Editor – Page 13 – Writers Resist

My body belongs to me

By Claire Sexton

It’s an insight the menopause has gifted to me.
The knowledge that my body belongs
wholly to me.
At last I can own my own body.
At last I don’t need to parade for boys or girls.
I can walk around my flat freely.
I can look in the mirror without flinching.
I can accept that my body has ‘curves.’
Like duck eggs, or cat tails, or a funerary cartouche.
Yes. My body belongs to me. That is final.
My flesh has come into the fold.
Where it is warm and sheltered from neglect.
Its creases are unique and compiled by me.
There are scriptures upon its expanse.
It has become my family at last.

Claire Sexton is an autistic woman who writes poetry that deals with neurodiverse and other mental health issues. She lives and works in England and is a medical librarian. She has previously been published in magazines such as Amethyst Review, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Light: a journal of photography and poetry, and Anti Heroin Chic.

Photo by Aleksander Vlad on Unsplash.

The Woman in Elmina

By Nicole Tanquary

There is a coastal village called Elmina. An abandoned slave castle sits at the village’s highest point. The castle walls stand in stark white stone that burns in the sun, the paint achingly fresh—the castle is now a museum, and it has money to keep itself restored, more than can be said for the village spread out at its feet.

In Elmina lives an old woman. She dresses in traditional kente cloth her son bought for her long ago. On clear days she sits beneath a palm tree in the shadow of the castle, on a stretch of green lawn leading to the castle’s entrance, where the tourists tend to wander. A bowl carved from a coconut shell sits in front of her. She does not beg but rests with her eyes closed and her back against the palm tree. If you come up to her and speak, she will open her eyes and you will see cataracts, filmy as ocean clouds. Once, her son fed her, but he was a fisherman, and sometimes fishermen drown.

If you come up to her, she may nod to acknowledge you or she may not. If she does not, set some money, cedis or pesues, in her bowl. The clinking of the coins will bring her awake.

If you take out a bottle of palm wine and hand it to her, saying, “Madame, will you drink with me?” the numb will drain from her face and leave behind a thoughtfulness. She will take the bottle and uncork it with expert hands, pouring some onto the ground for the ancestors to drink. She will take a sip of it herself and then offer you the same. If you drink it, it will be tangy, not quite sweet but with a good, settling warmth in your belly.

She will make another offering to the ancestors, and the thirsty earth will drink it away. And then she will tell you a story.

“The castle guides … they tell lies.” A tiny headshake, the movement swaying in time with the palm leaves above. “They are Ashanti, the ones who sold the Ewe to the white men. The Ashanti are ashamed, they try to change history. But we remember. We listen.” She will look towards the castle, its white walls reflecting in her eyes. When she speaks again her voice will fall to a monotone.

“The white governors, they empty the women’s dungeon into the courtyard and pick through them, take who they want. Guides say that if the women have governors’ child, they be looked after.” The old woman will spit onto the ground. “Lies. If a governor pick you, you be washed up, sent to private room, and afterwards go back to dungeons—no treated special. If you a favorite, it not matter that you carry child. You still his slave. Always a slave.”

Her eyes will go wet, and she will take another long drink of palm wine to steady herself. You may want to ask her how she could know these things when they happened so long ago, but if you wish to hear the rest of the story—if you wish to see what it will call forth—do not interrupt.

“The Ewe people brought down from the north, they be scared, so scared. Never see white men before. Never see ocean. They not know how to swim. If they sick, they thrown off ship into water, and they not know how to swim.”

Then, in a quieter voice, one with a tremble to it, she will say, “You feel them if you go in castle—all the ghosts. I hear them come through the walls, chains still on they ankles, in one big line … no one see them. I not see them,” she will admit, “but oh, oh I do hear them.” The palm wine will shiver in its bottle as her hands tremble. “The worst be in the water. That is why I never go there,” she will say, nodding at the ocean. “That is why my son should never have gone there. So much anger.” Her voice might drop to a whisper, “It drag down.”

The palm wine might sour in your mouth. Keep drinking. Even as you see echoes of the ghosts over her shoulders, their sun-bleached bones picked clean of flesh, the slack jaws saying nothing but the eye sockets boring into you, boring deep. Keep drinking. The woman will finish her story.

“Even when they no die … it is the same to us who stay. The Ewe who left on white men’s ships never came home. You,” and she might nod to you now, her eyes squinting to try to make out your face, “You, trying to find your history here, you the child of ghosts.”

Then she will start to smile, blearily. You will decide to leave her the bottle of palm wine because you think she will need it. Even when she does not tell you that she has dreams, terrible dreams of dead mothers and fathers and daughters and sons rotting together in the water … well, even if the ghosts have mostly left now with the end of the story, you can still see faint skeletal fingermarks, dug into the skin on her shoulders.

Before you leave the woman, stop long enough to pour your own offering of palm wine into the earth. Libations must be made to keep the ancestors at peace.

Especially the ones in the water.

Nicole Tanquary lives and works in upstate New York, although she will soon move to Pittsburgh, PA, to pursue a PhD degree in Rhetoric. She has over thirty speculative fiction short stories available from a variety of publications, some of the most recent being Crone Girls Press, Mithila Review, and The Society of Misfits Stories. When not writing or working, she likes to eat, sleep, follow mysterious trails into unknown woods, and play with her three adorable pet rats.

Photo credit: Stephen Johnson via Creative Commons license.

1962

By Ruth Hoberman

Memorial Day, we wore white gloves
to hold the flag. Songs fluttered in our lungs
like helium: we were pilgrim and witch,
Crockett and Quaker, the slave, the raft, the shore.

We were eleven, rich in Sousaphones and common wealth,
so sure of where the river went,
we’d beg our teachers to run our movies backwards,
hooting when the aphid spat back the eaten leaf

and the scientist, stripped of his white coat by the past,
hurried back to bed, the world unlearning itself.
Less funny now the Civil War’s unfought, and dinosaurs
return, and kids in cages bawl for their parents

while some guy in a uniform sends them back
and back and back. I was so sure America moved—
like tunnels, time, and rivers—toward the light.

Ruth Hoberman is a writer living in Chicago but residing in New Haven, Connecticut to be near her daughter and her family during the pandemic. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Smartish Pace, Rhino, Calyx, Adirondack Poetry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review and her essays in Michigan Quarterly Review, Consequence, and The Examined Life. She is a professor emerita of English at Eastern Illinois University, where she taught for thirty years, specializing in modern British literature.

Photo credit: Khairil Zhafri via a Creative Commons license.

Anger Management in a Time of COVID-19 Pandemic and Riotous Grief

By Ron L. Dowell

First, understand what you call a riot
was the Watts rebellion ending our 1965
Little League season. No last inning strikeout,
but choking smoke, thick of burning rubber,
no walk-off homerun, but smoldering wood,
no game-winning catch, but chemicals scorching
our throats, chest, lungs, interrupting me & Gerald’s
sunrise to sundown baseball passion on Gopher
Hole Stadium, redlined with public dollars. No,

never a riot, senseless, though it shines so.
CHP/LAPD, Marquette Frye, blood-wild, illogical emotion.
But rebellions always protest convention,
give sound to silence, fires cold dark places,
matter to people ignored, who attend unlettered schools,
& suffer grinding inequity from skin-color separation.
Baseball galvanized & helped equalize the offsets.

Sequestered atop our diamond-patterned chainlink
backstop, the fire surrounding us moved quickly,
scattered pigeons, our world burned in a square
circle like bases around our public housing
perimeter, eyes red, local stores convulsing
fire; Country Farms, Sav-on, Shop Rite, Safeway.
An uprising? Maybe—but never a riot,
& shaking, we scrambled, gasping. We played catch.

Jurist acquit Stacy Koon & Laurence Powell
that spring 1992 for clubbing shitless
Rodney “Can we get along?” King. How bad do you
jack a neighborhood before the hood
says enough? Many times the bucket visits the well,
one day the bucket bottom falls out. No, no riot.
After mad men smash Reginald Denny’s skull with bricks,
& four Good Samaritans help his distress,
the Little League board postpones practice that day & forever.

Choking smoke, thick of burning rubber, chemicals
& smoldering wood seeps inside our tiny Watts
home searing throats, chest, lungs.
Why can’t we play, daddy?
my three children ask while watching on TV
their favorite Jack in the Box burn, an hysterical
newsman calling it a riot as if it’s reasonless,
Why do they burn their stores? Why?
says he, ducking under an Olde English 800 billboard,
behind him, a looter wheels from the drugstore’s ash
his shopping cart, Huggies, Seagrams overloaded.
A young boy helps his father loot the sporting goods,
them taking a thermos & two Thigh-Masters, the
scene shifts to an earlier footage, stores like Empire
Liquor, which murdered Latasha Harlins

over orange juice & Tom’s Liquor aflame, a woman,
plastic bags laden with canned food & toilet
paper. Club Reno, an auto parts store ablaze,
armed sheriff’s deputies hiss over peoples of
color prone on their bellies, hands hogtied behind
their backs, cartons of Marlboros cast about the

asphalt before them. My daughter’s hand sweeps
her forehead, ridding herself of sweat. She flinches
at the pop outdoors, her brother snuggles against
my bosom, the other one hides behind the door.
Sirens scream, helicopters swoop; we’ve no firewall.
Stiffly, we resign to our back yard & play catch.

III

My morning kitchen is cold. I use stove burners
to warm, recalling how my mother often left
them on, sometimes the oven door open. Now I
understand, in life’s sunset, that that was one-way
poor people warmed their apartments. Public housing
room heaters were inefficient. I never felt

cold in our flat-roofed two-bedroom fourplex rental.
It’s been nearly 30 years since the last Los Angeles
riot & those experiences are etched,
carved into my mind like the confederate bas
relief of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee
& Stonewall Jackson on Georgia’s Stone Mountain

whose ghost’s lives in habits of white nativism,
over-policing, homelessness, immigrant camps, lives’
sidelined, precursors to when George Floyd can’t breathe,
calls his mother with his last breath &
once again, we’ll choke in smoke, thickened by burning
rubber, chemicals, smoldering wood, scorching our
throats, chests, lungs. Take me to the ballgame,
find someone to play catch with me.

Ron L. Dowell holds two Master’s degrees from California State University Long Beach. In June 2017, he received the UCLA Certificate in Fiction Writing. His short stories have appeared in Oyster Rivers Pages, Moon Magazine, Unlikely Stories, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine #11, Watermelanian Magazine, The Fear of Monkeys, Writers Resist, Baby Boomers Plus 2018, and The Bombay Review. His poetry resides in Penumbra and The Poeming Pigeon. He’s a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow. For more about Ron, please visit his website: crookedoutofcompton.com.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash.

Duende and The Great Matter of Life-and-Death

By Karen Morris

Garcia Lorca called me last night (Before you get in a twist, he called you too.
You didn’t pick up.) He said, “Disappearance and Death are real.” I suggested he text
but, texting’s too flat for the poetics of death. “Sure,” you said to no one
out loud, ridding yourself of the bitter taste on your tongue.

I feel you quicken, slow drifting away. Turning the trail by checking the volume,
counting the likes, followers, following. Disappearance after disappearance. There’s no
way to count the air. You think you know death. The Day of the Dead is just
ink. Garcia Lorca called you last night. Your line was dead.

Playing at death in the House of Numb.
Ay! Valiant cruising Internet!
Ay! Needles nattering!

Garcia Lorca is calling from Portland. Pick up!
Pick up! You’ve disappeared again, strategized
a pretext. Blackout. Death

is instantaneous. Torture, endless. Hunger,
slow. Shit a scandal of humiliation. Torment
deeper than a half-life is long.

The afternoon is ordinary. You are about to take a next breath, to shoot
an email to your publisher that contains your manuscript, Daily Minutia. The server
is hungry for fresh insights. It drags your text into the nearest hog-
shaped cloud. You have no teeth to speak of.

You ponder atomic particle theory. Trying
to manifest reality,
bitch-slap the keyboard.

He called from the marshes of Satilla Shores where there’s no reception at all.

He called from Minneapolis through a busted windpipe to tell you of the mastermind.

He called from Louisville awakened by a battering ram.

He called from Portland choking out the names of vanished people.

He left you a message from Chicago about meeting up in Kansas City,

He said, blossoms fall on the Day of the Dead.
You are a dreaded weed about to be pulled.

Karen Morris received The Gradiva Award for Poetry (2015, NAAP) for her full-length collection CATACLYSM and Other Arrangements (Three Stones Press). Her poems have appeared in Chiron Review, Plainsongs, The Stillwater Review, Paterson Literary Review, SWWIM Everyday, and others. She is a psychoanalyst by profession and an Ambassador of Hope for Shared Hope International in the role of volunteer public educator concerning the impact of the commercial sex industry in the sex trafficking of children around the world. She is a cofounder of Two Rivers Zen Community in Narrowsburg, New York.

Image: David Alfaro Siqueiros Echo of a Scream, 1937, MOMA.

After the Splat

By Kate LaDew

In 1867, the first instance of a hero saving their sweetheart from an oncoming train after a dastardly villain tied them to the tracks debuted in the last scene of a New York stage play.

The hero’s sweetheart calls for help, while the hero, locked inside the train station, watches from a barred window, searching for a way out. The villain disappears, off to be dastardly somewhere else, and the whistle of a locomotive sounds, the sweetheart’s cries grow frantic.

The door shudders from a blow on the other side. The hinges creak, the wood splinters and the door swings open, lock dangling, as the hero appears, out of breath, axe in hand.

The sweetheart calls again, beginning to sob, as the hero rushes forward, tearing at the ropes crisscrossed over the tracks, and pulls the sweetheart to safety a split second before the train barrels past.

The woman drops the axe, the man shrugs off the remnants of the rope and they embrace, each declaring undying love. The sweetheart marvels that his hero is capable of such bravery, yet not allowed the right to vote.

In 1867, the first instance of a hero saving their sweetheart from an oncoming train after a dastardly villain tied them to the tracks features the woman as hero, the man as sweetheart.

A scene from Augustin Daly’s 1867 play, Under the Gaslight

Every moment since that night, men have waited while women, with incredible patience, undo the cruel, illogical and sometimes just plain stupid acts of other men. The good, waiting men all the while wondering why the world is so unfair and “Oh! if only something could be done, by somebody, somewhere, about it all.” But it can’t be them, The Good Men, because someone has tied them to a train track, and don’t you hear the whistle? and won’t somebody think about them? down here all alone with all the other Good Men, waiting for somebody, somewhere to do something about it all? Never mind how they got here, and never mind that the ropes aren’t secure because the knots have been tied by The Bad Men, who only know how to tie women’s wrists.

Those Brave Strong Women who really deserve more, more pay and medical rights and safety and equal access and equality in general and all those things they blabber on about. Someday maybe, somebody, but right now, let’s deal with the train situation.

All The Good Men who have daughters and wives and sisters and mothers and really get it, truly, no really, feminism and such, and hey, where are you going? don’t you hear?—can’t you see?—I would do something, I swear, it’s just, these ropes, you know and I mean, I don’t agree with all the bad men, and I’m only laughing to fit in, and I don’t really believe—and if it were up to me—and I would never—and the light in that tunnel’s pretty bright, and the tracks are really rumbling, aren’t they? and is it just me or is it getting hotter, and that whistle’s pretty close, and I think that might be the tr—

After the splat, the woman sitting in the train station she built from scratch, feet on the desk she designed herself, pauses in the middle of a sentence in the paragraph of a chapter of a book she wrote. Looking up at the blue cloudless sky, past the glass skylight she can open whenever she wants, the woman asks all the other women in the room, feet up on their own desks, reading their own self-authored books, Hey, did you hear something?

Kate LaDew is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Art. She resides in Graham, North Carolina, with her cats Charlie Chaplin and Janis Joplin.

Boris Badenov image: Fair use.

Train scene from Daly’s Under the Gaslight (1868).

America likes to ask

By Emily Knapp

Are you like me? or

not like me?

Are you normal? or

not normal?

Are you human? or

not human?

Are you a boy? or

a girl?

Are you a woman? or

a man?

America likes to say:

We are right.

You

are wrong.

We are normal.

You

are not.

Fit into my box

face the consequences.

Emily Knapp is a writer and comedian living in Denver. She is originally from Chicago, but fled west because she really likes seeing the sun in February. Her poetry has been featured in Writers Resist and Fearsome Critters, and her satire has been featured in Funny-ish, Slackjaw, The Chicago Genius Herald, and Westish. You can read more of her writing on emilyknappwriter.com.

WODB image created by Karla Webb.

Gravity Ungrateful

By Mark Blickley

Yes, I am dressed in mourning.
Dark clothes for a dark time.
Yet I yearn to escape
pandemic imprisonment
with the germ of an idea
that will allow me to soar
above my confinement
in an airborne threat
against complacency and boredom
as I reach up to a blue heaven
that promises social distancing
on a cosmic scale.
But that old bitch gravity
bears down on me,
slapping me down
like a petulant child
crying out
for what she cannot have,
slammed back
to a blanketed earth
of red white and blue.

Mark Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center. His latest book is the text-based art collaboration with fine arts photographer Amy Bassin, Dream Streams.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash.

The everyday

By Ronna Magy

Here, another day, another morning,
another hour, another moment.
Mantle clock refusing to turn
even half round the dial.

She is, he is, they are, the country is,
waiting. For TV anchors, doctors, government officials to
discuss, divulge, to declare
in words, phrases, sentences,
in passages clearly anchored to the land,
stone posts rooted in the earth.
Waiting for words that will
free them, shake them loose from the
unending same: same walls, same doors,
same kitchen, same floors,
same tables, same light fixtures,
the same soundless air.

Hovering about, around, above words, the
numbers rise. Eighteen million
cases yesterday, eighteen million, two hundred thousand today.
Numbers of masks, ventilators, numbers of
black plastic bags.
By noon, the numbers
soar from the charts.
Red line crosses blue.
Red climbing upwards
when it’s supposed to
point down.

Air in the house never
seeming to move.
Dust on cup, saucer, spoon,
dust seeping through cracks.
Dusty soup ladle
arched in the sink.

This, one more morning,
afternoon, one more evening,
one more moment in unmoving space.
Each clock tick
echoing the second before.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, writer Ronna Magy calls Los Angeles home. In her poetry, Ronna combines roots in the rustbelt, community organizing, decades of teaching ESL, and a deeply held belief in social justice. Her work has appeared in: American Writers Review, Persimmon Tree, Nasty Women Poets, Sinister Wisdom, In the Questions, Glitterwolf, Southern Review, Musewrite, and Lady Business: A Celebration of Lesbian Poetry.

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash.

tell me you’re open

By A. Martine

Editor’s warning: sexual violence

i wake from the dream with gashes in my chest
snakes turning warm on my blood
half-interred in the wounds
while i go maybe it was me
surely it was me, surely it was me

athena would have torn
them from me and slung them
at my head to stop the babble
had i, in her temple, done the babbling

it wouldn’t have made a difference that i was
sixteen and he thrice that, rapacious
where i was not: he bore poseidon’s might
by virtue of being a man. even his
threats colored off like jazzy quips
to surrounding ears

till even i considered
maybe it was me, maybe it was me
till i inflected each word in turn
to change the sentence’s meaning

and make it more + less palatable

friendless forlorn empty dysmorphic
and sixteen, and sixteen, and sixteen
the sort of spotlight that should be
exhilarating: gift after
palliation after urging
meant to soft-pedal the panic gong

he said
tell me you’re open
instead
don’t say no, say maybe
be kind
i am offering love
and you
are killing, are killing
me

violation: to be stripped
to the flaring
flesh, and be demanded modesty

it’s been over ten years now
i’ve said it with less conviction since
knowing better

but sometimes i am capsized
from pre-slumber by that thought
maybe it was me
surely it was me
i said no, said no again
should have maybe sung it like a gorgon

A. Martine is a trilingual writer, musician and artist of color who goes where the waves take her. She might have been a kraken in a past life. She’s an Assistant Editor at Reckoning Pressand co-Editor-in-Chief/Producer/Creative Director of The Nasiona. Her collection AT SEA, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Kingdoms in the WildPoetry Prize, is forthcoming from CLASH BOOKS. Some words are found or forthcoming in: Déraciné, The Rumpus, Moonchild Magazine, Marías at Sampaguitas, Luna Luna, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Pussy Magic, South Broadway Ghost Society, Gone Lawn, Boston Accent Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, Cosmonauts Avenue, Tenderness Lit. Follow her on Twitter, @Maelllstrom and visit her website at www.amartine.com.

French Medusa mask, gilt bronze, late 18th century–early 19th century, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Editor’s note: If you are experiencing, or have experienced, sexual, physical, psychological, emotional, and/or financial violence, you do not deserve; it is a crime. If you are in the United States, please call the National Sexual Assault Hotline, at 1-800-656-4673, or the National Domestic Violence Hotline for help: 1-800-799-7233.

And They Lived Happily Ever After

By Myna Chang

Myna Chang writes flash fiction and short stories. Recent work has been featured in Flash Flood Journal, Atlas & Alice, Reflex Fiction, Writers Resist, and Daily Science Fiction. Anthologies featuring her stories include the Grace & Gravity collection Furious Gravity IX; and the forthcoming This is What America Looks Like anthology by Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Myna lives in Maryland with her husband and teenage son. The family has no patience for racist bullshit. Read more at MynaChang.com or on Twitter at @MynaChang.

Image from the Muppet Wiki.

Refugees Displaced in Foil

By Uzomah Ugwu

The guards did not even give us numbers
or sound the vowels in our broken names
that were whole before we arrived
at this destination
that keeps us moving in grief.

She asked what I wanted to eat
like we weren’t going to die here
at any minute, any hour,
borrowed moments we could,
would, not be given back.

She asked with a burnt punctuation
I was forced to feed on for a while ’til
I forged an answer off my dry and unused throat.
Words I cannot remember at all
95 degrees, it did not matter

She grabbed my hand and placed it on my belly,
like she was giving me direction to another life,
and smiled. I wanted to beg her
to take her happiness away
for this was not the place,
here where we laid wrapped in aluminum,
where they baked off our rights as they chose.

We did not give up our freedoms
to feel this consumed.

Her eyes yielded to the floor
for we all were crossing over the border
in hopes of so much more.

Such a high risk for a life
we thought was a myth.
Was it worth it to be sitting here,
like a chicken on a stick
they do not even turn over—do or won’t?

Before I could listen to my grief any longer
she stopped me, looked at me
leaving thorns in my eyes as she said,

“You are always going to be them.”
If you don’t think you have worth in this life,
if you don’t, they will eat you alive.
She took my hand and gave me an orange and smiled,
gazing at the foil that covered us,
smothered refugees

Uzomah Ugwu is a poet-writer and activist.

Photo credit: Mitchell Hainfield via a Creative Commons license.

Trump Tower

By Lao Rubert

She thought life in the castle would be great,
high up in the palace where Anne Boleyn had lived,
but had forgotten to read her history,
was busy with reality TV and those tasks
were the business of her personal Cromwell,
the minister who neglected to inform her
of the bruised eyes of the late wives,
the turret and the rolling heads.

He had forgotten to mention that her beloved was a poster boy,
a plump model of abuse all dressed up in power, a real
royal bully with sycophants using the power of state
to contain his paramour, who happened to be her.
She never saw the beautiful bondage,
never saw the bully buoyed by his armada.
She was too busy purchasing the next gown
when the guillotines went up,
the next reality star took her place and her head fell
swinging into the basket
leaving her body,
fresh perfumed pulp for the tabloids.

Lao Rubert is a poet and advocate for criminal justice reform living in North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in Barzakh, New Verse News, the NC Independent, The Davidson Miscellany, and the Raleigh News and Observer.

Editor’s note: If you are experiencing physical, psychological, emotional, sexual and/or financial abuse, you do not deserve; it is a crime. Please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline for help: 1-800-799-7233.

Image credit: The British Museum.

An Accounting

By Dianne Wright

“What is poetry which does not save nations or people” – Czeslaw Milosz

of the knowns:

25 years, the age of Ahmaud Arbery, gunned down by
2 white men.
1 white man filmed the assault.
2 prosecutors recused themselves.
1 recused prosecutor recommended no charges.
0 charges brought against the shooters for 2 months.
0 people who came to his assistance as he ran for his
1 life.
0 weapons found on his innocent, dead body.
2 times I have walked uninvited in an unconstructed house with no consequences.

of the unknowns:

How many yards did Ahmaud run to escape the killers?
How many heard LeBron James say
“We’re literally hunted every day”?
Where is the violence? On the streets? In the hearts of white men and women?
What are the right questions to ask and who should be asking them?

How many white people will open their eyes to this mortal wound?
Rise up against it?
What’s the story going to be this time?
Am I doing enough showing? Or too much telling?
What would a poem look like that exhorts white people to action?

In the moral wilderness I see people running for
their lives while streetlights reflect the shiny
triggers of guns in pale hands and I
raise my cup to drink a glass of sparkling metaphors
but the bubbles blast my eyes, blind me to my own

culpability and failure to do the right thing.
If the function of freedom is to free someone else*
how many poems will it take
to take down white supremacy?
Is that poem a blunt instrument or a song?

Dianne Wright is a disabled poet and social justice activist who lives in the High Desert with her 2 cats.

Photo credit: Victoria Pickering via a Creative Commons license.

* From Toni Morrison’s 1979 Barnard Commencement Speech, “I Am Alarmed by the Willingness of Women to Enslave Other Women.”

He Comes at Night

By J.M. Lasley

Editor’s warning: assault, self-harm, mental illness

He comes at night, when no one is watching.

The soles of his white shoes squeak on the shiny white floors, reflecting white lights above, humming and buzzing through night and day. The keys jingle-jangle and the door swings open, screaming.

He smells of sweat and the cigarettes he told his wife he quit smoking. Sometimes, like the first time, his breath stings my nose and my tongue: liquid fire from a flask he’s not supposed to sip from. He doesn’t care, he tells me, chattering as his fingers fumble with his belt. She’s a dumb bitch anyway and she’ll never know. Those idiots who run this place, they’ll never know, no one will know, and it will just keep happening.

The smoking, the drinking, and me.

I’m safe in the daytime, hidden amongst the bodies in the community room. I fold and fold bright squares of paper transformed into birds and butterflies, things I only see in pictures now that I’m here. I fold a lion to bite his legs and a tiger to roar him away, a bear to stand between us, with paws as big as my face.

They say we’re here because we’re mad. This is sometimes so. Sometimes I’m so mad I can feel it choking me, drowning me, my head lifting as I gasp for breath and the angry water spills up and out of me. That’s when they strap me, drag me kicking and screaming to the white room, to the bed, and I will have even less to fight him with between the straps and the pills. They taste like chalk and take the madness away. For a while. So I try not to get mad.

I try new things all the time. When it started, I tried kicking and screaming. But no one watches so no one came and the kicking and screaming only made his eyes sparkle and his breathing, fast.

No one asks about the bruises or the shadows. I can see them in the reflection of the window of my door. Not real glass. Real glass can shatter and cut and end, but this glass just bounces and breaks your knuckles when you hit it. I can only see myself dimly. But I can see the bruises and the shadows. Does he have magic? Is that how no one else can see? When the faces in the blue outfits do see them, eyes squinching behind their glasses, nose wrinkling, they mumble mutter, “She’s taken to hurting herself, poor thing.” More chalk and straps, more helpless nights.

No glass, no knives, no knitting, nothing poking, prodding, nails trimmed daily, nothing nowhere. Until the Big One broke the chair. Ferret, the tall skinny twitchy one, he had been swiping a pill or two from the Big One for days. Ferret is a Blue Shirt, not a White Shirt or a Body, but he takes the pills sometimes: the chalk we don’t want anyway, the chalk that sometimes the others need. He took too much for too many days and the Big One woke, a sleeping giant gone mad, real mad, breaking the chair over a White Shirt sending splinters skitter-scattering over the floor. Behind my chair, hands over my head, I felt one touch my foot. I lost my shoes again, which means a pinch from Nurse, but that’s how I felt it. Long, jagged, beautiful wood. Snatching it up, I tucked it under my bra band.

The giant has been taken down: a pebble to the brow or a needle to the arm, I wasn’t sure. They pat us down one by one, pulling bits of the chair or other contraband out of hair and pockets, waist bands. When they try to reach for my bra band I crouch and scream, as if I am scared, as if they are hurting me. They are not hurting me and I am not afraid, but they forget where they were searching. Others were not so clever, they did not hide their pieces before the White Shirts thought to check.

When I am put back in my room and the coast is clear I hide my treasure beneath my mattress, tucked in the coiling.

•

For a while I tried the not fighting. I lay and stared at the wall when he came, counting the squeaks of the bed frame, seeing faces in the cracks on the painted wall. The first time he cursed and left. Other times he tried to hurt me, tried to slap me back into madness, so that he could crush me into the pillow again. The faces on the wall smiled at me, and I smiled back.

Then a new body came to the playroom, the Community Room. Her face was young; behind her flat bangs she had wide eyes, round ears, a gap between her teeth. She was older than she looked, she would tell them when the old Nurses called her honey, baby, and the Whites called her sugar-pie. The soul in her eyes was older, that was plain as daylight through gridded windows. Her arms were decorated with the scars of her suffering, a tally for every sorrow. She folded birds with me, kindness in her gentle hands and the small smile she gave me when I clapped.

He would do her instead, he told me. He’d see if she’d give him what he was looking for. So, I fought again. Better me, who was filled with madness, than she who had only sorrow.

The girl is gone. She left yesterday, squeezing me tight and whispering sweet words of remembrance I know she has already forgotten outside these iron and stone walls. I hope she forgets me. I am glad she is gone. It is time to try again.

•

The door has been closed behind me, the lock clicking into place, the light inside taken away so that I am left under a thin blanket and darkness in my bed. When the calling and the footfalls stop, when the chatterings and cryings and crowings of the Bodies stop, I slip out of my bed and crawl under it. Between the coils, my wood waits. Grabbing it, I set to work.

For several nights I do this, between the time the light leaves and he comes. Sawing, sawing, pulling. I dispose of my work in pieces, so they will not know. I stuff the remnants in my bra, then into the trash when no one is looking. They think I’m mad, but I am more than mad.

The night comes. It is time to try. The light leaves, the lock clicks, the darkness settles. Before the sounds disappear, I lift up my mattress, slide onto the frame and then settle the mattress back down on top of me, hidden in the hole I have made. And I wait. My heart is loud in my ears, louder than I have ever heard it. Eventually it comes. The squeaking white shoes on the white floor. The jingle-jangle. The scream of the door. And then a new sound. He is surprised. I cannot put my hand over my mouth so I bite my lips between my teeth so that he cannot hear my glee. Now he thinks I am magic.

I hear his footsteps leave, squeaking down the hall and I hear his call to those who are not watching. He has triggered the alarm. I push the mattress up, slide out and then back on top of the mattress as it settles, covering myself with the blanket.

Many footsteps pad down the hallway, and people rush into the room. I blink open my eyes, pretending I was sleeping deeply, sitting up and rubbing my eyes. I look up at them—the White Shirts, the Blue Shirt and the Nurse.

They ask me questions, throwing words at me in anger. My eyes are wide at them, and I pull back, lifting my blanket up. Where did you go, they ask, how did you get out? I shake my head again and again. They begin to question him, begin to think maybe he is the mad one.

“Why was he in my room?”

It is the first time I have spoken to them in some time. Usually I sing—nonsense songs they call them but I know better. To me they are pink and yellow, blue and grey, and life lives within the sound in my ears. “Why did he come here?” I cock my head and wrinkle my nose. “Smells bad.”

I see their noses twitching, opening and closing as they take in the sour and the sting. Their eyes meet to trade secrets, and I sense when I become a Body again. Now he is the target. They pull him away, nothing wrong here, but they have some questions. I see the Blue Shirt pat his chest, feel the hidden flask in that chest pocket, see the sweat start to drip down his face. I giggle in glee when the door is closed because I am more than mad. I am clever like the fox that escaped the hound.

The next night, I hide again in my clever fox hole, and listen, telling my heart to not beat so loudly so I can hear if there are squeaking shoes. But nothing squeaks and the keys don’t jangle and the door doesn’t scream; I know that I am free. So, I come out, lie down on my lumpy bed and smile and smile as the stars dance me to sleep from beyond the bars.

Days pass and I don’t see him. I dance in the community room to the old music because I have slept, my bruises are fading, and there is less pain. But then, when I have not been mad enough for chalk for days and days so that I know the pills are not making me see the things that are not there that look there, he comes back. He does not look at me as he watches the bodies, but I know that in not looking he is staring directly at me. And I know that he will come again.

Each night I wait. I know he enjoys that I am waiting. In the morning he looks at me once, to see more and more shadows sleeping under my eyes and he smiles. And I wait. I know it is a matter of time before he comes. But I pretend to sleep every night. The squeaking goes up and down the hall and pauses—but there is no jingle-jangle. Not yet. He cannot come because they are watching.

Finally, I begin sleeping through the nights. Perhaps he will not come—perhaps they have learned their lesson and there are watchers now. The sparkle grows in his eyes as I tremble in my corner and I know that I am wrong. One day, as he passes me, his fingers prod me sharply in the back. I jump up and scream and soon there are White Shirts all around me and I know the chalk and straps are coming. I calm down but they make me take it anyway. I pretend to, but I hold the chalk behind my back tooth—they cannot see and they do not check too good. I know he will come tonight thinking they have taken the madness out of me and I will not be clever enough to hide.

He is only sort of right.

The white soled shoes squeak down the white floored hall, under humming white lights. Sweat drips down my back, my spine, like a slide. The keys jingle jangle. The door opens, screaming. He chatters at me while fumbling with his belt.

“Thought you had me good, didn’t you, little bitch. Well, if you thought I was rough before—”

I stop his chattering. I swing my arm down—the wood clenched in my fist, its ragged point like a spear—and then it is in his neck. When I pull it out, the wood is wet now, soaking it in, turning red instead of brown and his eyes are surprised, and this surprise is even better than before because I can see it. When he falls, his eyes still wide and his life pumping out of the hole I have made, I let him. White becomes pink and then red—the clothes, the floor, my hands.

I smile.

He came at night, when no one was watching.

J.M. Lasley believes that the greatest form of resistance is kindness and empathy. She lives in small town Georgia for now, where she keeps her dog company and lives a thousand lives through stories. Her short story “Wish Perfect” will be published in 2020.

Photo by Andy Li on Unsplash.

Here in the Future

By Keith Welch

The Future Ain’t What it Used to Be. –Yogi Berra

We were promised flying cars,
and condos on the moon, even
racial equality: all those great sci-fi gags.

Those were the glory days,
the Future. Everything polished
smooth and covered in chrome.

In the fifties, we had the scent
of unlimited progress in our
exceptional American nostrils—

the Future marched forward,
smelling of plutonium and plastic,
with just a hint of napalm. The Future
chanted loudly as it came on.

Then the sixties were assassinated
and we got the hard word,
written in blood: that much
optimism might be overly optimistic.

Welcome to the future, where flying
cars remain scarce, the moon remains
distant, and we have all the equality
our police will allow.

Keith Welch lives in Bloomington, Indiana where he works at the Indiana University Herman B Wells library. He has no MFA. He has poems published in The Tipton Poetry Journal, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Dime Show Review, and Literary Orphans, among others. He enjoys complicated board games, baking, talking to his cat, Alice C. Toklas, and meeting other poets. His website is keithwelchpoetry.com. On Twitter: @TheBloomington1.

Image Credit, “Modern Kitchen” by Mike Licht.

With great haste, but still too late

By Laura Mazza-Dixon

Evidence accumulates
as one by one, those who suffered
while the truth was silenced
begin to find the courage to speak.

Congress tells us that all will be done
with care, new revelations investigated,
whistleblowers protected.

On another channel, others deny
all wrongdoing, again and again,
mounting their defense
in louder and louder voices.

You can choose to believe
those on one side or the other.
There is no middle ground.

In between the news reports,
the advertisements for the latest
cars and medications run nonstop.

We cook, listen to the news, eat dinner,
and wash the dishes, wondering
how and if we are responsible,

knowing that even if we all agreed
about what is true, and even if
we acted with great haste,

it would be too late to save the people
driven from their homes in Syria yesterday,
today, tonight and tomorrow,

too late for the people swept
off the islands of the Bahamas,
too late to retrieve the glaciers
dissolving into the sea,

too late for the child
drowned in her father’s arms
in the river between danger
and the promised land.

A Pushcart Prize nominee, Laura Mazza-Dixon has been featured in both the Hartford Courant Poet’s Corner and the Simsbury Community Television’s Speaking of Poetry Series. Her poetry collection, Forged by Joy, was published in January of 2017. More information on it is available on the Antrim House website (www.antrimhousebooks.com/mazza-dixon.html). Mazza-Dixon lives in Granby, CT where she directs the Windy Hill Guitar Studio. She is co-artistic director of The Bruce Porter Memorial Music Series and has performed on classical guitar and viola da gamba across New England. She also organizes the Poetry at the Cossitt series at the F. H. Cossitt Library in North Granby, CT, and has organized two poetry workshops titled “Words That Matter: Courageous Conversations on Race” for the UCC churches in Granby.

Photo by Heather Zabriskie on Unsplash.

Honduran Refugees in My Classroom 2

By Alexander P. Garza

Editor’s warning: assault, violence against women

“Mira a mi tia.” Look at my aunt.
“La mataron.” They killed her.

She shows me a photo on her phone:
a black honduran woman, motionless,

face down, half-naked, ass exposed,
top torn. The girl tells me her aunt’s just been

raped and murdered, left dead.
She got the photo via text from a family friend.

The image forever ingrained in my brain
during our history class, right then.

“Another one down,” she says in Spanish.
“Glad we got out,” she says.

Alexander P. Garza is a writer, actor, and educator from Houston, TX. His work can be seen in Veil: Journal of Darker Musings, Thirteen Myna Birds, Black Poppy Review, and others. He was awarded the 2019 Dark Poetry Scholarship Award by the Horror Writers Association, was commissioned by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and Tintero Projects for work inspired by their Latin American Exhibit: Play and Grief, and he has worked on and offstage at the Alley Theatre, Houston Grand Opera, Main Street Theater, and Mildred’s Umbrella Theatre Company. Visit him on Instagram/Twitter, @alexanderpgarza, and on his website http://www.alexanderpgarza.com.

Photo credit: LasTesis performs the feminist anthem “Un violador en tu camino” (“A rapist in your way”), in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, from Honduras Tierra Libre.

The Right Hat

By Luke Walters

The little girl’s teal hat is what caught my eye. She and a woman were hugging the bottom of a gravel drainage ditch, hidden from sight—except to me, perched high in my rig.

I’d just passed dozens more like them sitting cross-legged along the highway next to green-striped border patrol trucks. Their hike across the desert from the Mexican border at an end.

Having headed the back way to Phoenix to avoid the zoomers and the Department of Public Safety, I’d left Tucson early to pick up a trailer of fresh chilis at a farm west of Casa Grande. With the sun rising behind me and miles of highway in front of me, I’d been sleep-driving 75-mph down I-8, a four-lane, flat-straight black-ribbon of asphalt cut through the rough Sonoran Desert. After skating on and off the white edge line for maybe twenty miles, I decided I wanted to live for another day, turned off, and wrestled my 18-wheeler into the parking lot of the rest stop—nothing more than paved-over desert with a half-dozen picnic tables. That’s when I spotted them.

Now, parked lengthwise in the empty lot, I scooted on over to the passenger’s side, pushed past my stack of crossword puzzle books, opened the door, and let my legs dangle out. A can of Monster in one hand and an unfiltered Camel in the other, I relaxed, taking in the monotone landscape. My old favorites, Waylon and Dolly, brought back too many memories and the regrets that came with them, so I listened now to Mozart.

The woman and the girl raised their heads to stare at me. I paid them no mind. After a quick jolt of caffeine and a hit of nicotine, I planned to be back on the road. The pair of fence jumpers weren’t any of my concern.

At least that’s what I thought, until the green-striped SUV of the border patrol passed through the lot.

After scanning the desert behind the picnic tables, the driver, a woman in an olive green uniform, stopped next to me and opened her window. She had the same burnt-brown skin and coal-black hair as the pair in the drainage ditch.

“Howdy, officer,” I said, shutting off the music. “Beautiful morning for catching beaners, ain’t it?”

Not answering, she gave me her cop smile while studying me. Too much Burger King and too many bottles of Bud showed on my face and my ass. Pretty, I wasn’t.

“Sir, is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

I blew out a smoke ring. “Yeah, there is.”

She watched me, tapping her steering wheel, as I crushed out my butt on the heel of my boot.

I raised my eyes to her.

The woman pulled the little girl close.

“Well, what is it?” the officer asked.

Taking off my Make America Great Again ball cap, I held it out, turning it for her to see. “Just got this. Looks nice, don’t it? Some big-smiling guy who wanted me to vote was passing them out at the garage. I liked my old John Deere better, but it was grungy—all sweat stained and greasy.”

Squaring my new red cap on my head, I said, “Not sure what it is, but somehow, there’s something about this one that just doesn’t feel right.”

The agent waited for me to say more. When I said nothing, she asked, “Is that all?”

“Yeah, that’s all.”

“Okay, sir,” she said, rolling her eyes like she’d been talking to someone simple, and she zipped out onto the highway.

I glanced toward the ditch. The little girl and woman smiled at me. Those were the first genuine smiles I’d gotten in ages. They lasted with me all the way to Phoenix, where I dropped them off.

Ed Radwanski, aka Luke Walters, resides in Arizona. His flash fiction has appeared in Yellow Mama, Mash Stories, Post Card Shorts, and in Envision – Future Fiction, an anthology by Kathy Steinemann, published on Amazon.

Photo by Ryan Riggins on Unsplash.