Editor – Page 16 – Writers Resist

Winter of Needle and Thread

By Caroline Bock

Dedicated to Grace Cavalieri

Nana makes you learn needle and thread and you stick your fingers—and blood—“Don’t bleed on the cloth,” she says. In your hands is a scrap, an addition to the family’s patchwork quilt. “Stitch. Even stitches,” she insists. A bulb of red appears as you pull the needle through your skin, and more blood, and she hits you with her boot on the side of your head, and you bend and stitch. Blood drips on the ice-hard ground, and you stitch. The sliver of a needle slides in and out, next to your bone, and you flinch. She hits you with her boot, and you stitch. Lift the thread through the heterodox cloth. Thread it through your skin and bone. Stitch the batting and backing; sew, swiftly. The needle pricks the cloth as if connected to a machine, not your throbbing fingers. “Faster, snow is in the forecast,“ she says. She has plied this trade since coming to this country from Sicily. She survived because of the needle and thread, a seamstress since age thirteen. We sit outside on wrought-iron garden chairs because the razor-thin air is good for our lungs, hers being very old and yours being only ten years old. You have no able mother, and your Pop has given you to Nana’s care. Her breath is smoked with black licorice cough drops. Her teeth are false, ruined over the years (“Use a scissors, not your teeth, or you’ll find yourself as toothless as me, a strega too, a witch.”). Her hair, once the same chestnut as yours, now frizzes coarsely metallic. “Come, closer to me,” she says, picking at the cloth, “let me see.” The seams are straight and neat enough, though she gives a bitter smile of superiority; her stitches would be straighter and neater. She is making you learn because you insisted you would never learn. You will have no soup, no warmth, until you finish. Some people, you will discover, will think they know what it is you need to know. They will know nothing about you—only that they see themselves in you. “You were born to needle and thread like me,” she says, distracted by the crows cutting across the twilight, and you stitch. And stitch. Stitch. You sew her into the quilt, and then, to her outrage, snip yourself free of the thread with your pair of scissors. You skip over the fence and, transformed, you fly off into the wintery candor of moon and crows. The promised snow falls, frozen spikes, erratic needlework, and you look back: the ice sews a final lattice around her. The other crows pluck out her eyes. And after all, the story should be that you take up the needle and thread, but you never do. You never bend your head over handiwork again. You have left buttons dangling and hems too long. Birthrights are often forsaken, and the needle and thread is yours. No one knows you as well as you know yourself. She might have shouted at you to return, to rip out seams, to incant forgiveness, but you are long gone, soaring on the snow-crisp winds toward southern skies.

Caroline Bock’s debut short story collection, Carry Her Home, is the winner of the 2018 Fiction Award from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Bock is also the author of the young adult novels Lie and Before My Eyes, from St. Martin’s Press. In 2018, the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County awarded her an Artists & Scholars grant for her novel-in-progress. She is a lecturer at Marymount University and leads creative writing workshops at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda and at Politics & Prose in Washington, DC. Learn more about Caroline at www.carolinebockauthor.com and follow her on Twitter @cabockwrites, Facebook @CarolineBockAuthor, and Instagram @CarolineBockAuthor.

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash.

Ghosts in the Eucalyptus Grove

By Julie Martin

Ending with a line from Brooke Jarvis

Footsteps churn
sassafras, mud, and fern leaves
into confetti in a continual cycle–
germinate, thrive, die, decay, give way to new life.

The hollowed log of a King Billy pine
garlanded with moss and mist serves as a lair
for the transverse stripes that radiate
in shadows.

Eyes gleam in the dark
on the threshold between dead and undead,
present and absent,
remembered and forgotten.

Every crack of a twig
is ripe with potential
for a glimpse
of Thylacine–

Amalgamation of a creature:
head of a wolf, hindquarters striped like a tiger,
long thick tail of a kangaroo,
the size of a Labrador retriever.

More commonly known as the Tasmanian Tiger.
The last known specimen
died in a zoo in 1936.
And yet of all the world’s officially extinct species,

Thylacine has the highest number of supposed
post-extinction sightings.
“Is it more foolish to chase a figment
or assume that our planet has no secrets left?”

A poet and a public school teacher, Julie Martin lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her husband, sons and dogs. Her poetry has appeared in several online journals, most recently Thimble Literary Magazine, Gravitas, Pasque Petals, Dreamers Creative Writing, Tiny Seed Journal and Tiger Moth Review. She was the 2018 first place winner of South Dakota State Poetry Contest, in the landscape division.

Photo credit: Young, male thylacine at Beaumaris Zoo, about 1936, National Museum of Australia.

the heart of the matter

By Yvonne G Patterson

eldritch energies twist and warp
the skin of space, bend time, weave
shields of plaited light, cloak the heart

bodies orbit, surfing unleashed power’s vortex
grasp at coloured baubles glittering
in furnaces fuelled by matter’s dying screams

dark theatres host phantasmic pageants
vast auroras writhe upon the stage
magicians’ spectral hands seduce

sensory feasts fuel ferocious appetites
chimera’s cosmic heroin addicts

gravitational force accelerates
the heart’s event horizon looms
Faustian bargains sink their teeth

conscience battles rage
locate the will to exit, or
satiate the lust for full immersion

through the looking glass where

life travels forever into stasis, embalmed
in adamantine quicksand, decaying time
endless iteration

a flaw interred inside a diamond
a breath exiled inside obsidian
glacial involution, a collapsing star

free falling in the heart of the black
the singularity where time hibernates

where even coldness hides
shuts its eyes, shudders
deep inside the caverns of that void

in the stasis of the heart

does self awareness flicker
feel the slightest flare of shame, contrition
seek absolution from the choice?

the choice

at the heart of the matter

Yvonne Patterson lives in Perth, WA, Australia, with her wife and has a career background in human services clinical psychology and state-wide human services policy in mental health, disability, community, and justice services. Her poetry reflects themes of social justice, equality, and environmental issues. She received a commendation in the Australian 2018 Tom Collins National Poetry Prize.

Photo credit: Andrea Della Adriano via a Creative Commons license.

Introducing a New Writers Resist Editor

We’re delighted to announce a new addition to our editorial team, Debbie Hall, who’ll be joining Ying Wu in reviewing poetry submissions.

Debbie is a psychologist and writer whose poetry has appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies, including the San Diego Poetry Annual, Serving House Journal, Sixfold, Poets Reading the News, Poetry24, Bird’s Thumb, Califragile, Gyroscope Review, and Hawaii Pacific Review. Her essays have appeared on NPR’s This I Believe series, in USD Magazine, and in the San Diego Union Tribune. She completed her MFA in 2017 at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.

Debbie received an honorable mention in the 2016 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize and won second place in the 2018 Poetry Super Highway contest. She is the author of the poetry collection, What Light I Have (Main Street Rag Books, 2018), a finalist in the 2019 San Diego Book Awards, and an award-winning chapbook, Falling Into the River (The Poetry Box, 2020).

In addition to writing, Debbie’s passions include photography and world travel. She and her partner, both native Southern Californians, live in north San Diego County.

Enjoy this poem by Debbie. …

Against Doom

Corona I’m not going
to write about you
or read or think
about you
any longer today
I want a divorce
from you.
To not think about
you I will take a drive
to mail one small envelope
that is not urgent
not touching the mailbox
or getting out of my car
enjoying scenery
on the way and back
sights that are well known
to me and usually fairly
boring but suddenly
are bright and compelling.
For lunch a comfort
dose of peanut butter
seems necessary
and instead of thinking
about you I am
contemplating the wind
and orioles fighting
over grape jelly
in the feeder.
Then it is time
to brew tea—
Earl Grey with its
floral notes and
while I drink it
I do not consider
the loss of taste
and smell some people
infected by you
have reported.
Once I have written
this poem that is not
about you I will watch
the evening news
but avert my eyes
& mute the sound
when the topic
of you comes up
and sip my gin martini
with its delightful scent
of juniper berry.
When I go to sleep
tonight after
not thinking about
the vast unknown
hampering science
right now in its
fight against you
and your ilk
I will dream of sailing
far out to sea
where you are but
a faint apparition
on a distant shore—
soon to be disappeared
by the morning tide.

Oh, brother, where art thou?

By Kathleen Hellen

“You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely.”
– J.D. Salinger

I’d thought that you’d do better than a sidekick, thought that you’d articulate—knowing,
as you must, about the stink they left behind, the helicopters lifting from the ruins in Saigon.

Of course, I smelled it as a kid—a whiff—when boys who lived in trailers—their fathers pulling double-shifts, drunk on sulfur stink, spoiling for a fight, raising fists—shouted Jap—go back!
picked me up and threw me down a hill. They spit on my mother.

I smelled it when the mills laid off. Again, the odor. They murdered Vincent Chin.
Again the hint—like chlorine burning in the failed reactor:
ching chong ling long ting tong. It smelled like girls I knew in college.
A strange perfume, as if they’d lit the storefronts, piled up bodies (murders, exonerations).

And then I saw you in the clip, aiding and abetting. You turned your back on witness, like Frankl said. Only those most brutal, those who’d lost all scruples, were self-selected in the camps.
The well-fed, red-cheeked guards who ushered others to the crematoria.

I suppose that in this game of self-selection there are always those
marched off to smokestacks, and those who choose instead to pinch their noses.

Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin, Umberto’s Night, winner of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has won the Thomas Merton poetry prize and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. Her poems have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Diode Poetry Journal, jubilat, The Massachusetts Review, New American Writing, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, and West Branch, among others. For more on Kathleen, visit kathleenhellen.com.

Photo by Mike Marrah on Unsplash.

Man with a Knife

By Tara Stillions Whitehead

ENTER death as sound blackening an already shadowy scene—as a long, hard lament from the HORN of the failed getaway car. Then, as a YOUNG WOMAN. Everything is lost; everyone has lost. At this distance, death is an exquisite execution of convention. A triumph of method acting. Near-perfect cinema. It will be studied and taught and adapted and celebrated for its shape.

It is easy to rage over a newly motherless child.

It happened in broad daylight. It happened at night. It unmistakably happened. It was day. It was night. It was. (It still is.) He bent him over, he broke him in half, he bent him until he broke and couldn’t be put back together again. He told him this is a common occurrence. He used the word occurrence by mistake. This is how guys let off steam, he said. This is how you make friends in the business, he said. And this is how you get away with it. Over here, behind the condor, between the generator and the empty two-banger. It’s fast, he said. It’s hard. It hurts, he said. But that’s okay. That’s part of it, he said. That’s part of what makes it great. When you’re older, you’ll appreciate it, he said. The pain. You’ll see I’m right, he said, in a voice that was sure, in a body anticipating relief. And then he folded the boy hard into that posture that broke him. He demonstrated, the boy said in a documentary twenty years later, how to ruin a life.

ENTER deception as a WOMAN whom we have never seen but whose rumored infidelities keep the emotional plot moving, whose fatal intrigue is meant to distract the players from burgeoning political avarice. While the newspapers pay for pictures, big money for images of fucking or almost fucking someone else’s husband, someone desiccates the orange groves to the north, slakes penniless farmers with broken promises, and forges the names of the dead. The inland empire is ripe for annexing, the groomed child is ripe for killing.

ENTER a millionaire to execute both. It’s savage. It’s noir. It’s a captivating example of how to unravel humanity on a screen.

It’s easy to rage over pictures that hide the truth.

I’ve told the bloggers, she says. I’ve told the LA Times, she says. Didn’t you see my interview on The Talk? Read my sworn affidavit, she says. Read all three of them. Forget the Deadline Hollywood nonsense. It’s a hashtag epidemic. It’s total bologna. I know my husband. I know everything about him, more than his doctors. He sleeps in the fetal position—when he sleeps—and he only fucks women, okay? Vaginas. Tits. Never anal. Not even plugs. A wife knows, okay. Ask me anything. That beauty mark that made him a millionaire is a chicken pox scar. He didn’t grow up in Reseda. He’s from rural Pennsylvania. His mother was Mennonite and he didn’t learn to drive until he was twenty-fucking-three years old. His father died of sepsis after he severed his hand in a grain mill, and his sister Lucy committed suicide at ten. Ten. If that doesn’t fuck you—Look, E. worked his ass off to float to the top of this cesspool. He didn’t fuck that casting director’s kid in the back of his town car. He didn’t sodomize any child stars. It’s a hashtag epidemic. It’s social media. It’s a lot of angry women and crying faggots, okay? This isn’t just business these people are fucking with. It’s the whole entertainment industry. Thousands of people. It’s livelihood—yours, E.’s, and mine. Everyone’s. My husband doesn’t fuck kids, okay. A wife knows. Now put this bitch to bed so we can get back to production.

ENTER truth as obscenity, as a confession: She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister and she’s my daughter. It is cunning and unexpected. It is one of the most spectacular scenes in all of film. Any film professor with a degree in cinema will assure us of it. The brutality, they say—

It is easy to rage over a fatherless daughter.

That’s great. You did great. Do you high five? Alright, high five! Okay, okay. So, next time we meet, it’ll be at my other office. Seventh floor of the Burbank building. The third office to the left. Be sure to wash up first, okay? You can’t be sticky during an audition. There’s a bathroom in the foyer off the elevator. It has good lighting. Take your time. Practice your lines for the new scene. Do whatever you gotta do to get warmed up, okay? Be sure to tell your mother to wait downstairs again. She’ll only distract you. Mothers are just distractions. Tell her to get a coffee and take a long walk through the studio store. Tell her she can buy anything she wants. You like Harry Potter? Avengers? The Flash? Of course you do. Tell her to give the cashier my name. It’s on me. Everything is on me. Isn’t that cool? It’s pretty cool, right? That’s what it’s like to be famous. You can buy anything you want. You can go anywhere you want. Do anything you want. It’s pretty cool. Hey, come here. A little closer. Yeah, right there. Perfect. Are you scared? Don’t be scared. It’s okay. I know what I’m doing. Trust me, okay? Can you trust me? Think about your mom and all the things you’ll be able to buy her. Think about how cool your house will be once you make it big. Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing, okay. There. See. That’s not so bad, right? It’s kind of good, isn’t it? Right. Right. Now, tell me … how would you like to be famous?

Top 10 Anticipated Series in Development: [3/27/2020]

4. Untitled #metoo Project | NC-17 | Action – Drama – Suspense | Announced

Attorney who “would never put herself in a position to be raped” represents network mogul slammed with allegations that he sexually assaulted children and young actresses.

8-episode mini-series| Director: M. Garcea | Starring: C. Beavers, M. Roberts

One of the broken boys died of addiction. But not really. He died of pneumonia. But not really. Can shame kill? Because the boy’s blood was infected with it. And whether it was the shame that caused the emptiness that caused the use that caused the addiction that caused the pneumonia that caused his death—he can never confirm. Dead boys can’t defend themselves or explain. They can’t talk at all, not like living boys, the unbroken ones anyway.

It is easy to rage over a boy who cannot speak.

85 EXT. – STONE CANYON RESERVOIR – DAY – MAGIC HOUR (Omitted) 85*

LOW ANGLE BEHIND the feet of two men standing on the gravel perimeter of the empty reservoir. DARK RINGS mark varying latitudes of higher water levels, times long gone. One of the men, M., 37, wears khaki shorts and a bulletproof vest over his button-down. The dark-suited man to M.’s right, K., 55, speaks in sharp monotone throughout, hands resigned to his pockets. As the SUN SETS, we STAY ON the men’s backs, sometimes catch a glimpse of them in profile.

You’ve seen Chinatown, right?

K. nods.

M. (CONT’D)

The scene where Gittes gets his nose sliced. That
was shot right over there.

M. points off-screen.

M. (CONT’D)

Polanski played the attacker.

(pause)

He had a choice, you know. As the director. He
chose to be Man with a Knife. No name, just a man
and his weapon. He chose to play that role, to be the
one to say “kitty cat” instead of pussy. To be the
guy who disfigures Nicholson and tells him to stop
trying to uncover the truth. It was 1973. Polanski
had a thing for knives.

(turns to K.)

I’m not killing myself.

No one really wants that.

A lot of people sure sound like they do. Trolls, E.,
the media, lawyers—

(looks at K.)

Well, most of them.

Hey, I’m here for you, buddy.

These Twitter trolls. They’re stuck in a time warp.
I’m forty-two. I’m married and have two daughters.
But people see my name in their feeds and they
think time hasn’t passed. They think I’m still that
goofy kid they loved almost thirty years ago. How
could anything bad have ever happened to him, they
ask? He was so goofy and healthy, he never looked
hurt. But now they hate me. For nothing. For
nothing except telling the truth. People hate when
the truth gets in the way of what they believe, so if I
just disappear, if I’m not here to force them to
choose truth—

(stops himself)

Fuck.

The SUN lowers into frame, FLARES. The men become SILHOUETTES.

M. (CONT’D)

You know, Polanski experienced total brutality in
his life. He fled the Nazis. His mother died in
Auschwitz. He lost Sharon in the most horrific way.
His life is the culmination of catastrophic
circumstances. It’d be easy to forgive a person like
that, to say they were so fucked up as a kid, as a
young father-to-be, that they didn’t know how to do
things right.

(pauses)

Except that when you’ve been the victim, you know
what wrong is, and you know complicity. You
choose to do bad. Polanski had a choice. Those
kids—Sam Gailey, the girls in Gstaad—

(pauses)

They’ve heard it too. “You’re lying.” “Go kill
yourself.” “Give us back our brilliant Polanski.”

(pauses)

I’m not killing myself.

You have a lot to live for, pal.

People marvel at how Chinatown ends, how fucked
up it is. But they like it. They like that Gittes is too
powerless to save anyone. It makes their own
powerlessness okay. People thought it was real hard
to end a film that way given the circumstances of
Watergate, the paranoia and desire for transparency.
But then they saw their own powerlessness. And
they thought, well shit, here’s a movie that tells it
like it is.

(laughs)

Polanski knew his audience. He knew what he was
doing, what a film could really achieve.

(pauses)

You know, Gittes’s last line wasn’t in Townes’ final
draft. In the original ending, Gittes was livid,
berating the police, proselytizing justice while
Cross held his dead daughter, the one he fucked and
fathered another daughter with. In the original,
Gittes was real passionate about calling out
authority. He was angry and relatable. He was a
hopeful kind of fiction.

(pause)

But you’ve seen the movie. You know how it really ends.

(pause)

“As little as possible.” That’s the kicker right there.
That’s the tagline of this whole damn thing. That’s
the most real line I’ve ever heard in a film. Because
men can be broken. Gittes gets broken. The system
gets broken. And nobody cares enough to try to fix
it or the people it breaks. They just want their
money. They just want their stories.

It’s dark now. As we PULL BACK, as we RISE UP, REVEAL that trillion-dollar landscape built on stories: Bel Air, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Santa Monica; Hollywood, Pasadena, and Burbank, and the vast Pacific Ocean, which SCINTILLATES like broken glass, WINKING at us before it FADES beneath a blood-colored sky.

CUT TO:

BLACK and no credits. (No one will take credit.)

It is easy to rage over the inability to forget.

To do as little as possible.

I am a multi-genre writer and filmmaker who was assaulted off of the number one sitcom in the country and went on to pursue an MFA to unwrite and unteach the toxic Hollywood narratives. My work can be found in more than two dozen journals. Recent publications include cream city review, PRISM international, Monkeybicycle, The Rupture, and Pithead Chapel. I have received a Glimmer Train Award for New Writers, AWP Intro Journal Awards, and Pushcart Prize nominations. My first collection of stories, The Year of the Monster, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press.

Late Afternoon in the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe

By Joe Milosch

Sitting in the barrio church,
I look at the altar window.
It is a pale October evening,
but now its rainbow-colored shore
glows in the stained-glass.
Standing mast-like in a boat,
Christ looks toward land as he turns
red at sunset. He doesn’t look
like a carpenter’s son
any more than the men around him
look like fishermen;
any more than the man
I saw drinking from a bottle
looked like a refugee
as he rested near the south side
of the metal barrier on the border.
Wearing his Padres cap
slightly off center, he seemed
to study his shadow.
If someone from north of the border
shook the hand of this man,
their shadows would blend
and speak from the dust:
“We are the earth, mined, tilled,
and worked to exhaustion.”
Here, the gardener rinses
the stained-glass
and interrupts my thoughts
about men, land, and the sun.
Rubbing the cross of my rosary,
I kneel beside the aisle of marble tiles;
their broken pattern becomes
a landscape of farms
in my home state.
Looking up at the face of Christ,
I see watery traces
leading from his blue eyes to
the lead-bordered edge of his jaw,
and there, droplets fall unnoticed
among roses, stones, and soil.

Joe Milosch graduated from San Diego State University. His poetry has appeared in various magazines, including the California Quarterly. He has multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and he received the Hackney Award for Literature. He has two published books: The Lost Pilgrimage Poems and Landscape of a Hummingbird.

Photo by Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash.

Sonnet: Australia in 2020

By Chris Collins

‘graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day’
– P. B. Shelley, England in 1819

An orange light, pale, sickly, dying
Chokes the sky, while it anaesthetises.
Infected air, poisoned, thick and blinding,
But smoke can’t shroud our eyes from these fire’s sizes.
Our rulers neither see, nor feel nor know
But deny, scorn, politicise and peddle
As drought, hunger and extinction grow;
The stench of half a billion gone to the devil.
They make glib comments on cricket and ‘soul’
And our ‘resilient spirit’ that sucks the lie.
They warm their hands on lacquered coal
While their people sleep on beaches – and die.
Now even water, and breathing air aren’t free
Unless you’re on holiday in Hawaii.

Chris Collins writes poems and fairy fiction in between marking essays, narrowboating, Morris dancing, and folk singing. Her writing has previously been published by Animal Heart Press, Between These Shores Literary Annual, and several online presses and magazines, including Cephalopress and Mooky Chick.

Photo by Kym MacKinnon on Unsplash.

Fire Storm: Poem Beginning with a Line from Jane Kenyon

By Lynn Wagner

Into light all things must fall, glad at last to have fallen
while the crown fires burn and branches break, charred
and brittled to the tall trees’ bones. Fall down from the sky
fantails, so stumble purple swamphen along the shore.
And day is night and ash is all while pyrocumulonimbus
counterclockwise circle the globe.

Into light all things must fall, glad at last to have fallen.
Australian sharpshooters cull ten thousand thirsty camels
brought to their knees. To the east, their brothers in choppers
tip carrots and yam to wallabies. Call the Karajarri to pray
for rain. Call the prime minister back home. And all is ash,
is ash, so the children make a circle and sing a tune.

Into light all things must fall, glad at last to have fallen
like the very same rain from the sky, that gratefully
commingled with beads of hail. And the black earth
knows its sacrifice. And the beasts, vegetarians and sad
predators alike, their bodies baptized in death, yet koala
come, pockmarked, to puddles and drink, satisfied, at dawn.

Lynn Wagner is the author of No Blues This Raucous Song, which won the Slapering Hol Chapbook competition. She received an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, where she won the Academy of American Poets prize. Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Subtropics, West Branch, Green Mountains Review, Cavewall, and other journals. See more at lynnwagner.com.

Photo by Joanne Francis on Unsplash.

Americans are rushing around stocking up on toilet paper

By Marcy Rae Henry

In Himalayan India we used leaves

buckets of water and our hands

Best-selling tampons have applicators

because Americans are afraid to touch themselves

In Himalayan India we didn’t have tampons

We used rags and pads

but didn’t touch each other’s hands to say hello

When wiping with leaves or plants you have to know

which ones are poisonous and that’s different

from knowing the price of toilet paper at Sam’s v. Costco

They want to install outhouses in rural India

where people have only used the forest

Don’t women have enough problems on buses

without feeling vulnerable trapped in a shitbox at night

We learned to cut off tops of water bottles and pee in plastic

during an unknown night

With the tops we made spoons and flimsy guitar picks

At crowded train stations or bus stops food was sold

on plates of leaves that were tossed from windows

to degrade sooner than bones that are outlived by plastic

In Himalayan India we didn’t have many choices

for shampoo toothpaste or hair ties

We got whatever someone carried up the mountain

The States is mad about choice

about opening bars and closing borders

Some see the lack of a mask as an act of rebellion

The Great American Rush on Toilet Paper

A virus that cannot space out everyone

And we are the perfect hosts when we don’t want to be

Marcy Rae Henry is a Latina born and raised in Mexican-America/The Borderlands. She is a resister and an interdisciplinary artist with no social media accounts. Her writing and visual art have appeared in national and international publications and the former has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. Ms. M.R. Henry is working on a collection of poems and two novellas. She is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Fine Arts at Harold Washington College Chicago.

Say Their Names

Writers Resist is honored to share some of the many and diverse creative writings recently inspired by Black Lives Matter, systemic racism, police brutality, U.S. protests, and the gorgeous, global chorus demanding equity and equality for all. This issue includes works by Kitty Anarchy, Despy Boutris, Schyler Butler, Marcy Rae Henry, Dana Kinsey, Christa Miller, Aaron Sandberg, Sarah Sheppeck, Jennifer Shneiderman, and Rebecca Tolin.

We’re grateful to be able to illustrate the writings with images of protests, labor that often puts photojournalists and lay photographers in police crosshairs.

Please join us in celebrating all these works by sharing them wherever you feel safe doing so and—more important—when it isn’t comfortable.

Silence is not an option; resistance is transformative.

We’ll be releasing one piece daily on social media for the next ten days. Follow us to share the posts on Facebook @WritersResist, Instagram @WritersResist, and Twitter @WritersResist.

And subscribe at writersresist.com. It’s free, and words do create change.

With love and persistence,
K-B, Debbie, Sara, and Ying
Writers Resist
Publishing the resistance since 2016

Years that ask questions

By Marcy Rae Henry

Black like me said John Howard Griffin and the world listened

(Black like losing electricity)

Black like me said Rachel Dolezal and the world blistered

(Black like the plague)

Black lives matter (now) say my neighbors

(Black like squares on a checkerboard)

Black is beautiful said Bill Allen (maybe) and the world paused

(Black like hair before silver)

Doesn’t matter if you’re black (or white) said Michael

(Black like a birthmark)

And what did I mean by ‘black’? asked Coates

(Black like seeds)

I became black in America said Adichie

(Black like pepper)

Black Power is a cry of pain said MLK

(Black like blindness)

The Black Revolution is controlled only by God said Malcolm

(Black like Goth)

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide
welling and swelling I bear in the tide wrote Maya

(Black like ink)
(Black like mud)

Education is indoctrination if you’re white—subjugation if you’re black argued Baldwin

(Black like leopard spots)
(Black like the unlucky cat)
(Black like guns)

Animals weren’t made for humans any more than black people were made for white
(or women for men) claimed Alice Walker

(Black like pupils)
(Black like funerals)
(Black like devil’s hooves)
(Black like beaches)

Las caras lindas de mi gente negra son un desfile de melaza en flor sang Susana Baca

(Black like asphalt)
(Black like all colors blended together)
(Negro como mina de lápiz)
(Black like the absorption of all colors of the spectrum)
(Black like film noir)

Black, brown, beautiful—viviremos para siempre Afro-Latinos hasta la muerte lyricized Elizabeth Acevedo

(Black like eyeliner)
(Black like beans)
(Black like a cocktail dress)
(Negro como el opuesto de blanco)
(Black like the depths of Langston’s Africa)
(Black like a red-beaked swan)

Who would have thought, when they came to the fight
that they’d witness a launchin’ of a black satellite said Ali

(Black like charcoal)
(Black like black holes)
(Black like coal)
(Black like Christ)
(Black like Olbers’ Paradox)
(Black like the anoxic Euxine Sea)
(Black like the eight ball)

I am black because I come from the earth’s inside answers Lorde to the question she posed

Each Day I Ask Nine Words

By Rebecca Tolin

Less than nine minutes is how long
it took to snuff
the life out of a man
a white officer with his knee
on the neck
of a black man in Minneapolis.
Necks are not meant for kneeling
mister officer.
Necks are meant for breathing
turning
linking head to the heart.
Before his lungs collapsed
like a balloon
deflated
George Floyd once
talked and danced and cooked
with his mother and brothers
washed clothes in the sink
dried them in the stove.
His cousin said when Big George
wrapped his arms around you
your problems vanished
for a while.
Nine days is how long
it took to be charged
with second-degree murder
for holding down
a man
as the last breath
slipped from his lips
as he begged for air
as he called for his mama
as he fell forever out of reach
of his five children
Gianna just six.
Nine words is how many
it takes to ask:
How may I make each day
a living reparation?

Rebecca Tolin is a writer and poet living in San Diego. She enjoys tree gazing, trail blazing, word playing, asking unanswerable questions and drifting into the silence that gives rise to it all. She previously worked as a broadcast journalist covering science and nature. Her essays and articles appear in places like Yoga Journal and Sierra Magazine. Rebecca’s poetry is featured in the anthology Song of Ourself: Voices in Unison and other journals including Perigee. You’ll find her, occasionally, on Facebook.

Yes, All

By Sarah Sheppeck

Car break-ins were frequent in the city. Insurance only covered the damage if I produced a police report, so when I left work to find another window smashed, I simply left for the precinct.

It was already dark. Trying to avoid traffic, I stayed on side roads and in residential neighborhoods. Two miles from the station, whoop. My arm hair straightened, as did my spine.

They never even approached my window.

Exit your vehicle, said the megaphone.

I just got pulled over, I texted my friend.

Are you OK??? she asked. I opened my door, certain she’d never receive an answer.

Stand on the sidewalk, said the megaphone. Place your hands on your head.

I did.

I wept, ugly and loud, and when two large men exited their vehicle to approach me, I prayed that the first bullet would hit my head so that I wouldn’t feel the rest.

Even though I sat in the passenger’s seat the officer looked at me first. Then he noticed my friend’s quivering lip, the smooth expanse of pale freckled skin extending from beneath her romper.

He asked her to approach his cruiser.

In the rearview, I watched him direct her into the passenger seat. She sat, leaving her door ajar. He signaled to her, and her eyes turned forward. I met her gaze in the rearview. She swallowed. She closed the door.

I watched for nearly ten minutes. He advanced as she receded.

She returned to her driver’s seat. He drove away, and she cried.

“The next time that happens, call Mommy. Just leave me on the line, so I can hear if …” My mother choked.

“I will,” I said.

I knew I was going to be pulled over.

I didn’t know there was a cop behind me, but I knew, the way you know that you’re going to be sick, or that the man who just sat next to you at the bar is bad news.

It was two a.m., my partner beside me as I drove. We were out of town, we’d missed turns, I was frustrated. I chose to ignore the NO U-TURN sign on the otherwise empty street, and the red and blue lights blinded me from behind.

My partner, a white man, said something calming.

The cop, a Black woman, knocked on his window.

“Where are you headed? Where are you coming from?” she asked him, while watching me.

Then she saw it, the cardboard carrier containing six empty bottles we’d drained the day prior, stupidly, so stupidly left on the passenger side floor mat. She retreated, returned with her reporting officer, also a white man. This time, they approached my window.

I wasn’t drunk, and neither was my partner, the white officer determined after six sobriety tests.

The bottles were a mistake, my partner explained. We’d meant to recycle them and hadn’t thought to move them to the backseat. The white officer nodded. The black officer fidgeted.

“It’s your call,” he said to her.

She looked at him. Looked at me. Wrote a citation for violating the state’s open carry law. Left.

In the motel, I dreamt of sirens.

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 Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Rochester and her Master’s in Secondary Education and Curriculum from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Born and raised in upstate New York, with stints in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, she now lives in the woods of northern Maine, where she pays the bills by ghostwriting for motivational speakers. Follow her on Twitter @EpicSheppeck.

Photo credit: Raffi Asdourian via a Creative Commons license.

Dear Captain

By Jennifer Shneiderman

after Walt Whitman

O Captain! my Captain!
our fearful trip has just begun.
Exit the door of no return –
grim vessel of horror,
the treasure chest,
black gold, first wealth and power –
America cannot go back.

But O heart! heart! heart!
the bleeding does not stop.
Black men struck down – life seeping,
fallen cold and dead.
How many ways are there
to sink a heart.

O Captain! my Captain!
rise up and see what has become of us.
The bugle is trilling,
soul of the country.
Bouquets, wreaths fly in the wind
ashes and flames
burned out buildings
broken storefronts
looted dreams.

Here father! dear father!
swaying masses call out for relief
from wretched rudderless elect.
Lips of justice pale –
a standstill, a dead fall.
The anchor sinks,
voyage done, heads bowed.
Exult no shores.
The bells are still

You are betrayed, my captain.
We mourn what could have been,
complicit in silence,
eyes averted.
Time to pay for the passage.

Jennifer Shneiderman is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and a writer living in Los Angeles. She writes poetry and short stories about health and mental health. Her work has been published in Indolent Book’s HIV Here and Now and her short story, “Housekeeping in the Time of COVID-19,” was in the most recent issue of The Rubbertop Review. Her poetry will be included in the anthology, Poetry in the Time of COVID-19, Variant Literature, and the Bright Flash Literary Review. She is the recipient of a Wingless Dreamer flash poetry prize. Currently, her teenage son is in quarantine and her emergency room doctor husband is on the front lines of the pandemic.

Photo by munshots on Unsplash.

oppression Olympics

By Kitty Anarchy

you can’t even
say a problem

without someone
having a better
story than yours

suddenly they’re
the ones
telling theirs

yours out
the door

it’s the
oppression
Olympics
out here

but those
doing the
oppressing

aren’t even
playing
with us
down here

they watching
us fight
over crumbs
from up
in the
hills

Kitty Anarchy is an anarchafeminist, chicana womyn poet and short story writer. She has a background in social work, having earned her MSW from California State University, Long Beach, and she listens to KPFK radio. She has 7 cats, her favorite being ChiChi and 2 dogs, named Nibbit and Chato. She is published in Chiron Review, Rabid Oak Journal, Los Angeles Review, and Ghost Town Literary Journal, as well as in anthologies through Arroyo Seco Press and Picture Show Press. Visit Kitty’s website at www.kittyanarchy.com.

Photo by Donovan Valdivia on Unsplash.

The Gospel According to Saint Bryan

By Dana Kinsey

There was in Georgia a humble young man, jovial and curious,
who came upon two others who knew the law and the prophets.
Confined and detained, this man had no recourse but to run.
Hunted, he must have cried out to implore neighbors for help,
and sought shelter from bullets he knew were inscribed for him.

Fortunately, there was a Good Samaritan traveling the same road,
one whose benevolence forced him to stop and end the plight of
the innocent Georgian, offer him the help denied by the other men.
Sunday school lessons flooded back and he knew what he must do.
The victim was not of his race or religion, but he loved this neighbor
as he loved himself, and so reached in his pocket to offer a phone.

Gently, fearlessly, without flinching or uttering even a gasp, he
put the camera in video mode, took care to turn it horizontally
and filmed the man’s unfortunate ordeal, a sign of true mercy.
This Jesus, reincarnate, knew what a selfless gift he provided,
footage for the young man to show his grandchildren someday.

Roddie held steady to get the best quality video, kept his reactions
stifled so as to not mar the 28 seconds with any jolting or shock.
In time, all could see that his footage revealed God’s truth while
the other two men walked away appearing blameless in the town.
He thought of panning the area to show the 11 shotgun pellets
dead on the sidewalk, but he was expected in Samaria by sunset.

Dana Kinsey holds a BA in English and an MA in Theater from Villanova University. She is a poet, actor, freelance writer, and teacher at Lancaster Catholic High School in Pennsylvania. Her poetry has been published online in the Yellow Chair Review, The Broadkill Review, and Spillwords. Her work also appears in Fledgling Rag and Silver Needle Press. Dana’s screenplay, WaterRise, was filmed in Manhattan by Sagesse Productions. Visit Dana’s website at www.wordsbyDK.com.

Photo credit: William “Roddie” Bryan mugshot courtesy of Glynn County Sheriff’s Office.

Response/Ability

By Schyler Butler

Share the photo of Keisha with tire marks cascading her back.
Remember the protest last night, the hungry eyes.
Ask the masses where were you.
Ask them taste blood in exchange for God.
After the ashes settle on the campus rooftops
and the downtown glass is swept,
pay for Speedway Marlboro’s.
Listen to birds chirp and avoid the eyes
of every child still young enough to grow.

Schyler Butler received her BA in English from the University of North Texas. A recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for FY 2020 and a lead poetry editor for Human/Kind Journal, her work appears and is forthcoming in Duende, Superstition Review, Obsidian, Heavy Feather Review’s #NoMorePresidents, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere, sometimes under the pseudonym “Iyana Sky.” She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash.

At Heaven’s Door

By Christa Miller

After ten days of scavenging around the houses in our subdivision, I know it’s unsustainable.

Zoe and I had started with the houses next door, then worked our way down the street, but we were walking farther and farther for less and less.

I decide to head for Myrtle Beach, but Zoe doesn’t want to go. She’s worried about running into more mobs. I tell her, “They’re mobs, not zombies,” but my words fall flat. The memories in her dark eyes reflect in my mind: the way they banged on our door, broke our windows, searched the house.

I haven’t been able to tell her why they came. I’ve never been an open book, and my stepdaughter is as much a stranger to me as I am to her. She was 12 when I met her, 13 when I married her mother. Zoe had been deep in the throes of puberty-driven issues, and I’m sure it doesn’t help that I’m white.

When I finally convinced her it was time to hit the road, I expected it all to start up again: the thrum of National Guard Chinooks, the bizarre scenes of mob violence, the screams and gunshots that made us barricade ourselves in our home, our prepper stash enough to sustain us for six weeks.

But the streets are eerily quiet now. The sounds are long gone, along with the people who made them. Did they all leave? Move with their mobs into other communities like schools of fish, flow into the Lowcountry like floodwater? Or did they all give up once the mob lost its meaning and they came to their senses, go inside their houses to starve themselves or take pills?

I don’t know which thought unsettles me more. But I’m glad I made the decision to go on foot, just a pair of backpackers. I don’t want to draw any more attention to us than we already have.

On the road, my memories are so strong that, as we search stores for food and clothes, I nearly hallucinate perky greeting girls and tired middle-aged clerks, asking if they can help me find something. I catch myself with my eye out for store detectives following Zoe, or well-to-do white women eyeballing her clothing choices at checkout like she doesn’t deserve the moisture-wicking sports gear or new pair of Nikes. That’s why, at a truck stop off the interstate, I don’t even notice the trucker drawing down on me until he screams something about this place being the domain he’s taken for himself. Blinking, my head still full of distracted thinking that the place should have bustled with crying children and cranky clerks and zoned-out drivers, I turn and face the black hole of his muzzle and think, This is why I left my guns behind. I’d almost welcome the bullet.

When the glass display case full of little crystal figurines crashes down on the trucker’s head, I don’t comprehend what’s happening right away. That big old burly white guy lies there screaming, a thousand tiny cuts from pink tinted glass all over his face and neck and eyes. Then there’s movement in my upper peripheral vision, and I turn my attention there.

It’s Zoe, of course. My stepdaughter has gone above and beyond what I deserve.

We grab up as many snacks as we can carry and hustle on our way. Zoe doesn’t exactly walk with me, but she doesn’t disappear either. She has this way of sort of eyeballing the space around her until she sees that I’m in it. Then she keeps going.

After the truck stop, there’s nothing but forest and farmland. By now, despite crazed white truckers, we’ve worked out that most everyone is gone. Disappeared, like the Rapture was a real thing, and we were the only sinners who didn’t get taken up. I don’t really think so, of course. Occasionally, holed up in a garage or shed, we’ve had to endure that sweet smell when it wafted on a breeze. Not often enough for suicide to account for all the disappearances, maybe more people died in the mob riots, but there’s no way to tell.

We manage to steal a truck from a farm and we drive just past Sangaree before it runs out of gas. It’s only been about an hour, and we’re a lot closer now to the coast, but the thought of walking makes my legs throb. Zoe, too. I can see it in her stiff limbs, the way she picks up her feet and puts them back down: gingerly, like she wishes the hard ground weren’t there.

We haven’t spoken since the truck stop. Time to give conversation a try. “We’re so close. All I want right now is to stick my feet in the surf.”

She shrugs, pushes her long box braids back away from her neck. “I’d settle for a place to stay and relax.”

“With a nice sun porch,” I try. “A hammock.” I chance a look at her face and catch the tail end of her eye roll.

We’re in a small community just off the highway. Zoe gestures at a little ranch. “No place matters if we don’t have food and water,” she says.

We have plenty, so much that I’m afraid any more will slow us down, but, whatever her reasons—probably a general disdain for my incompetence—Zoe seems to want the responsibility for scavenging.

The optics of a white cop letting a Black kid break into houses aren’t lost on me. After what happened to her mother, it feels like I’m setting her up for certain death. But arguing with her feels like an assault on her individuality, and so I watch her slip, cat-like, into the dark gap beneath the garage door.

Was Zoe into urban exploration or was it something she’d picked up from her video games? Jaye had never said anything about it. Jaye wasn’t a permissive mother, but she wasn’t strict, either. “Zoe’s like a river with a fast, deep undercurrent,” she told me once. “Damming it is only temporary, and you’d best have a way to relieve the pressure when it rains too hard for too long. Better to direct it. Set its path in the direction you want it to go, and hope it doesn’t overflow its banks.”

I could only wish I’d been raised that way. I might’ve gotten into less trouble. At the time I’d been excited that maybe Zoe and I had more in common than I realized. Now I think spit-and-polish discipline has been a part of my life for too long to be helpful to either one of us. All I know is, these urbex skills of hers, however she came by them, are exactly what she—what we—need to ensure our survival in this new world.

I come to a stop almost in front of the house, where I can see and hear anything that might go down, but I don’t go inside. That would be a good way to get myself hurt or killed if I were to turn a corner and surprise her, or anyone else who’s in there. Instead I wait. I keep my pack on my back and do a slow 360-degree turn, because I haven’t looked behind me in a while and I want to get my bearings.

As always, there’s nothing. A few high cirrus clouds tell me rain might be on its way, but that’s about it. There are no sounds, not the chatter of children playing nor the whir of lawn equipment. No footfalls or the squeak of a bicycle to tell us someone followed us. The air is flat and still, heavy with moisture and heat that won’t rise, and I suddenly have the irrational thought that we should be heading inland, away from the coast, because it’s hurricane season and what if? We’d never know until it hit us.

I shut it down. It would take us days to retrace our steps, and as bad as inland flooding has been in recent storms, we’d still have no guarantee of safety. I’d rather stay, maybe in a house built up on stilts, than risk fleeing.

Another five minutes and Zoe comes back out. She rolls her eyes again. “Why are you waiting for me?” she demands.

“Basic safety. Watching your back. Would you rather I went in there with you?”

She clicks her tongue and suddenly I know: Someday, perhaps sooner than I think, she’ll walk off without me, decide she’d rather just live on her own. I’ll wake up one morning, and she’ll be gone, or she’ll roll right out the back door of one of these houses and keep going, disappear for good.

I force myself to breathe, focus. Her hiking backpack doesn’t look any more stuffed than it did before. I resist the temptation to go in and do my own search, and instead I ask, “What’d you find in there? Anything good?”

She relaxes, just a little bit. “Nah. Those people took everything. Shelves were empty.” She hesitates, then meets my gaze. “Where are our photos?”

It takes me a few seconds to understand what she’s asking. The shame compounds tenfold when I realize I didn’t even think to bring any of the pictures Jaye printed from now-unreachable servers.

We halt in the middle of an intersection. Gas stations at opposite corners, a McDonald’s on one side, a Rite Aid on the other. All of them surrounded by weeds.

“How could you forget?” Zoe’s soft alto turns harsh, guttural. Her brown eyes meet mine, then slide away. Her mouth compresses into a thin line on her delicate face, and she twists a thin braid around her finger. “It’s not like we had no time. We spent weeks at home, waiting for the riots to blow over. Weeks. Plenty of time to go through the photos.”

What she’s saying is that those memories meant more to her than they did to me, and I’d never even stopped to consider that. I realize two things: one, I’d long ago reconciled with the idea that I might lose Jaye—you can’t both be cops and not recognize that—but I’d thought of Zoe as an extension of her. And two, I hadn’t thought—really thought—that we were truly leaving everything behind, but it pissed me off that Zoe blamed me when neither one of us had been able to think straight. I say the only thing I can think of to say: “If they were so important, why didn’t you go through them?”

She rocks back on her heels like I physically hit her. Then she takes off running.

Shit. Shitshitshit. The one thing Jaye would’ve entrusted to me, and I’ve fucked it up.

I stay in the same spot in that intersection for much longer than I tactically should. When Zoe doesn’t come back, I go looking for her.

What will I say when I find her? I don’t know. She probably won’t let me hug her. I’m so pissed off and frightened and ashamed that what I really want is for her to see me and follow me. To prove she didn’t just stick with me because she felt somehow compelled to.

I hear footsteps behind me, and my mind starts to play havoc. What if it isn’t Zoe, but some half-crazed resident, looking to loot me or worse?

The thought of being assaulted and left for dead out here in the street, under the baking Carolina sun, is what makes me finally spin around, hand at my hip where my gun used to be.

Zoe stops dead in her tracks.

She’s tied her braids into a ponytail, so it takes me three beats too long to recognize her. The first thing I notice is her expression: fearful, astonished, and, worst of all, betrayed. She eyeballs my hand until she’s sure I’m not really carrying. Then she seems to melt into the landscape.

I didn’t think the shame could get any worse, but it does. It burns my face along with the sun. I just made the worst possible assumption, not only about the only other living human being I’m aware of, but Jaye’s daughter, for fuck’s sake. And now I’ve chased her away, and the two of us are worse off for it. “I’m sorry,” I call out to the deserted street. My voice thin, weak.

She doesn’t respond.

I could end this all right now, one way or the other, if I could just tell her what happened to her mother.

She deserves that from me. They both do. I should have told her.

I take a deep breath, channel my most authoritative voice. “Zoe,” I call into the silent street. “Remember when we had to hide in the attic last month?”

No answer. But I wasn’t expecting one.

“I never thought I would ever have to do that,” I continue, “hide from people I considered friends, brothers even. But after what they did to your mother. … She tried to make them stop. They’d whipped themselves into a frenzy, thinking a group of unarmed civilians was looting a store, and she got in front of them. I couldn’t get to her in time. I promise you, Zoe, if I’d had any chance— In that moment, you were all I could think of. That moment … I’d been seeing for days, weeks, even months, who those people really were, but I couldn’t accept it until I saw what they did to their sister officer. Until I couldn’t say what they’d do to you. We were our own mob. The damage we did or were complicit in. So I deserted.”

Zoe sidles out from behind a parked car. I don’t give in to the relief. Not just yet.

Then she says dryly, “And you used to worry that video games were desensitizing me to violence.”

I have to let out a bark of laughter, because she’s right.

She doesn’t laugh with me, but her face softens. She hefts her pack on her back and without another word, starts to walk once more. East, of course.

I follow her.

Too goody-two-shoes for the rebels and too rebellious for the good girls and boys, Christa Miller writes fiction which, like herself, doesn’t quite fit in. For nearly 20 years, Christa has written in genres ranging from crime fiction to horror to children’s, but prefers to write—and read—blended-genre stories. Her affinity for the dark, psychological, and somewhat bizarre doesn’t stop her from volunteering at a local wildlife rescue, adventuring with her two sons in rivers, swamps, and marshes, or—when she’s not running her freelance business—relaxing with a book and a beverage in her hammock. Learn more at her website, christammiller.com.

Photo by Donovan Valdivia on Unsplash.

Cicadas in Protest, 2020

By Aaron Sandberg

they emerge—
suddenly and briefly in large numbers—
symbols of immortality—prominent eyes—

active during the day with some calling at dawn or dusk—
modes of locomotion—walking and flight—
take to the wing to travel distances—

the structure is buckled by muscular action—
removing dirt in the process—
sometimes cause damage—
blunt spikes—
drumlike—

yet to be studied carefully—
many await formal description—
common names—red eye—black prince—
trees may be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers—

cicadas are preyed on—
making them drop to the ground—
variety of strategies to evade predators—
long lifecycles may have developed as a response—

the cicada-hunter—
mounts and carries them—
pushing with its hind legs—
sometimes over a distance—
until they can be shoved down—

a loud cicada song—
especially in chorus—
distinct distress call—
asserted to repel predators—
calls to maintain personal space—
emitted when seized or panicked—

resonating chamber—
sing in scattered groups—
an exceptionally loud song—
may use different heights and timing of calling—
loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss—
the pitch is nearly constant—the sound is continuous—
they construct an exit tunnel to the surface and emerge—

they emerge, all at once—

Poet’s Note:

Audre Lorde said, “Revolution is not a one time event.” With the reemergence of the cicadas this season and the uprising protests, I saw a point of positive comparison—gathering in large numbers, being viciously preyed upon, making a unified chorus of sound. This is a found poem—all the phrases here are taken in some form or another from the Cicada Wikipedia entry.

Aaron Sandberg resides in Illinois where he teaches. His recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Asimov’s Science Fiction, English Journal, Yes Poetry, One Sentence Poems, Vita Brevis Press, Literary Yard, and elsewhere. You might find him on Instagram @aarondsandberg.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash.