Author: Editor

Apartheid

By Rebecca Ruth Gould

 

“We don’t serve Arabs,”
says the man behind the counter.
He fixes his eyes on me &
awaits my consent.

My Arab taxi driver is unfazed.
Racism is an old story
in the land of David.
Politeness took over.

We head for the car.
The road is a silent witness to atrocity.
Barren valleys cascade,
one after another.

God is a strange creature,
I think to myself.
What idiot would choose this sterile land
for launching his career?

We reach Bethlehem: checkpoint 300.
I disembark.
Arabs are not allowed
to cross like white women

with American passports.
I journey by foot to the two-storied
white limestone home where
I’ve taken up abode.

I pass tourists in t-shirts,
Banksy portraits,
& soldiers armed with kalashnikovs.
Like the racist at the counter—

like every well-heeled politician—
like every international law—
armed soldiers avert their gaze,
revealing glare of the sun.

 

Rebecca Ruth Gould’s poems and translations have appeared in Nimrod, Kenyon Review, Tin House, The Hudson Review, Salt Hill, and The Atlantic Review. She translates from Persian, Russian, and Georgian, and has translated books such as After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016) and The Death of Bagrat Zakharych and Other Stories by Vazha-Pshavela (Paper & Ink, 2019). Her literary translations have earned comparison with the world’s greatest poets, with a reviewer in The Calvert Journal recently noting, “With her new translation, Rebecca Ruth Gould follows in the footsteps of Russian literature luminaries like Osip Mandelshtam and Marina Tsvetaeva.” Her poem “Grocery Shopping” was a finalist for the Luminaire Award for Best Poetry in 2017, and she is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

West Bank mural photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash, 2014.

Dan’s note: This was done by Banksy, which I didn’t learn until a couple years later. I paid a Palestinian cab driver to take me to their side of the wall and took a few photos of the “graffiti”/art with my iPhone. The West Bank is walled off like a prison and heavily guarded by the Israelis. For those reasons, of all the “graffiti” I saw, this one resonated the most with me. I hope this pic introduces others to this amazing piece of art or gives some context to those who have seen it before.

Passion Play

By Jose A. Alcantara

 

The men in white collars
worship the crucified Christ

or what passes for it –
a soft-fleshed boy on a bed

stripped naked,
arms spread, ankles crossed.

They shoot polaroids
to share with other men

of God, those not lucky
enough to be there

that day, on Golgotha,
when the innocent wept

and even thieves
begged forgiveness.

 

 Jose A. Alcantara has worked as a bookseller, mailman, commercial fisherman, baker, carpenter, studio photographer, door-to-door salesman, and math teacher. He is a former Fishtrap Fellow and was the winner of the 2017 Patricia Bibby Memorial Scholarship from Tebot Bach. His poems have appeared in Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, Spillway, Rattle, High Desert Journal, San Pedro River Review, Pilgrimage, Spoon River Poetry Review, and the anthologies, 99 Poems for the 99%, and America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience. His poetry has been nominated for both a Pushcart and Best of the Net.

Photo credit: Photo by lAI mAN nUNG on Unsplash.

On the President’s Announcement of Our Hashtag

By John Linstrom

 

The President announced we need to keep
some carbon in the ground; he sounded sure,

his raised and lowered index finger maybe
mimicking an oil rig I’ve seen

on my computer screen. I caught his talk
distilled at first, a single image meme,

hashtagged to my cell phone’s glowing face,
the floating phantom of a president

in light above this tiny glowing slab.
Such phones are made of matter. I forget

sometimes the way the world is swept for me,
the oil that forms the plastic, metals heaved

from mines, and heavy metals concentrated
to this short-term task. I hold it here—

the screen dims—it reminds me of the black
obsidian we’d often find in flakes

along the old ravine. We pretended
that was magic, too, but we really knew

it made the body of the place we played,
the mud’s black fingernails, skeletal

outcropped source of grounded mystic wonder.
That stone had been there for millennia.

Then we’d each lift a rock and toss it up
into the clicking branches, watch it fall

gleaming along a trail the trees had altered,
and catch it in our shirt-sleeve-guarded hands.

Later, we’d return the stones to the mud.
The soul of Earth is black like that, I think,

obsidian and coal and oil, the bridges
from molten core to surface, dinosaurs

to us. We listen to our President
on magic flakes we’ve swept from earth’s ravines.

The flakes can prophesy to how we’ve made
an end to all we’ll ever dream to make—

a human listening to the soil’s voice
might speak of moderation, or of love.

#KeepItInTheGround

 

 

Poet’s note: Written on the occasion of President Barack Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline, November 2015.

John Linstrom’s poems have recently appeared in Commonweal Magazine, Bridge Eight, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Dunes Review, and Narrative Northeast’s “Eco Issue.” In 2015, Counterpoint Press published his centennial edition of Liberty Hyde Bailey’s eco-philosophical manifesto, The Holy Earth, with a new foreword by Wendell Berry. He now has a collection of Bailey’s garden writings, The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener’s Companion, forthcoming from Cornell University Press in the fall. John currently lives with his fiancée in Brooklyn, where he is a doctoral candidate in English and American Literature at New York University, and he also holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. Visit him on Twitter and Instagram @JohnLinstrom, at his website at johnlinstrom.com, and on Facebook.

“On the President’s Announcement of Our Hashtag” was previously publish by This Week in Poetry.

Photo credit: Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash.

Street Folk

By Ellen Girardeau Kempler

 

Disembodied. Disenfranchised. Disconnected. Disassociated. Disowned. Disliked.

Distained. Disrespected. Disregarded. Disparaged. Disgraced. Dismissed.

Discarded. Disavowed. Disqualified. Disappointed. Disheartened. Distanced. Disbarred.

Dislocated to:

Dis City,

The Inferno,

Sixth Circle of Hell,

Not in My Backyard,

Planet Earth 00000

(Do not forward. Do not return.) Disappeared.

 

Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” Ellen Girardeau Kempler’s first book, Thirty Views of a Changing World: Haiku + Photos, was published in December 2017 by Finishing Line Press. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and received honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. She posts a daily haiku and photo “anti-selfie” on Instagram @placepoet, you can follow her on Twitter @goodnewsmuse, and she publishes a newsletter called Tiny Letters.

Photo credit: Photo by Fred Pixlab on Unsplash.

The President Signs the Criminal Justice Reform Act

By Jack Mackey

 

In the Oval Office dripping in rehearsed applause
from the full-pocketed and the bloated
paid to do a job by corporate wardens enriched
by a three-strike law that scooped up traffic
violators like escaped farm animals

surrounded by billionaire brothers who bought
a conscience on closeout after years of dictating to
lap dog stenographers in the Capitol their wishes
placing innocents into the jaws of a meat grinder

smoothing silk tie with one hand he grins
and turns with camera-ready graciousness to his left
to his right cloaks himself in the mantle of
unearned praise halfway extends his barely average
hands to his greedy kin who get credit for
finally noticing injustice now
because it nested in their family patch

he moves the pen up and down with theatrical force
forging a scribbled signature turning his name towards
the cameras like a child with a finger painting.

I watch this revival-tent duplicity on my TV
wondering, how do we mend a wingless sparrow how
do we put a daddy’s push on the seat of a girl’s swing how
do we place a mother’s palm on a boy’s delicate
fingers guiding as he practices his letters.

How will a new law fix a bad law, return
the confiscated lift all the clothes and furniture
evicted to the curb and fly them back inside the house?

 

Jack Mackey lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and Washington, D.C.  He holds an M.A. in English from the University of Maryland. His poems have been published by, or forthcoming in, Darkhouse Books, the Rehoboth Beach Writers’ Guild, Third Wednesday and Rat’s Ass Review.

Photo credit: From the ACLU website.

Abortion Stories from Writers Resist

Unlike the statistics above, our stories help humanize the theme of abortion, and this week we are sharing five of them, in poetry and prose, by Mileva Anastasiadou, Andrea England, Vicki Cohen, Heather Mydosh, and Penny Perry.

Like every piece in the issue, each abortion decision is unique and intimate, and it is owned by only one person, the person who is pregnant.

To those who feel confident they know better than the people to whom the decision belongs, we invite you to learn otherwise, and then join us.

Writers Resist is passionate in our support of reproductive justice—and we are in the majority—but we must do more to assure that across the United States abortion is legal, accessible, and safe for all.

 

The chart is from Pew Research Center.

How to Disappear Completely

By Mileva Anastasiadou

 

She’s not that young, already in her mid-twenties, when the double lines appear on the test. She is careful enough most of the time, yet that’s how it goes; life happens and spoils all plans.

At first, she’ll panic. That doesn’t mean much, her boyfriend will say; everybody panics at the prospect of responsibility. She’ll have to take some time to think about it before she makes up her mind. She doesn’t need to, for the decision is already made, yet she pretends to consider all options, because that’s what’s expected of her. Being a mother was never her dream. Nor was being an astronaut. Or a lawyer. So she’s not an astronaut, or a lawyer. Does she have the right not to be a mother, though? She’ll wonder for a while if motherhood is a choice or an inevitable fate, yet she’s certain and firm. Her partner is not negative about a pregnancy, as usually expected in stories like this one. She won’t blame it on an irresponsible boyfriend. We could start a family, he’ll say. It’s up to her and she knows it. She’ll shake her head. She can’t even picture herself as a mother. He’ll hold her hand and ask her if that’s what she wants. She’ll nod.

She’ll make the arrangements next morning. She’ll remain detached, not out of second thoughts, as expected in stories like this one. She only regrets not being careful enough. She doesn’t enjoy unnecessary medical procedures. No one does. Nor does she enjoy her body being invaded by an alien creature, even if it’s her future offspring. She’ll sing inside that Radiohead tune about how to disappear completely. She’ll recognize it’s a sad song.

The doctor will see her partner standing beside her and won’t know what to tell him. In his mind, it’s the boyfriend’s fault. The girl would love to be a mother, he thinks, had she found the proper man. Wouldn’t every woman? She’ll keep her boyfriend away, go and fetch some sandwiches, she’ll tell him. Now that they’re alone, the doctor will feel more comfortable asking her. Are you sure? She’ll nod.

She’ll come home to sleep. Not out of regrets, as expected in stories like this one. She’ll be exhausted but glad the whole thing is over. I’m more than just a womb, she’ll say to herself. She’ll wonder if love is only about procreation. She’ll know, though, she did the right thing. She’ll be happier without a baby, so will be the unborn kid. What would life be like for a child growing up with an unwilling mother? Next day, she’ll go to work like nothing happened. Her colleagues will ask if she enjoyed her day off. She’ll nod.

She’ll still be child free at forty, privileged enough to live a life of choices. She’ll have been careful enough to not go through the same situation again. She won’t see the ghost of her unborn daughter, as usually expected in stories like this one. Strangely enough people only imagine unborn daughters, not unborn sons. People will wonder why she doesn’t have kids. Not all people are made out to be parents, she’ll say. They’ll assume there’s something wrong. Physically or mentally. They’ll ask questions and offer unsolicited advice. To avoid further explanations, she’ll nod.

In an alternate universe, the girl won’t have a choice. She’ll have to keep the baby no matter what. She’ll look at it and every single time she’ll be reminded of the life she hasn’t lived. She’ll hate it, only she won’t be able to admit it. People never do. She’ll raise it like a committed mother and little by little she’ll love her kid, like all parents do. Or most of them.

By forty, she’ll have completely disappeared, enslaved in a life unchosen. That’s when the ghost of the life she could have lived will come to haunt her. The doctor will hand her the appropriate pills, asking her to calm down. She’ll take them without hesitation and she’ll nod. Not out of determination this time, but that nod will be the white flag signaling acceptance of defeat.

 

Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist, from Athens, Greece. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in many journals, such as the Molotov Cocktail, Jellyfish Review, Sunlight Press (Best Small Fictions 2019 nominee), Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, Ellipsis Zine, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Bending Genres, MoonPark Review, Litro and others. Follow Mileva on Twitter @happymil_.

Photo credit: Carlos Ebert via a Creative Commons license.

Coat Hanger Song

By Andrea England

 

The baby born into a subway toilet

between Harvard and Porter

Baby

with the too-big head and ears

that flap in the wind from a smack

Baby addicted to crack turned

blue as a bruise in his birthday suit

Baby unwanted and doesn’t know why

His father raped his mother

Baby taken

and fostered and fostered and

jailed for no crime of his own

Baby who commits suicide at nine

with a needle spooned from the shelter

of homelessness

Baby hit by the hunger of

water just to be wet

Black baby White

baby

Baby nursed by wolves or cats

Baby who killed his mother and

died anyway in the NICU of  broken

hearts or the

Baby kept in a shed of his own

milk and blood

Beaten like a drum, in the back

alley of our glorious forsaken nation.

 

Andrea England is the author of Other Geographies (2017, Creative Justice Press) and Inventory of a Field (2014, Finishing Line Press). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Potomac Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Fourteen Hills Review, and others.. Most recently she had the honor of being a Writer-in-Residence at Firefly Farms (SAFTA). She lives and works in Kalamazoo Michigan, where she teaches English and Creative Writing for various universities and organizations. To learn and read more about her and her work, visit andreajengland.com.

Photo credit: Photo by Palash Jain on Unsplash.

On Abortion

By Vicki Cohen

 

I am a nurse-midwife.

For over thirty years, I provided prenatal care for pregnant women and welcomed new life. It was mostly happy work, but sometimes I’d find myself worrying about the women who lived in poverty or suffered from substance abuse, the thirteen-year-old who didn’t know she was pregnant until too late to consider her options, or the woman about to give birth to her eleventh child. I often left work feeling jaded and tired.

Now, in my semi-retirement, I mostly do the opposite of what I did before. I help women prevent pregnancy and help them when those plans fail. Which they do.

On social media, in response to an article about abortion, a man wrote that women should, instead of killing the baby, use birth control or the morning after pill. I could not stop myself from responding. I wrote that I am an abortion provider despite the fact that abortions are a fraction of what I do. I wrote that birth control is not 100 percent effective, nor is emergency contraception. I wrote that an unplanned pregnancy never happens without a man. Whoever claims they don’t believe in abortion rights may make their own decision not to have one.

My post received applause and gratitude. It also received more than one veiled threat in which I was told I was going to Hell. I think I do not want to go to their Heaven.

Yes. I do abortions.

I also provide contraception and STD treatment and preventative care.

Many days, I pass protesters who block my car from the clinic parking lot, who engage the women who are coming to see me or the other clinicians I’m proud to work with. What I think about these people—holding pictures of dead babies, handing out business cards for fake clinics, pamphlets filled with inaccurate descriptions of what we do, and propaganda such as the claims that sperm protects against pre-eclampsia or that birth control pills cause cancer—is: How dare you? This is not your business.

I can dismiss them. But my patients? Maybe not.

The second time I saw the rape victim was a month or more after the assault. The first time she’d asked me to look at a small bump that turned out not to be the herpes she was worried about. But this time, after sitting at her side while she tried to catch her breath long enough to tell me why she’d returned, to describe the pain of sitting, the torture when urine hit her skin, the agony caused by the multiple eruptions on her genitals, I had to tell her that this time, she was not so lucky. I sat with her as she sobbed, distraught over the thought of being reminded of the rape every time she has an outbreak of an infection she will never be rid of. This woman was not pregnant. Still, before getting inside, she had to walk past people who called her a murderer.

The day before, while deciding whether to renew the state’s last reproductive health clinic’s license to operate, Missouri’s health department passed a requirement that clinicians do a pelvic exam prior to the already mandated three-day waiting period before a woman has her constitutionally protected abortion. There are few situations that would make this exam medically necessary. This is punishment, pure and simple. Punishment for the women—some of whom, according to news reports, feel obliged to apologize to their clinicians for this prerequisite—punishment for the providers who, I imagine, feel as if they have guns to their heads.

In Oregon, where I work, we’re lucky to have a liberal governor and liberal laws. It is easy to convince myself that whatever the federal government does, we will be safe. And yet.

The federal Title X gag rule has been upheld in the courts. This rule tells health care providers they may only discuss prenatal care or adoption with their pregnant patients. It tells us, if we continue to provide education about or access to abortion, that we will lose Title X funding. What will this mean for the adolescent requesting chlamydia screening? For the married woman who learns her husband has been having sex with men? For the recovering addict who wants to be sure they don’t have HIV? Or the woman with the breast mass, the one asking for her first cervical cancer screening in ten years, the one with bleeding that could be controlled by a hormonal IUD even though she’s never been sexually active? The trans-man who feels rejected everywhere else or the cis-man who wants condoms, a vasectomy, or testing for STDs? Besides being a question of choice, this is a public health issue, pure and simple.

Sometimes the protesters outside my clinic are women. Head-bowed women holding prayer books line up along the sidewalk singing hymns. The woman in the headscarf, when she’s not pushing brochures, lies prostrate at the entrance to the property. I would like to tell them about the women who start out just as convinced of the morality of their views as they are, but who end up inside, making a choice they never imagined they’d make.

Sometimes, the protesters are men, to whom I want to say: You, too, bear responsibility. The only thing that guarantees no unplanned pregnancies is not having intercourse with a man. So why is the onus on women? It’s simple. Men can walk away. We cannot.

During his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Brett Kavanaugh was asked to come up with just one law that regulates what a man can do with his body. I couldn’t stop thinking about that question, couldn’t stop thinking about the decisions being made about my body and the bodies of every woman I know and those I don’t. I wrote the senator’s question on a cardboard sign and carried it to a Stop the Ban rally where a stranger informed me that in some states a man still needs his wife’s permission to have a vasectomy, but in fact, such a requirement would constitute not only an ethical lapse, but a violation of patient privacy law that prevents health care providers from discussing a patient with anyone without permission. The person who felt compelled to tell me I was mistaken, was mistaken.

I left the rally with my sister, both of us wondering what made these protests feel so less potent than those we attended when we were young. Demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Fighting for civil rights and the passage of Roe vs. Wade. I couldn’t stop seeing the sense of fatigue reflected back in the faces of those who now protest at our sides. Does it come from the barrage of stories about children in cages, starving polar bears, and mass shootings that flood social media and feed our sense of helplessness? Is it a manifestation of the slow, deliberate cutting away of our rights so that by the time we realize they’re gone we’ve been exhausted instead of energized?

It’s easy to convince ourselves that lives are not on the line, but they are. I am overwhelmed by a pervasive and palpable fear of returning to a time when women died and doctors were assassinated for trying to help.

So, every day, moving forward, I will remind myself of the health care providers in Missouri’s last clinic who, after three weeks of state-mandated pelvic exams—a decree that amounted to nothing short of state-mandated assault—stood up and said, No. We will no longer do this. We will not let you tell us how to do our jobs. I will remind myself of those clinicians who forced the state to stand down. I will remind myself of what is possible.

What if my patient with herpes had been pregnant, if her attacker had given her not just a chronic disease, but had also impregnated her? Who has the right to tell her whether or not to raise a child created by rape? Or to tell the woman who struggles to feed her children that she must have one more; to tell the teenager, who conceives the first time she has sex because her partner removed the condom, that her dreams have just died; to insist that the woman with a damaged fetus give birth even though the fetus won’t have a chance at the kind of life every one of us wants for our kids?

Who has that right? I don’t. And you don’t either. Our opinions don’t matter. We should keep them to ourselves, even, sometimes, when we’re asked to share.

Reproductive justice is about one thing and one thing only. It is about who controls my body and who controls yours, even if you are sure you’d never terminate a pregnancy. Please remember the women I’ve had in my office who, until they sat there, were absolutely certain, too.

 

Vicki Cohen is a nurse-midwife, a writer, and an activist from Portland, Oregon. She received her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January 2018.

The image is by Lauren Walker for Truthout.

 

Dark Spaces

By Heather Mydosh

For Indiana HEA 1337

 

Eve is a common punch line
in the joke against women
with her penchant for the forked tongue
and listening to more than one
authority figure, but if we
peel it back a little further
to rectilinear Pandora, bless her,
created first among women
by temperamental adolescent gods,
she had it even worse—at least Eve
knew what the apple looked like,
could touch it, fingertip trace its cheeks
and test for firmness. Fondling wouldn’t
have done Eve in, but all Pandora
had to do was crack her box
for the proverbial peak.
She couldn’t have known
what was in there, what could take root
in the world outside herself.
If she could have known,
of course she wouldn’t have
opened it and damned herself
to a notoriety which outstrips her gods.
Still we punish women who look
inside themselves to see
what seeds we bear, what traits,
what crooked stems and strains,
and we damn with new laws
those who slam the lid back down
and seal up in their cups and vessels
that which they will not tend and grow.

 

Heather Mydosh is a professor at Independence Community College in southeast Kansas and a recent graduate of the Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine. Her work has appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, After the Pause, 99 Pine Street, The Corvus Review, and Kansas Time + Place among others. Visit Heather’s website to learn more.

Painting credit: From the 1951 film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.

Floating

By Penny Perry

 

Mother couldn’t have known what to do.
She was only twenty-five,
drove her big sister, Leona, six weeks pregnant
to the doctor’s in L.A.

Leona squinted at California bungalows,
backyards with orange trees.
She thought about her husband home worrying,
her baby waiting for her.

She told my mother about her screenplay,
a murder in the Braille room of the public library.
Then, she sat silent, her long fingers tangled like kelp.

The doctor glanced at his medical license
framed on the wall behind him,
said he was afraid to use ether.
Leona jutted her famous Heyert jaw:
“My friend Ruth told me to insist.
With ether I’ll float above the pain.”

It was hot that June morning, 1942.
No air conditioning. My mother
in the waiting room thumbed through magazines.
Big-eyed Loretta Young on the cover of Life.

It happened fast. Ether, a busy housewife,
pulled down the shades.

The doctor waved my mother in.
White face, head back, Leona was no longer breathing.
The ribbon in her dark hair floated in the breeze of a fan.

 

Penny Perry currently has poems in Earth’s Daughters, Lips, California Quarterly, Patterson Literary Review and the San Diego Poetry Annual. Garden Oak Press will publish my novel, Selling Pencils and Charlie in Spring 2020. “Floating” was previously published in Penny Perry’s poetry collection, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage (Garden Oak Press, 2012).

Photo credit: Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash.

Mamichu

By Robert Walton

 

“Mamichu, it’s cold!”

I looked at Ivar. I looked at his knobby lump of a head, at his lips lying beneath his broken nose like twin dead slugs, at his eyes glistening beneath his granite ledge of a brow, eyes so small I never knew their color. There was no pleasure in looking at him. I looked away. “Why do you say this?”

“Because the wind cuts like a gypsy blade.”

“No, why do you say ‘mamichu’? What is mamichu?”

“Just a curse—a Zagreb curse for when you have to look up to see hell.”

“What does it mean?”

Ivar’s brow lowered, extinguishing his eyes. “It’s the worst curse of all.”

“The worst of all?”

“The worst!”  He chuckled like a diesel engine starting on a frozen morning. “It blasphemes sisters, mothers, grandmothers even.”

“Oh,” I recoiled in mock horror, “even grandmothers! Saints preserve us!”

Ivar shrugged. “It should be reserved for the worst of the worst. I say it about the wind, but I don’t mean it, not really.”

“You don’t mean it? Why say it?”

“Habit. Curses become a habit. The morning wind, this camp, they’re not so bad. My grandfather told me of the true gulag, Stalin’s gulag. One in twenty lived. My grandfather was the one.”

“Bah! Old men’s stories. Stalin’s gulag couldn’t be worse than here.”

“Peter, do we have soup?”

“The soup is snot.”

“But we have the snot.”

I did not reply.

“Do we have bread?”

“The bread crawls with weevils.”

“But we have the weevils. Munch them. Savor the snot. You live, man. You live! This Putin camp is paradise. We could be in America, in a ‘tender care center’!”

“Ha! Mar-a-Lago, maybe.”

A troop of guards carrying Kalashnikovs approached the gate. Two dragged a man between them. The camp commandant followed behind. Six guards peeled off, three to either side, and leveled their weapons. Two more slung their rifles and opened the gate. The prisoner’s feet made twin furrows in the mud as he was pulled into the compound and dropped on his belly.

Three hundred men in the compound stood motionless.

“Who is it?” I whispered.

“Yuri—our mate.”

“How can you tell? His face is gone.”

“It will heal. Believe me.”

The guards turned and paced back through the gate. Ivar stepped forward then. He went to Yuri, knelt, rolled him gently onto his back and cradled his head.

The camp commandant stared at Ivar. He was a short, slender man, like a banker or a pimp—a man whose work is to make others work.

“Drop him.”

Ivar didn’t move.

“Drop him.”

Ivar stroked Yuri’s blood-matted hair. “Outside the wire, we are yours. Inside the wire— we may care for each other as we can. It is the law of the camps. The unwritten law.”

“I am the law.”

Ivar didn’t reply, but continued to cradle Yuri’s head in his battered hands.

“You’re the one called Ivar?”

“I am.”

The commandant nodded to the guards. “Bring him.”

Two guards handed their weapons to men standing beside them. Four more aimed vaguely at the motionless prisoners. All six entered the compound. The two gripped Ivar.

Ivar glanced at me. “Peter?”

I nodded.

Then he carefully laid Yuri’s head on the mud and rose on his own. When the gate shut behind them, we were forgotten. A dozen others followed me to help Yuri.

They took Ivar, but they did not bring him back. Only his screams returned—until they ceased.

•

A line of thirty guards formed in front of the wire the next morning. The camp commandant—chin lifted, eyes bright— stepped in front of them and stared at us. It was a challenge.

Mamichu.

It may have drifted on a forest breeze from pine needles nearby, or sparked from sunlight glinting off barbs on the wire.

Perhaps I whispered, “Mamichu.”

“Mamichu, mamichu.” We prayed, “Mamichu.”

“Mamichu, mamichu.” We chanted, “Mamichu.”

Raw throats opened wide and we roared, “Mamichu. Mamichu!”

Mamichu.

 

Robert Walton is a retired teacher and a lifelong mountaineer and rock climber, with many ascents in the Sierras and Pinnacles National Monument, his home crags. His writing about climbing has appeared in the Sierra Club’s Ascent. His novel Dawn Drums won the 2014 New Mexico Book Awards Tony Hillerman Prize for best fiction, first place in the 2014 Arizona Authors competition, and first place in the historical fiction category of the 2017 Readers Choice Awards. Most recently, his short story “Uriah” was published in Assisi, a literary journal associated with St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Learn more about Robert at his website and follow him on Facebook.

“The New Order” painting is by Noel Counihan, 1942, National Gallery of Australia.

At the Funeral of 50 Barefoot Men

By Amirah Al Wassif

 

once upon a time
there was an ancient place
called “Amon” village
that very far spot
where everybody talks
about the river legend
that very far spot
where everybody knows
how to distinguish
the smell of fresh bread
there, at the Amon village
where all the folks live
in their dreams
and the blazing sun cries
against the face of heaven
there, where the poor sweeper
drowns in the colors of the rainbow
and the great brown mountains
announce their upper secrets
to the mass grave
in the Amon village
where everybody talks
about the river legend
and the real tale of
50 barefoot men
in the ancient village
all people are storytellers
and all of them say
the same story
which starts with
once upon a time

there were 100 men
lived together in the same village
but 50 of them were barefoot
and the other 50 had fancy shoes!
50 men sweeping the streets
and 50 men making the bread
50 ones looking for more!
50 shoes in luxury leather
and 50 toes inflamed and cracked

the river recognized the difference
between the shoes and the toes
then it made a good decision
according to nature rules
and the river understood
the difference between
the torn clothing and the perfect ones
then it made a good decision
according to nature rules

on the ragged edge, all the people walk
under the boiling sun
all people talk
and there were two kinds of talking
talking from shoe to shoe
and talking from toe to toe
and the river didn’t love that kind of speech
so, it made a good decision
according to nature rules

50 barefoot men carrying
their empty pots
their facial bones
tell you about long age of bitterly
shabby dresses, fearful eyes
ancient faces full of pimples
much sweat
and shaky hands

50 barefoot men bearing their pain
looking for a way
to protect their feet
from another pain
but the shattered glass
everywhere

the dispossessed people died
and the rest were alive around the river
laughing, jumping, drinking
but the river has a sense of justice
so, it made a good decision
according to the nature rules
and        dried up!

 

Amirah Al Wassif is a freelance writer and author. She has written articles, novels, short stories poems and songs. Five of her books were written in Arabic and many of her English works have been published in various cultural magazines. Amirah is passionate about producing literary works for children, teens and adults that represent cultures from around the world. Her first book, Who Do Not Eat Chocolate was published by Poetic Justice Books, and her latest illustrated book, The Cocoa Book and Other Stories was recently released by Breaking Rules Publishing.

Photo by Sofia Truppel on Unsplash.

People Keep Bothering Me with Details

By Pedro Hoffmeister

 

It’s beginning to snow in Tucson and it’s 65 degrees in Seattle, Washington
in February
But our president says…
He’s tweeting about…

And we should listen to him because he’s the best president we’ve had

this entire year.

That’s a fact. He’s our man. Our leader.

Another fact:
Lori Loughlin, Felicity Huffman, other celebrities have paid money to get their children into some of the most privileged universities, Southern Cal, The Ivies,
where the reported rape rate is higher than at nearby public schools,
Where freshman girls rush sororities, visit fraternities, trip and fall into date-rapists’ arms
But it’s okay
because some of those freshman girls look 13 when they’re 18,
look like
kids

and we all know kids don’t matter – at least not specifically – because there are so many of them.

Try this: Have you ever attempted to think of every single child on earth at the same time?

Exactly.
It’s  too overwhelming             like
trying to name
the name of every celebrity I’ve ever read about.

But children
without names that anyone will learn,
– people keep telling me this –
are in detention centers, Southwest Key in Phoenix, or
Southwest Key in Tucson, or Southwest Key in Youngtown, Arizona
Boring company name – if you ask me,
Boring white vans driving children through boring black gates,
They can do better.

People tell me that a different nameless child is picking the Uzbek cotton that will go into the tongue of my Nike shoes, but the tag on the shoes never says
MADE BY A CHILD’S HANDS
And that stuff is regulated by governments, so this story can’t be true
And anyway
I’m grateful because my kicks will look flawless.

Meanwhile, Asian children (it doesn’t matter where – they all look the same, be honest, they really, really do)
Asian children are wiping
anti-scratch chemicals onto the glass faces of Samsungs, ipads, iphones…
The supervisors in the factories saying something like:

“Dip the rag into the solution, wipe it across the screen, make sure to cover the entire surface, set the glass onto the belt – carefully – don’t touch the front with your grubby fingers. Now dip the rag again…”

These kids are careful – thank God – they care about quality

I’m told
these factories rotate their children every six weeks to let their hands recover from the chemicals – which is nice –
they let the children’s fingerpads and palms heal.
or they replace the children with a new crop – they’re thoughtful about things like that,
like crop rotations to keep our Southern soil healthy.
And I understand that we have to keep the products healthy – that’s what matters – no matter how hard the labor is
Plus, the children are a renewable energy source,

My friend Bill always says, “The dream of America
is a dream of small, willing hands.”

Which is funny

But this evening – all across the United States, and seriously, not funny – we’re watching our people talk about their feelings on The Bachelor
I just feel that…
I’m developing feeling for…
and these feelings are just so…

The thing I love about this show:
No one on this show wastes our time talking about
Authors
Painters
Poets
Activists

They understand that we need to take a break from TOO MUCH THINKING

And this show lets me put myself in The Bachelor’s shoes, stare out at all those women who are available to me

Hannah G., will you accept this rose?

No, actually,
Hannah B. is way skinnier
Ooh, Hannah B. in a bikini…

Hannah B., will you accept this rose?

I’ve noticed that roses on my phone look just as real as the roses in my neighbor’s yard when
I’m looking through my front window,
Realer roses
Truer

I like rose filters,
Which make me think of rose emojis

And emojis remind me of my friend KT who hates emojis – for some stupid reason or another – and doesn’t understand why the emoji movie is so funny
KT,
one of those people who tells me that
Foxconn used Chinese teen interns for 11-hour workdays to produce the iphone X.
Tells me this story twice even after I tell her that
Apple already released a statement that made it clear:
The Chinese teen interns worked voluntarily.

I do like factoids like this:
Professor E.O. Wilson discovered that the collective weight of all ants on earth matches the collective weight of all humans.

He calls the two species symbiotic
somehow
We rise,
we rise,

Like we’ve got diamonds at the meetings
Of our…
Wait, what are the physical characteristics of ants? Or physiological?
Psycho-spiritual?

What I don’t know:
Are ants spiritually and theologically aligned with my religion?

What I do know but I really DON’T care about:
Proceeds from mining for US electronics in the Congo have funded a civil war.

Please don’t tell me about that again
because where even is the Congo? Africa somewhere?

Here’s a question that matters to the people I care about the most:

Are you a part of a meal service, and – if so – which one?

Along with things I don’t care about, there are people I don’t care about as well
Or people I just don’t like
For example:
Stan from IT said something about “Hi-Def drone footage of the fracking fields of Canada” as I was searching music videos on Youtube with my friend at work, Susan.
Susan and I both laughed SO hard.

Stan said:
“What’s the matter?
or better yet,
What else matters?”

And I said to him:
“I matter.
I’m sure I matter.”
Then I looked at Susan and thought of something really smart to say:
“I matter because I know enough about science to be sure that I’m made of matter,
get it?”
Then Susan and I laughed hard again.

But Stan didn’t, and that’s what’s wrong with him. He doesn’t get things.

This is also annoying – and on the same topic:

In my Twitter feed the other day, someone Retweeted:

Is all the matter in the universe finite reconstructive
or infinite dimensional?

 

After publishing books with Penguin, Random House, and Simon & Schuster, Pedro Hoffmeister just self-published a collection of essays titled Confessions of the Last Man on Earth Without a Cell Phone, so he could say anything he wanted to say. No content editors nixing “questionable content.” No publicists’ input on what sells. Just strong personal opinions, satire, and humor.

Amplifier poster art by Chip Thomas, photographer, public artist, activist and physician who has been working between Monument Valley and The Grand Canyon on the Navajo nation since 1987. Enjoy more of his activist and collaborative artwork here and his photography here.

Man with a Knife

By Beth Levine

 

Imagine
that this letter S
floats off the page
becomes a strong
rope
that wraps your hands together behind
your back, like officers do
before putting someone in
the back of a police car.

Imagine
that this letter S floats
off the page and becomes a second
strong rope
one end wraps
around your
left leg
the other hoists you up from
where you are reading this poem so
you are
hanging
upside
down.

Imagine
a man coming toward you
knife in hand
pointing at your throat.
You see
blood on his knife
blood on his hands.
There is no
possible escape.
No one to call on
for help.
No way to free
yourself.
You are
trapped.
Alone.

Imagine
how your heart
desperately races as fast
as a jackhammer and your body shakes
like an off-kilter washing machine,
and you can’t seem to breathe and
helpless tears well-up.

Imagine
how you beg for
your life, for
mercy, but your voice is smaller
than you want it to be,
like when you try to wake
from a scary dream
and you scream, but it is not audible,
not rescuing you
from the nightmare and
you keep pushing the air out
until the sound bursts from your lungs.

Imagine
how the man
keeps coming.
You try
to move him, to
touch his heart, but
his eyes are
vacant and he keeps moving
toward you,
knife in hand.
You wonder how he can be
so cold.
You wouldn’t
ever
ever
do this to another.
You couldn’t
ever
disregard their pleas.

Or could you?

Imagine
bacon.

Imagine
ice cream,
your down comforter,
zoos.

Imagine
your leather shoes,
and eggs.

Imagine
chicken wings.

Now you are the man with the knife.

 

Beth is a psychotherapist and an animals rights activist. She shares her life with two dogs, and enjoys hearing bird songs and being in nature. In her work, whether poetry, art, or both, she helps the marginalized be seen and heard and hopes to contribute to social change by raising awareness.

Photo by Kai Oberhäuser on Unsplash.

The Gun-Seller

By DS Levy

 

A young man travels out of state where it’s possible to buy a gun, no questions asked. He buys an AK-47. The transaction is easier than getting the driver’s license that allows him to navigate across the desert highway. If you want his story, read his manifesto on Instagram. This story is unbelievable, as are all true stories. The man who sells the gun has a daughter who attends the same university as the young man who buys the gun (hereafter known simply as “the shooter”). One morning, the shooter storms the campus, and as he scatters shots randomly the gun-seller’s daughter comes out of her English class and in a synchronous flash that Hollywood would turn into a dramatic slo-mo shot steps into the path of a bullet. Killed instantly. The young man continues his rampage, his AK-47 a scythe mowing down anything that moves. Of course, this story ends, as they all do, with the shooter getting killed. Afterwards, news agencies rush to the campus; if it bleeds, it leads. TV screens flash hand-wringing families and friends, offer the politicians’ sound-bytes of thoughts and prayers. The next day the sun comes up. A new day. Headlines scream “Gun Control Now!” The next day, we want to know who the shooter was and why he did what he did. By the third day, we worry about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, whether they’ll ever get back together. For the bereft gun-seller, the days are one, long, interminable day. For him, there are no jump-cuts, no “and in other news” transitions. In his heart, he knows his loss is divine retribution, that he’s sacrificed his own flesh and blood for greenbacks. Weapons, bump stocks, bullets in exchange for burnished gold. TV journalists clamor for interviews. But he’s not speaking. Not even to his wife, who finally walks out the door and never looks back. The gun-seller becomes a hermit, lives a miserable life. He gives up his gun business. Still, he keeps an arsenal in his dark basement. Every afternoon he goes out to the field behind his house and aims at a target with the shooter’s image. A marksman, he plugs the kid between the eyes every time. The old oak tree swallows the bullets. Eventually, the gun-seller goes to the basement and fires a pistol into his mouth. They bury him next to his daughter. The oak tree lives on, pushes up new green, tender limbs between the seeds of lead.

 

DS Levy’s writing has been published in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Columbia, New Flash Fiction Review, Little Fiction, Brevity, The Pinch, and others. Her collection of flash fiction, A Binary Heart, was published in 2017 by Finishing Line Press.

Photo by Taylor Young on Unsplash.

Questions for My Shooter

By Abby E. Murray

 

Which of my relatives
will point out how
I was raised humanely,
in a house with a yard
where I could pick
blueberries I grew myself
or sit on a blanket in the grass
when it was warm?
And who will tell them
that’s good because it was,
the humane life, I mean—
how I had constant
opportunities to play
or nest or use my voice,
how I carried myself
into spaces I believed
were beyond assault?
Who will ask whether
the shot was clean,
whether I suffered,
whether I was harvested
responsibly afterward,
my blood stretched far
as a rainy day envelope
or my daughter’s love?
Will the shooting be
diagnosed as a symptom
of Bad Day Disorder
or Disappointment Fever?
Will it be the opposite
of having died in vain?
Sweetheart—may I call you that?
you will, after all,
be the last to change me—
how long will I survive
after we meet?

 

Abby E. Murray is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal publishing work concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. She is the poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, where she teaches community workshops for veterans, civilians, military families, and undocumented youth. Her first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and will be released in September 2019.

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash.

American Ouroboros

By Myna Chang

 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ScaredMom.com
Outfit Your Kindergartner in Safety and Style 

ORDER SUMMARY

ITEM:

1 ShooterProofTM Toddler Vest, Happy Dinosaurs print, size 4T . . . . . $400.00

  • Fits child up to: 34 pounds // 32 inches in height
  • Protects your child’s fragile body with state-of-the-art, lab-certified steel mesh. Lightweight*, breathable & moisture wicking.
  • Guaranteed to repel popular American projectiles, including 357 Magnum, .45, and hollow-point ammunition.**

*Actual weight: approximately 4 lbs.

**Does not protect against armor-piercing rounds or AR-style ammunition.

Shipment option: Expedited

Product Note: Vest covers torso only. Add the fashionable hood to protect your child’s precious head. Attaches to vest with hidden velcro placket.

Complete your kindergartner’s safety wardrobe.

Products frequently purchased with ShooterProofTM Toddler Vest:

  • Safe at School Mittens — Steel filament lining protects hands and wrists from defensive wounds. Water resistant.
  • School Days Neck Gaiter — Protection for that tiny throat. Now with patented SafeFlexTM fabric for comfort.
  • ShieldMeTM Backpack — Bullet-resistant protection in Candy Pink or Little Boy Blue.

Thank you for shopping ScaredMom.com

A Subsidiary of the American Ammo Corporation

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ScaredMom.com
Outfit Your Kindergartner in Safety and Style

RETURN FORM

ITEM:

1 ShooterProofTM Toddler Vest, size 4T

Return or Exchange? Return

Reason for Return:

01 — Product too large _____

02 — Product too small _____

03 — Product defective ___X_

If 03, please explain defect: ____vest failed to perform as advertised__

Refund  __X___  or  Store Credit _____

Refund Note: In cases of product failure due to projectile damage, a complete ballistics report is required before refund procedures can be initiated. A list of approved GetProof Ballistics* labs is available on our website. Please allow up to one calendar year for processing.

*GetProof Ballistics is a subsidiary of the American Ammo Corporation.

Thank you for shopping ScaredMom.com

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ScaredMom.com
Outfit Your Kindergartner in Safety and Style

RE: Merchandise Return

  • 1 ShooterProofTM Toddler Vest, size 4T

We’re sorry! Due to a higher than expected volume of returns, ScaredMom.com is unable to complete your refund at this time.

In lieu of cash, please accept this store credit in the amount of $25.*

*Store credit is paid at 50 percent of original purchase price, minus NRA tithes and PAC contributions. Shipping, handling, and merchandise restocking fees are also deducted.

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Myna Chang writes flash and short stories in a variety of genres. Her work has been featured in Daily Science Fiction, The Copperfield Review, and Dead Housekeeping, among others. Read more at mynachang.com.

Editor’s note: The photo of a child with a weapon, marketed for children, is used for purposes of noncommercial commentary, satire, and education under the Fair Use Doctrine.

Fine People

By Paul Colton

Based on Martin Niemöller’s confession-turned-poem, “First they came …”

 

First a fine man killed six Sikhs in a Wisconsin temple
but Republicans did not act
because they’re not Sikhs

Then a fine man murdered black worshippers in Charleston
but Republicans did not act
because they’re not black

Then a fine man ran down counter-protestors in Charlottesville
but Republicans did not act
because they’re not lefties

Then a fine man slaughtered 11 Jews praying in Pittsburgh
but Republicans did not act
because they’re not Jews

Then a fine man assassinated Hispanics in an El Paso Walmart
but Republicans will not act decisively
because they’re not Hispanic

Soon fine people will come for pale-skinned moderates
but then it will be too late to stifle
their seething hate and assault rifles

 

Paul Colton has been writing about life’s vagaries for thirty-plus years. His poetry and essays have appeared in more than 75 magazines, literary journals, and poetry anthologies, including The Literary Hatchet, The Satirist, and The Moon magazine.

Photo credit: Christopher Althouse Cohen via a Creative Commons license.