Sip-In: 1966

By Jesse Mavro Diamond

 

For LGBT Rights Activist Dick Leitsch

 

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

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

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

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

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

being orderly is simply not suitable.

 


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

Photo credit: USC Doheny Memorial Library.

My Black Ass Is Resting

By Sarah Sheppeck

 

“I want to hear all of you.”

“Do I have to tell it in order?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Blood and skin,” I say.

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

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

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

I do not check his email again.

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

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

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

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

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

 


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

Photo by Daniele Fotia on Unsplash.

January 6th

By Sherry Stuart Berman

 

when they are ants
world is colony is home
is superorganism

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

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

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

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

 


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

Photo by Thomas Kinto on Unsplash.

In Praise of Boredom

By Suzanne O’Connell

 

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

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

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

 


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

Photo by Agnieszka Kowalczyk on Unsplash .

the arrogance of illusion

by conney d. williams

 

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

 


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

Photo by Randy Jacob on Unsplash .

The Hold

By Pat Andrus

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

 

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

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

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

 


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

Photo by Oscar Helgstrand on Unsplash .

Stop Light

By D.A. Gray

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

 

The light works for now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 


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

Photo by wu yi on Unsplash.

The Wizard of Roz

By Marleen S. Barr

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

“My mother’s name was Roslyn.”

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

Sondra felt dizzy.

“Steady yourself. Just answer the question.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m a dragon.”

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

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

“The atrium is devoid of trees.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 


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

Photo credit: William Warby via a Creative Commons license.

Passing On Fire

By Joyce Frohn

 

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

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

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

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

 


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

Election Day

By Elizabeth Edelglass

 

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

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

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

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

 


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

Photo by Patrick Schöpflin on Unsplash.

Work

By Mary Leary

 

Please stop writing about nothing. The light from your
lawn chairs. Berries you savored or didn’t,
bodies massed for gatherings on back summer lawns. Nice usually means
smiling; at least pretending to listen. Maybe keeping it light.
No politics at New Year’s Day dinner, you say and I
wonder why I came
when we are in a process of
disintegration; the only news left to report, my lonely
heartbroken calling
for birds, sea creatures, coral
in the poems I don’t write
for people in straits too dire for them to notice silenced
chirps; scattered winds anxious
for the sounds they used to make through
trees, now downed and drowned.

The poems I won’t write, for people too busy
trying to pull women and children
from bloody, uncaring jaws;
people who never recovered from
the famine/flood/fire/murder; several hammers
to the head of New Orleans. Creatures/women/children/prisoners
who’ve stopped waiting for someone
to help them. I am much closer to the waves
of destruction than those who have time
to write about tea with the lonely cat,
reunions hinting at the last gasps of
something some called civilization. That’s the triumph,
you will say — capturing those
small moments in the lap of the relatively
or greatly sheltered classes. You are probably right.
Once we meet, I do
want to know about your life. For now
I need to bear witness to oily death rattles.
Last gasps.

 


Mary Leary has been writing since she was about eight. She would prefer to have been born a banker.

Photo credit: K-B Gressitt.

We Must Resist

By Laura Martinez

 

Everything has changed

Nothing has changed

He is gone

Does that mean we no longer resist?

It “takes time” to undo what he has done

Does that mean we no longer resist?

As long as elected officials state “America is not a racist country”

We must resist

As long as there is voter suppression

We must resist

As long as my grandson lives in fear of driving while black

We must resist

As long as women and LGBTQ communities risk losing everything they have gained

We must resist

As long as those fleeing oppression and poverty are turned away at the Southern border

We must resist

As long as elected officials live in fear of he who is not really gone

We must resist.

As long as fear and conspiracy theories abound

We must resist.

No matter who is in the White House

WE MUST RESIST

 


Laura Martinez is a retired social worker. She has been involved in active resistance for more than fifty years and knows we must resist injustice no matter who is in the White House.

REMINDER: Writers Resist Call for Submissions

Current Call for Submissions

We’ll be publishing a special Writers Resist issue on 19 June 2021 to acknowledge Juneteenth and the first 150 days of the Biden-Harris administration.

We all see things—politics, justice, history, the future, even flowers—differently. What are you seeing these days?

Send us your words, in poetry or prose, and your images, but read our submission guidelines first.

 

Writers Resist Call for Submissions

We’ll be publishing a special Writers Resist issue on 19 June 2021 to acknowledge Juneteenth and the first 150 days of the Biden-Harris administration—how’re we doing?

Send us your words, in poetry or prose, and your images, but read our submission guidelines first.

Submissions will be accepted through 15 May 2021.


Image is the Juneteenth flag.

Join Writers Resist at Boca de Oro Festival

Writers Resist Readings at Boca de Oro Festival

March 5 and March 6, 2021

Keynote Speaker: Pete Souza, presidential photographer

Closing Speaker: Marc Bamuthi Joseph, poet and playwright

The festival of literary, visual, and performing arts presents two virtual WR readings

Writers Resist: Global Voices

Hosted by Kit-Bacon Gressitt and Sara Marchant.

Visit the Writers Resist events page for featured writers and other details.

The wicked Trump presidency is dead

Yo-ho!

Consequently, this is the final bi-weekly issue of Writers Resist.

Although we have other things in the works, we want to pause to thank the hundreds of writers, artists, donors, and volunteer editors, who have lived the last four years with us, raging and weeping and laughing—and hoping.

K-B, if she could, would also thank her dear-but-departed mother, Patricia Bacon Gressitt, whose estate remnants funded the journal’s development and infrastructure.

Now, looking forward, one of those things we have in the works is a couple of Writers Resist readings, hosted by the virtual Boca de Oro Literary Festival, 5 through 7 March 2021. The festival’s keynote speaker is presidential photographer Pete Souza, who has helped keep us sane, lo these painful years, and the closing speaker is poet and playwright Marc Bamuthi Joseph.

Drop by here occasionally for more details.

In the meantime, we know it’s been a long, long four years—many thanks to you all for surviving them with us.

Love,
K-B and Sara

Paean to All the Books I’m Reading in the Time of COVID

and Black Lives Matter

 

By Patricia Aya Williams

 

From the un-masked           and (turtled

nooks) of home        to the  socially      –      distanced

and     sanitized

patios

of coffeeshops,

I greet you.

The world spins

on an axis

    of livid proclaiming

     and

bulleted majesty

while    vultures                    circle               the      fetid    plain.

It is a summer of fires          and

burning,

convulsions of voices

from frac- tured streets.

Still     in quiet hours,

there is joy …

I invite you,

keepers of slow wisdom, speak –

your history,

your poetry,

your lives no longer but for ink and thought –

let us reckon together a truth

unshallowed

an air

that will let us all

breathe

 


Patricia Aya Williams is currently enrolled in the San Diego Writers, Ink Poetry Certificate Program. She is also an award-winning iPhone/iPad digital artist who takes great delight in her scarf collection. Her poems have been published in San Diego Poetry Annual and City Works Literary Journal.

Photo by Daniel Páscoa on Unsplash.

Five short stories by Amirah Al Wassif

Running away

My mouth is full of mice. I can’t talk or protest. I was born in the darkest spot of the world. My people hate the sun. They put the weight of the world on my tiny shoulders. When I was young, I was a great talker, but when I became 12 years old, they ordered me to shut my mouth up. My country is made of dust and sins. They don’t believe in girls’ voices. They say that when girls talk, the evil spirits spread.

I have to admit that I am not sure that my mouth is full of mice, but when my tribe circled around me like bees, they pointed to my mouth, shouting loudly: “Hide your ugly mice! Don’t speak! Don’t protest.”

Their anger showed me that I have to flush and run away for hiding. Instead of doing that. I made a hole in the wall and disappeared forever.

 

Hunger and satiety

At the same time when I was wondering, did my friend like my latest photo on the Instagram, a child died from hunger somewhere in the world.

We all bite our nails through watching the breaking news. We all recognize the fake ones. We all cry in front of war children posters. We all laugh at our mirrors.

My mother stands on a mountain of pillows for feeding my little brother. I am big enough to feed myself.

We have many delicious dishes. We are proud of our full plates. After finishing my own, I run in a hurry to bring another one, not because I feel hungry, but because we have a plenty of food. So it is a shame not to bring another one.

We never experienced hunger before. The first time we heard of it was when our neighbor’s daughter died. At her funeral, people said that she died because of hunger. Even when we all knew that, nobody cared.

 

Just a dream

Last night, I closed my eyes and I saw my mother and me sitting together in front of a brown oven, baking delicious bread in a clearing where some birds pecked our necks and backs.

My mother’s cheeks were colorful like a clown. I looked at her in a proud way. She was still beautiful, just like a young girl.

She had a dimple. A special one. One of those dimples that kiss the heart of the sun. You feel its warmth naturally, without trying so hard.

The dust that covered my mother’s eyelashes smelled of the ancient streets.

In the dream, there were grown mint leaves between my fingers. My mother grabbed one of them, trying her best to cut it off. I screamed. There was a lot of pain around my fingers.

We are farmers. We used to fill our pockets with laughs and stones, stumbling to the river to throw them. Our dearest friend, the river welcomes our greetings, competing with us to make the funniest jokes in the world. We are country people, so we and the river understand each other very well.

I have a music box within my chest. All my lifetime, I felt that I am the richest girl in the globe. We don’t have money, but we feel so wealthy. Our fortune is a mix of singing and giving. We sing for our folk. We used to give them. We used to plant for them, for us, for the whole world.

My mother kissed my right cheek in the dream. You are a winner, babe, she told me. You plant your land; don’t wait for the men to plant it for you.

I don’t have a father. My mother’s forever tale says that there is a toxic man, tricked her, married her and made her a pregnant child who suffered a lot because of this.

I don’t blame you for this, babe, my mother said to me. You are my blessed girl, I need you in my world, and we all here need your bravery.

The distant birds play hide and seek with my wishes. I pray for our land, I pray for getting stronger, I pray for the girls, for the poor mothers. I don’t pray for the abusive husbands.

Within my dream, the grace underneath my little feet, I am sinking in the arms of the universe, sipping the happiness water.

My mother’s milk isn’t enough now, I am trailing the buds with my fingers.

The sky breathes in and out through my hair.

I met you too, in my dream. You were smiling at me from your far land. I called you: “Lewis, don’t forget me, my love, don’t.”

You looked at me in your gentle way. Your eyes smelled of honey. I see a paradise lies inside them. “Don’t try to close them so much, my love.” I said to you, and you ran away behind the red sun’s reflection.

I understand how the sun was so jealous. I know that nature belongs to you.

I plant beans, tomatoes and flowers. You plant me like a poem inside your heart. How close we were in my dream! How far we are in the reality!

I still remember how many tears jammed in your eye, when I sighed and cried, telling you that I and my mother should leave this land. You still remember, don’t you? How I sobbed, how the sadness made a lake of salt in my heart.

That moment was the harshest moment in my lifetime, the words jumped in craziness from my mouth’s edge. You ate yourself in worry and pain.

In my dream, my mother advised me to stop crying. She told me that nobody deserves my tears. I pretended that I agreed with her, but in truth, I didn’t, because you deserve, my love, you aren’t them, you aren’t a toxic man like my father and like all those men who forced us to leave the land, who poisoned our plants, who stole our right to be women farmers.

In my dream, I shrugged. I felt like I lost my voice forever, but then, I woke up, half asleep, trying to hide my waterfall of tears.

I open my eyes wide: I am heading now to my mother’s graveyard, next to yours, where I am planning to plant a cactus, my love.

 

My dead husband’s secret

My dead husband plays hide and seek with me. I catch him every now and then playing guitar in front of our daughter’s framed photo. He also loves to act like a clown before our baby budgie birds. He believes they notice him.

I don’t say a word about that to my relatives. They won’t believe me. To be honest they will say that I am a crazy old woman who is looking desperately for a new man. I am not. I love my dead husband, and really, I see him wandering in our apartment all the time.

Every time I see him, I try my best to hurry, to follow him. I want to catch him. I am longing to kiss his cheeks. I dream of throwing myself into his arms.

But I can’t. As a disabled old woman who is sitting in her wheelchair, I can’t help it.

There is no one here to watch me. There is no one here to look after me. Only my dead husband shadow, dancing up there on the walls with the shadow of our dead daughter.

 

Injustice

I was born and raised in a box.

My body is a metaphor. I lost my voice when Adam planted a knife in my throat.

“Give up, Eve,” Adam said.

I pointed out to the Apple tree. I hopped from one corner to another inside the box. I was dying to shout. I wanted to announce my revolution. I was in trouble. A big one.

My voice is gone. I have no power, no words.

Adam was touching the apple curiously, tracing it with his fingers. The smile on his face. The sin on his hand.

He kept watching me from his place: I was moving in back and forth. He treated me like a monkey in a cage.

The last time I called Adam was a billion years ago, when he asked me what was the thing I see in my dreams that makes me feel good, although I’m imprisoned?

At that moment, I let him see the picture in my head. A magnificent photo of the apple tree, guiding me to the river of happiness.

When he saw the photo in my head, he sighed and smiled.

After a while, he sang and ran away to find the tree, and yes, Adam found it and owned it, before punishing me and cutting my tongue.

 


Amirah Al Wassif’s poems have appeared in several print and online publications including South Florida PoetryBirmingham Arts JournalHawaii ReviewThe MeniscusChiron ReviewThe HungerWriters ResistRight Now, and others. Amirah also has a poetry collection, For Those Who Don’t Know Chocolate (Poetic Justice Books & Arts, 2019), and a children’s book, The Cocoa Boy and Other Stories, published in February 2020.

Photo credit: Andrew Malone via a Creative Commons license.

I can’t breathe

By Mary F. Lenox

 

I can’t breathe
the words said
written on a waste container
near the sidewalk

I wondered what other
unheard voices say
I can’t breathe

Dying fish of the sea
echo
I can’t breathe
as they
navigate through
plastic and oil invaders

Birds
call out
through polluted air
I can’t breathe

Children playing
in urban streets
for lack of space elsewhere
I can’t breathe

Rivers and streams
full of sewage from earthlings
scream
I can’t breathe

Shouting voices of people of color
grieving for relief
from all the ways oppressors
have tried to kill, destroy, eliminate
I can’t breathe

Yet
young and old around the world march and proclaim
No more!

We will not stand silently by
hearing those words
I can’t breathe

 


Born in Chicago, Illinois, Mary F. Lenox is a poet, writer, speaker, and educator.  She was a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia in the School of Library and Information Science where she served as dean for 12 years. She is the author of two books of poetry, Threads of Grace: Selected Poems (2015) and Riches of Life: Poems (2019). She resides in San Diego, California.

Photo credit: Tyler Merbler via a Creative Commons license.

Dead Man Votes in Wayne County, Michigan

By William Palmer

 

I found an old mask on the ground
and stood in line.

At a table I handed a woman a scrap
of paper with my name on it
and my old address. She scrunched
her face to check it while a big guy
behind her wearing a white mask
with red and blue firearms on it
told her to keep the line moving.
She looked at my old Ford Assembly Plant ID
and the guy told her again but louder.
She handed me a ballot.
I voted for Joe Biden.

I signed my name best I could
then walked out
before my legs caved to dust.

 


William Palmer’s poetry has appeared in J JournalPoetry East, and Salamander. He has published two chapbooks—A String of Blue Lights and Humble—and has been interviewed by Grace Cavalieri for The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress. He lives in northern Michigan.

Photo by Josh Carter on Unsplash.