. Now I live in Macomb, Illinois, with my spouse, son, and poodle.

Photo credit: Deputy Enforcement Officer Blanche Rogers, 1913, Dewey, Oklahoma, from the U.S. Library of Congress, restored by sixpounder and used 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.

A Letter for My Unborn Daughter

By Debasish Mishra

 

Dear daughter, this is a dark world

Light is a mere plaything
and if you were present here
it’d diffract through the window
and fall on your orange cheeks
like petals of the sun

But darkness is real

How do I define it?

Wherever you go, it’ll follow
in the stares of those shameless eyes
and those hands that grope
the genitals and laugh
and boast their bare brazenness,
seeking medals for their phalluses

You can’t stare back
No, you are not permitted to!
If you dare, you may be
stripped of your wings
or splashed with acid and acrimony

You can’t run to the cops too
Even their uniforms are stained
with sins and semen and blood

Who will help you, my love?
Who will shield you from
the stares and stabs,
the lust and locusts?

How long will I water your seed
with my tears and prayers and hopes?

Stay in the womb forever, I plead
That’s the safest place I know

Or wait till the world becomes an orchard
where you can hop and fly and kiss
the rainbow of your dreams someday

 


Debasish Mishra, a native of Bhawanipatna, Odisha, India, is the recipient of The Bharat Award for Literature in 2019 and The Reuel International Best Upcoming Poet Prize in 2017. His recent poems have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Penumbra, trampset, Star*Line, Enchanted Conversation, Spaceports & Spidersilk, and elsewhere. His poems are also forthcoming in The Headlight Review, Space & Time, Bez & Co and Quadrant. A former banker with United Bank of India, he is presently engaged as a Senior Research Fellow at National Institute of Science Education and Research, HBNI, Bhubaneswar, India.

Photo credit: “Father & Daughter” by Dean White 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.

Defiance

By Ethan Cunningham

 


Artist’s Statement

For me, the true beauty of this image is that it suggests a powerful story with very little. But for each person, that story can be very personal and very different. The silhouette acts as a stand-in for the viewer.

I like to imagine this is a woman who has recently received terrible news, perhaps her husband has left her or she was diagnosed with cancer, and so she drives to the coast to process this in solitude, and here she is, having battled the raging sea and herself, standing resolute against the tide, determined to resist being crushed and fight onward, head held high.

Even though I was there when I took the photo and I know its silhouetted subject well, and I know the true story of this photo, for me personally, this is the story told in this image.


Ethan Cunningham prefers to create without artistic labels. His short works appear in print, on-screen, and on the stage. Most recently, his poetry, short fiction, and photography can be found in Abstract Elephant, Lotus-eater Magazine, Ygdrasil, New Plains Review, and others. Among his writing credits are three award-winning short documentaries featuring international nonprofit endeavors. He lives in California.


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.

⌘lzibongo for Black Women

By Kai Coggin

a praise poem, after JP Howard, for my Sisters

 

praise you Black Woman
because you never be praised enough
let me lift your collective name here
let me strip you of all your forced-on shame here
praise you for the stars that unfold when you smile
praise you for the way moons rise in your eyes
praise you for your tragic hope and sacrifice
life for you ain’t been no crystal stair
but you still keep climbin’ on
praise Langston’s mama
praise her wisdom and truth

praise you Black Woman
because you never be praised enough
praise be your laugh
let me say that again because it’s the song
that makes the planet spin
praise be your laugh
how it cackles and coos loud brassy beautiful
unafraid and unbroken
honey and fire

praise you Black Woman
because you never be praised enough
praise your natural hair and its curls
how whole galaxies swirl in the furls of you
praise your box braids and your twist outs
praise your locs and your bantu knots
praise how I got a Sister whose afro blocks out the sun
praise how I got another Sister whose afro is so tall
God uses it for a microphone
infuses her as gospel
Black Woman
praise your fingers braiding and trading beads
and weaving histories into wild glorious hair
the ceremony of pulling
praise your pulling
praise your pushing
pushing back on all that no longer makes room
for your crown
here Queen— here is your crown

praise the Motherland of your womb
how everything comes from you
and is stolen from you
and is returned to you again in glory
or entombed
I can’t begin to know your story but
praise you Black Mama
forgive us for what we have done
and all that we still do
how we don’t do right by your Black sons
how they are followed all their lives
by the shadows of guns
and how your Black daughters atlas the weight
of systemic cycles yet undone
and you still teach them to lift their faces to the sun
praise Breonna Taylor right here

praise you Black Woman
how you still raise continents of sons and daughters
despite their predisposition to being slaughtered
how the Atlantic ocean is still found in your transatlantic tears
the salt of you betrayed and splayed out
creating lands under your feet from all your centuries of grief
praise you as homeland
praise you as shore of a brighter world
praise the holy map of you
praise the North Star
that hangs from your earlobe like a pearl
praise you Black Mama
for how you hold the world
praise your swaddle and thick body
your warmth and your song
how you lullaby the night with a defiant hope
praise your hope
praise your dreams
praise the scripture of your face
praise the lines on your hands and crows-feet hymns
make an altar of my tongue
so that my words are poetic reparation
burn nag champa and sage in praise of your fire
praise be your fire
praise your persistence and your resistance
praise how you Harriet your children to a new freedom
praise how you Rosa until someone else offers you a seat at the table
praise how you Audre deliberate and afraid of nothing
praise how you Maya rising and phenomenal
praise how I got a Sister who named her daughter Revolution
Black Woman praise you
how your heroes and saints speak to you from the edge of the world
how your ancestors tell you the mountaintop is near
how every step toward freedom
is emblazoned into your DNA
encoded in your retaliations of Black Joy
praise your Black Joy
praise your Black Joy

praise you Black Woman
because you never be praised enough
praise your hips
praise your thighs
praise your arms and your legs
praise your back and your heavy head
praise your neck and them tight-ass shoulders
praise your temples
and how your whole beautiful Black Woman body
is a Temple
praise you Black Temple
praise your knees and your elbows
your fingers and your toes
praise your perfect beautiful Black nose
and your perfect lips
praise your voice that sings and hums and hallelujahs
praise your voice that shouts for justice
that leads us all to shout beside you BLACK LIVES MATTER

Sister praise you
praise your heart for all that you bear
praise your ears for all that you hear
praise your eyes for all that you see
how your eyes and ears sometimes
bring you your biggest fears
and yet somehow somehow you soldier on
praise you Black Woman
I don’t know how you be so strong
I don’t know how you be so strong

this praise poem could just go on and on and on and on
because Sister—you never be praised enough

 


Kai Coggin (she/her) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Mining for Stardust (FlowerSong Press 2021) and Incandescent (Sibling Rivalry Press 2019). She is: a queer woman of color who thinks Black Lives Matter, a teaching artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, and the host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry. Recently awarded the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award and named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated four times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016 and 2018. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, Bellevue Literary Review, TAB, Entropy, SWWIM, Split This Rock, Lavender Review, Luna Luna, Blue Heron Review, Tupelo Press, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review. She lives with her wife and their two adorable dogs in the valley of a small mountain in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.

Photo from the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibit 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.

Cell Block Tango

By Avra Margariti

 

A lullaby—seductive, hypnopaedic—slinks
through the high security ward
of the women’s prison.
Morrigan, the phantom queen

whistling between sharp teeth her very own
Cell Block Tango, banshee call
to arms. The doors all open wide

locks broken, passwords hacked, guard
uniforms painted red with life, never to
be washed clean again.

The inmates run, rubber soles over steel
and concrete, spilling through the courtyard
under the watchful eye of priestess Crow.
High on moonlight, bacchanal

the inmates dance like willow boughs
in the midst of a tornado.
They’ll drink the prison van’s gas for wine,
poison shared between thirsty lips,
cinereous uniforms set

on fire.

They’ll wear ferns for clothes,
or their skins
for clothes, or their bones—

their bones they will at last set free.

 


Avra Margariti is a queer author, Greek sea monster, and Pushcart-nominated poet with a fondness for the dark and the darling. Avra’s work haunts publications such as Vastarien, Asimov’s, Liminality, Arsenika, The Future Fire, Space and Time, Eye to the Telescope, and GlittershipThe Saint of Witches, Avra’s debut collection of horror poetry, is forthcoming from Weasel Press. You can find Avra on twitter @avramargariti.

Photo by Chris 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.

Gender Neutral

By Jane Muschenetz

To Skyler and the Diversionary Theatre, who stand proud and help all of us stand together.

 

They’re studying the effects of gendering on language
and cultural norms —
how the moon is feminine in Spanish and Russian,
but masculine in German
how this alters
our perception of its qualifications —
whether we believe it to be
beautiful, changeable (f) or
stoic, abrupt (m) —
over 1000 Google links discuss in length

how the moon is the moon.

Some promote doing away with sex, but I —
having learned gender from my Mother Tongue
and feeling its lack like a missing limb when I try bending English —
am fascinated, mouth hungry
to embrace each understanding of our world —
uncomfortable and broken as it is.
Learning to speak again and again,
there is something revealing
about seeing the moon
through every lexiconic, scientific, and artistic notion —
and still not having enough
words to fill the sky.

 


Emerging writer and fully grown MIT nerd, Jane (Yevgenia!) Muschenetz (Veitzman!) came to the US as a Jewish refugee from Ukraine at 10 years of age. She is now mother to two very American kids. Identity and cultural displacement strongly influence her writing. Creator of PalmFrondZoo.com, Jane’s work also appears or is forthcoming in Mom Egg Review, The San Diego Poetry Annual, and The Detour-Ahead Exhibit.

Photo by Debbie Hall.


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.

Rudy Springs a Leak

By Suzanne O’Connell

 

This morning I found a meatloaf in a basket.
When you look, there are always things to find.
The only time you can find a fraudulent ballot
for example, is when you look.
We have statisticians willing to testify
that there is a big coordinated Thing.
It lurks in every city.
It’s chained to the rack of your public library
in the ‘F’ section, ‘F’ for fraud.
It sits on your front porch next to the Ficus.
It’s taken over Silicon Valley and CNN.
It’s a scientific fact.
Even Tanzania has rules about inspectors.
Everyone knows the smell of rotten meat, right?
How did the meatloaf get in there?
It’s logical to ask.
Voters could have been dead,
or voted 30 times, or for Mickey Mouse.
An extraordinary number of brave,
patriotic Americans came forward to witness.
Extraordinary!
I don’t have time to read you their affidavits,
I need to grab some lunch.
And I seem to have sprung a leak.
I thought I was waterproof.
My suit is starting to feel greasy,
like prison stew.
My ducts might also be full
as my oil gauge is blinking.
Anyway, trust me, the pattern repeats itself.
It’s only logical.

 


Poet’s note: This is a found poem from Rudy Giuliani’s speech at the Four Seasons Landscaping Store.


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.

Rudy Giuliani portrait and photograph by Dan Lacey, via a Creative Commons license. Purchase his art on Etsy.

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.

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

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” hundred_percent_height=”no” hundred_percent_height_scroll=”no” hundred_percent_height_center_content=”yes” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” enable_mobile=”no” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ layout=”1_1″ spacing=”” center_content=”no” link=”” target=”_self” min_height=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”left top” background_repeat=”no-repeat” hover_type=”none” border_size=”0″ border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” padding=”” dimension_margin=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=”” last=”no”][fusion_text]

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.

[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]