By Alicia Cerra Waters
My mother found Jesus.
He was on sale at the Walmart
in El Paso.
Mom is on a budget because
no one pays her any money
to play pretend.
When she prays
to the plastic Jesus
with a ninety nine cent sticker
cemented to the back of his robes
at least she means it.
Alicia Cerra Waters is a writer and educator. She lives with her husband and son.
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
It’s eighth-grade writing class day and the weekly morning jaunt to my favorite little school, nestled in a rural Southern California valley. Here, the water table’s level prevents developers from bulldozing nurseries and groves, and there’s still a farmer’s grange. A canopy of Live Oaks shades my drive to the school, where the children of immigrants are the dominant demographic. My child went to school here, transferred from our very-white hometown, so she’d no longer speak disparagingly of the Latinx kids on the playground. She didn’t understand back then that she’s one of them.
Today, my students are learning to make notecards for a research paper on climate change. The assigned article that challenges their English can no longer be found on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s website.
“What did you all find most surprising about the article?” I ask.
“That the U.S. is the second biggest producer of greenhouse gasses that cause global warming,” one of them answers.
The students are smart. Smart and so young and hopeful. All but two or three of them want to attend college. They all have plans for the future. Here, in the United States.
They finish up their notecards.
“‘Heat stress is the leading cause of weather-related death in the Southwest, and heat waves are increasing in frequency and intensity.’ That’s a direct quote combined with a paraphrase,” a student says.
“Nice work! Now, before I go, let’s talk about the homework for next week. Please complete—”
An alarm blasts.
“We have to stop,” the classroom teacher says fast and loud. “That’s our emergency response signal. Everyone, under your desks, away from the windows. Quick. Nope, leave your stuff. Get down now. Manuel, I can see your head. Rosa, you’re visible from the window. Get under the desk—under! I don’t want to have to say it again.”
It’s an active shooter drill.
The signal blares while I tuck my laptop into my briefcase, and down the dregs of my coffee. The students are giggling, sprawled on the floor—the perfect opportunity to make quick contact with the objects of their desires. The teacher tells them to cool their jets.
“Okeydoke, nice work today, everyone,” I say. “See you all next week.”
There’s more giggling as I leave. The alarm continues pulsing danger. I hear it—feel it—on the way to my car.
• • •
It’s another day, a Sunday, my writing day. But I can’t.
Five mass shootings in twenty-four hours.*
Numbers and names and the detritus of lives litter parking lots and store aisles and nightclubs and theaters and playgrounds and schools. Shootings are linked to hate websites, to Donald Trump, to manifestos, to mental illness, to familial discord, to immigration, to feminism, to news media, to the grotesque availability of guns.
So I wonder.
Which of my students will I be able to save when we have our school shooting?
How many of their heads will I be able to shove under desks before they are seen?
How many of their young bodies will expire in pools of blood, their cries for their mothers interrupted?
Will I die with them?
I wonder, because today, in this nation, with this president, with this Congress, with this NRA gun lobby, it feels inevitable.
* https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
K-B’s narrative nonfiction, commentary, political fiction, book reviews and author features have been published in Evening Street Review and Evening Street Press, Not My President: The Anthology of Dissent (Thoughtcrime Press, December 2017), Publishers Weekly, Ducts magazine, The Missing Slate, Trivia: Feminist Voices, Ms. Magazine blog, North County Times, Gay San Diego, and others. She is the publisher and a founding editor of Writers Resist, and teaches Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the Cal State University system. Read more of her work at ExcuseMeImWriting.com.
Editor’s note: The Trump in Guns photo was allegedly posted by one of the shooters on 8chan.
By Tori Cárdenas
Poetry editor Tori Cárdenas is a queer Tainx/Latinx poet from Northern New Mexico. In 2014, she graduated from the University of New Mexico with a dual Bachelor of Arts degree in History and English, with a concentration in Poetry. She returned to UNM in Fall 2017 to earn her MFA in Fiction. She served as Blue Mesa Review‘s 2018-2019 Poetry Editor, and serves currently as the 2019-2020 Editor-in-Chief. Tori’s work has appeared in Conceptions Southwest, VICE, Pantheon Magazine, Writers Resist online journal, and Writers Resist: The Anthology 2018, and it has been nominated for the Best of the Net anthology and a Pushcart Prize. Her works were also featured as finalists in the 2018 and 2019 Rabbit Catastrophe Press Really Good Poem Prize contests. Tori lives with her dog Sophie in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Editor’s note: The photo of the U.S. flag pistol is used for purposes of noncommercial commentary, satire, and education under the Fair Use Doctrine.
By Kathy Lundy Derengowski
And what if the next
crazed school-shooter
is the security officer,
with a long gun
and a long memory
and a short temper,
who is tired of smart-ass kids
who call him “rent-a-cop”
and mock his lumbering swagger?
What if one too many of them
have flipped him off,
and his wife just left him
for another man or woman
and his credit card is maxed out
and his own children never call?
What then?
Kathy Lundy Derengowski is a native of San Diego County. She is an active member and co-facilitator of the Lake San Marcos Writer’s Workshop. Her work has appeared in Summation, the ekphraisis anthology of the Escondido Arts Partnership, California Quarterly, Silver Birch Press, Autumn Sky Daily, Turtle Light Press, and the Journal of Modern Poetry. She has won awards from the California State Poetry Society and been a finalist in the San Diego Book Awards poetry chapbook category. She has been a guest blogger on Trish Hopkinson’s site.
Photo by Jose Alonso on Unsplash.
By Avra Margariti
She goes from gun-shy to
trigger-happy
in a single breath.
That honest sun-smile
nestles in my chest
while she obliterates the world
as we know it.
She’s a rare, delicate bird
perched on the last tree of Earth
watching everything turn to
ash.
Bell jar, birdcage, formaldehyde—
everyone wants to capture her for their
post-apocalyptic
collection.
I go near her
and get a mouthful of
fire and brimstone.
Are you going to destroy the world? I ask.
Yes, she says. By making them
l i s t e n
Avra Margariti is a queer Social Work undergrad from Greece. She enjoys storytelling in all its forms and writes about diverse identities and experiences. Her work has appeared in Wolfpack Press, The Writing District, Dime Show Review, and Page & Spine.
Photo credit: Mark Turnauckas via a Create Commons license.
By Bruce Robinson
They didn’t see it coming
(how could they?)
And then it rained, rained
and we weren’t witness
so we can only surmise
that the days grew shorter
and who’s to say that clocks
could demonstrate a direction
and there was nothing
one could do about it
(which is what we did)
Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears or is forthcoming in Mobius, Fourth River/Tributaries, Pangyrus, Blueline, and the Beautiful Cadaver social justice anthology.
“Malice in Four Thoughts” was previously published by Indolent Books’ What Rough Beast.
Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash.
By Jennifer Hernandez
When the water finally
breaches the dam,
long after empty hollows,
long after parched ground,
even after all is well,
the deluge doesn’t stop,
becomes a train,
careens through the station,
passengers left behind
on platforms, watching,
like the citizens of Pompeii
as ash rains down
from the mountain,
peaceful exterior
having hidden
the burbling stew
inside her belly.
When she blew,
it seemed so sudden,
like the breached dam,
the runaway train.
In retrospect,
there are always signs.
Jennifer Hernandez lives in Minnesota where she teaches immigrant youth and writes poetry, flash, and creative nonfiction. Much of her recent writing has been colored by her distress at what she reads in her daily news feed. Work can be found in such publications as New Verse News, Radical Teacher, Rise Up Review, and Writers Resist. She is working on a chapbook of hybrid writing about teaching as a political act.
Photo credit: Dr. Wendy Longo via a Creative Commons license.
By Ron L. Dowell
You’re on Compton City Hall’s council chambers steps, a fist-sized Black Lives Matter button pinned conspicuously on your t-shirt, your belly distending and nearly blocking out Congresswoman Imelda Herrera and obscenely stretching Elizabeth Eckford’s 1957 photo that’s on your tee. Elizabeth’s lovely brown face is downcast, looking cautiously through dark sunglasses, clutching her books, wearing a white cotton piqué over her petticoat, in stylishly pressed hair curls, keeping ahead of Hazel Bryan and legions of other whites whose mouths seethe and follow her with venomous, nullifying words, their minds filled with imagined superiority on Eckford’s first day at Little Rock’s Central High School.
Your iPhone selfie tells the story.
Far right is Turner, teen mentor, researcher, prison guard. He exhibits a picture of young Emmett Till lying in his casket, body swollen, teeth missing, ear severed. At sixty-three, stomach tumors forced you to retire your dustpan and broom. Your gut burns like a fire whirl. Your abdomen knots and twists into closed fists and forces words up your throat. “Same old shit,” you say to diminutive Congresswoman Herrera’s wide eyes on this early spring evening. She smells of Chanel and, in full 2018 campaign mode, postures between you and Turner.
Years ago, you made yourself a promise to never allow you a belly like your daddy lugged around—one full of hog maws, potatoes, and greasy chicken. At seventy-five, he died from too much blood pressure and sugar, a supersized prostate.
Turner’s gut matches yours but for this shot he sucks it in and angles his Shoot the Police t-shirt toward the camera. You don’t because you can’t. You turn slightly toward Herrera.
“Tallent Neal and I will support you,” Turner says to her.
“Good luck,” you say. She heads inside.
“Man,” you say to Turner. “I never noticed how big my gut’s grown. I look six months pregnant.” You’d assumed based on four to five days a week gym time that you looked pretty svelte for a graybeard. No.
“Damn,” Turner says. “I thought my stomach was fat.”
When did your body change?
“Forget it. We have what we came for,” he says. “Can you upload it to Facebook?”
“I think I’ll up the cardio,” you say.
•
Burdened by protest signs and the heavy Killer Cops banner, you and Turner squeeze through crowds into the council chambers. Four-by-ten feet, the canvas standard is a stark optical showing killer police agencies, names and ages of people murdered in Los Angeles County since 2005. Not long ago, you’d nailed it up at the rear, next to the public entry doors in perfect view of council members from the dais. You considered that an act of free speech. The mayor considered it public property defacement. She called you a vandal, had sheriff deputies snatch down your banner, grip your upper arm, and escort you outside. Deputies said you tripped and fell on damp pavement. You said that you were shoved. They threw the banner your way and said, “Next time we’ll arrest you for trespassing.”
You’re back. Having, at nineteen, acquired a felony conviction from back in the day, you don’t really want to face another judge, but this is a campaign rally, not a council meeting, so officials aren’t present, no deputies visible. Whew! You’re lightheaded with an unexpected release of tension.
You and Turner hang the banner, stand on each end of it with signs. Yours reads, “Black Lives Matter—Stop Killing Us.” Turner’s says, “What if We Shoot Back—with cameras?”
The chamber overflows, eyes focusing on your banner, riveting to your signs. You switch the sign from hand to hand but still your arms tire. You set it down and lean on the stick like it’s a cane. That won’t work so you hoist it up and rest the stick in the folds of your belly, which seems to have grown over the past several minutes. You sigh. Like a tent pole, it fits within pudgy gut creases, holds fast, the fit, perfect. You wave your hands around, move your feet, do old school dances, the Jerk, the Swim, then you Twerk. You enjoy communal energy and shout, “Black Lives Matter.” Turner follows, “Shoot the police.”
In front of the dais, Congresswoman Herrera looks startled by your display. Into the microphone she says, “It’s true that black lives do matter and there are far too many black and brown men killed by police.” Still, she’s a politician and modifies the subject. “That’s why I advocate a ban on assault weapons—I’ll eliminate bump stocks—we’ll put metal detectors in all schools, require lockdown drills.”
The audience is silent until someone shouts. “Hell, yeah!”
A sheriff’s deputy peeks in. Chest tight, you breathe faster. Your belly, acting on its own, bounces the sign up and down, waves it side to side, forcing words from your gut, despite your resistance, up to and through your esophagus, to your mouth, “Off the pigs,” you shout.
•
Two sleepless days later, your belly gurgles and protrudes from underneath your navy blue county jail shirt. Court’s spilling over with defendants at your preliminary hearing. Their supporters and victims clamor for seats. Turner’s waving his ‘Free Tallent Neal’ sign.
Pasty-faced Judge Hardass is on the bench, smiling smugly and broadly like a lion about to pounce on an antelope. His eyeballs linger on your belly, as if he knows something that you don’t, signaling that maybe he’s already decided your fate, finally asking after a long, uncomfortable moment, “How do you plead?”
You turn to your portly public defender who, in bright red bowtie, mouths, guilty. He’d promised the plea deal would get you thirty days jail time plus probation. That’s easy for him say. He doesn’t get strip searched or have to walk with his back to walls to avoid shanks or hard dick attacks. The pit of your ever-expanding gut feels empty. You mumble “Fuck you” to him.
Hardass says, “Speak up, Mr. Neal.”
The DA says to the judge, “He has priors, sir.”
The crowd hushes when the bailiff eases over, clutching the Taser on her equipment belt.
The public defender whispers, “Guilty—say guilty. Unless you raise bail, you’ll stay in jail until trial.”
Mouth dry, you glance at the clock on the wood-paneled wall to the judge’s left. When you turn back, your chest opens. Your lower esophageal sphincter snatches the public defender’s neck and forces him into your stomach, where he’s attacked by enzymes that especially like fatty foods. “Say guilty,” he says again before he dissolves into chyme. The bailiff reaches to pull him out, but is also swallowed by your burgeoning belly. Gut flora breaks them down and digests them both. Your liver and pancreas send juices to help push them into your large intestine as shit.
The DA’s eyes widen, Hardass smashes his gavel, “Order,” he says. “Order!”
Even if you’re in jail, who’s going to mess with someone with a hungry belly?
You say, “Scuse me, your honor—Black Lives Matter—and I. Ain’t. Guilty.”
Ron L. Dowell holds two master’s degrees from California State University Long Beach. In June 2017, he received the UCLA Certificate in Fiction Writing. His short stories have appeared in Oyster Rivers Pages and Stories Through The Ages Baby Boomers Plus 2018. He is a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow.
Photo credit: Jorene Rene via a Creative Commons license.
Laura Orem is retiring after almost two years as one of our dedicated volunteer poetry editors. Farewell, Laura!
While we’ll miss Laura—and her sense of humor—we’re delighted to welcome our newest poetry editor, Tori Cárdenas.
Tori is a queer Tainx/Latinx poet from Northern New Mexico. In 2014, she graduated from the University of New Mexico with a dual Bachelor of Arts degree in History and English, with a concentration in Poetry. She returned to UNM in Fall 2017 to earn her Master’s of Fine Arts in Fiction. She served as Blue Mesa Review’s 2018-2019 Poetry Editor, and serves currently as the 2019-2020 Editor-in-Chief.
Tori’s work has appeared in Conceptions Southwest, VICE, Pantheon Magazine, Writers Resist online journal, and Writers Resist: The Anthology 2018, and it has been nominated for the Best of the Net anthology and a Pushcart Prize. Her works have also been featured as finalists in the 2018 and 2019 Rabbit Catastrophe Press Really Good Poem Prize contests.
Tori lives with her dog Sophie in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Please join us in welcoming Tori—and celebrating her poem. …
White
upon buying a new car for visibility, practicality, and functionality,
the car and insurance salesmen convince me white is the best color—
it’s functional, keeping it clean is as easy as keeping the dust off of it.
at night, you will be easy to see, less likely to get pulled over or questioned,
folks will stop to help you with flats on the shoulder. on long road trips,
bugs splatter every color across your grille, red and brown and yellow—
won’t it be pretty
By John C. Mannone
We are desperate for life
to be found outside our
comfortable homes here
on this planet. We send
messengers to the outer
reaches of our solar system
—robots with test tube eyes
see 200 atom-heavy molecules
on Saturn’s Enceladus
geysering from a subsurface
ocean, icy plumes feathered
with biochemistry—life
essential molecules speaking
no words, only facts.
Our conjecture is at least
as clear as political banter.
We are experts at posturing—
made of many chemicals
much bigger than those
and laddered with the right
codes for human engagement,
though some links are missing.
We search for simple life
elsewhere, yet we cannot
coexist among ourselves
without destroying everything
we have.
Author’s Note: Inspired by the June 27, 2018 breaking news, “Complex Organic Molecules Discovered on Enceladus For The First Time: It has everything needed to host alien life!” by Michelle Starr. The original work is cited in Nature, “Macromolecular organic compounds from the depths of Enceladus,” volume 558, pages 564–568 (2018).
John C. Mannone has poems in Artemis Journal, Poetry South, Blue Fifth Review, Peacock Journal, Baltimore Review, Pedestal, New England Journal of Medicine, Intima, Annals of Internal Medicine and others. He’s a Jean Ritchie Fellowship winner in Appalachian literature (2017) and served as Celebrity Judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). He has three poetry collections and has been nominated for Pushcart, Rhysling, Dwarf Stars and Best of the Net awards. He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex, Silver Blade, and Liquid Imagination. He’s a professor of physics near Knoxville, TN. Follow him on Facebook and at The Art of Poetry.
By Joanne Sharp
Some monkeys have learned
that a rock can break open
a nut.
Other monkeys are learning
that a nut can break open
their world.
Joanne Sharp, Southern California native, graduated from UCLA with a B.A. in Art. Lifelong interests in arts practice, music, and literature led to her to poetry writing late in life. She has been published in the San Diego Poetry Annual and California Quarterly. Joanne and her family live in Del Mar. This poem appeared in Joanne’s self-published book Big World Little World.
Photo by Quinten de Graaf on Unsplash.
By Chris Maiurro and Remy Dambron, an artist-author collaboration
I. I alone am your news, you shall not have other news besides me.
II. Thou shalt not make unto thee global waming or covfefe.
III. Thou shalt not take the name of thy Lord, your vain president.
IV. Remember which came first, the wheel and the wall.
V. Honor thy twitter and fox.
VI. Thou shalt not kill unless invoking the second amendment.
VII. Thou shalt not commit adultery above one hundred thirty thousand.
VIII. Thou shalt not be caught stealing.
IX. Though shalt only bear witness to false and alternate facts.
X. Thou shalt only covet thy partisan goods.
Remy and Chris met in Portland, Oregon during March for Our Lives 2018. They have since teamed up to advocate for equal rights, attending community-led events that promote social justice and collaborating on poetry, prose, and imagery that denounce political corruption.
By Jack Ridl
For all the victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue killings
He went to the city of bridges.
He stood in front of the synagogue,
dared shake the hand of the Rabbi. He
said what his daughter and son-in-law
told him to say. He went to the city
of bridges. He went to the city
of neighborhoods. He did not climb
the stairs of the Cathedral of Learning.
He did not look in the eyes of those sitting shiva.
He said he never saw anyone standing in lines
with their signs: “YOU are not welcome here”
in the city of bridges. He went to the city
of bridges to meet the Carnegies, to see where
the steel barons sat, hundreds now standing
at the church where Fred Rogers had knelt.
He stopped by on his way to his rally.
There was also a rally in the city of bridges,
a rally for HIAS, for peace, health, and love.
He went to the city of bridges built
by the iches, the icis, the ids, and the O’s.
And I’m pretty damn sure that he crossed
the irregular streets where my immigrant
Bohemian hunky great-grandfather drove
the horses that pulled a wagon with barrels
of beer in the city where his hunky son, only
sixteen, said he was 20 and for 49 years
day after day stood on the monotonous line
doing the irrelevant, replaceable job.
At the end of that line was what lined
the twill pockets of those at their desks
He stood there day after day so his family
could eat, own a car, house, and radio. I, born
a hunky, could now be an illegal immigrant kid.
He went to the city of bridges. Then on
to his welcoming “base” to proclaim
he was loved. Loved . . . Not by the dead,
not by the trodden, the poor, the betrayed.
Unforgivable for the sorrow-filled veils.
Not loved at the border where the hope-draped
will hand over their photos, their wallets,
their backpacks, toothpaste, and children.
The crowd at the rally, that base congregation,
will roar yet again, “Lock her up!” They
will cheer at the blasphemy “Great.” They
will hate. And somewhere someone’s making
a plan and a bomb, plotting a shooting,
shrieking on Gab while the bereaved sit
in shiva, while we wonder where next.
He went to the city of bridges.
Jack Ridl’s Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (Wayne State University Press) received the ForeWords Review Gold Medal for the finest collection of poems published by a university or small press. Broken Symmetry (WSU Press) was named the year’s best book of poetry by The Society of Midland Authors. Losing Season (CavanKerry Press) was recognized by the Institute for International Sport as the year’s best sports-related book. Poet Laureate at the time, Billy Collins, selected Ridl’s Against Elegies for the chapbook award from The NYC Center for Book Arts. Ridl is co-author with Peter Schakel of Approaching Literature (Bedford/St. Martin’s). His Saint Peter and the Goldfinch was published in April, again by WSU Press. Ridl served as Honorary Chancellor of the Poetry Society of Michigan, and the Carnegie Foundation (CASE) named him Michigan’s Professor of the Year. Ridl responded to the 2016 Presidential Election by launching “In Time Project,” sharing poetry and commentary with subscribers from every continent. For more information, visit Jack’s website at www.ridl.com.
Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash.
By Julia Tagliere
Why is it that when women drink we love
We melt at your gentle insistence
and praise your strong hands
We shed our full-body armor
and open our honeyed limbs
We forget
When women drink we love
We do not, generally, shove bottles into your rectums
or try to force your flaccid penises inside of us
as you lie on the asphalt beside a dumpster
When we drink
we do not, normally, bloody your boxer briefs
or spray our sticky souvenirs into your hair
as your mouths scream against our hands
When we drink
we do not, usually, invite friends to watch, join in, and Snap
or laugh while our bladders empty onto your faces
as you curl into the tiniest balls of garbage human beings can become
When women drink we love
When women drink we forget
And how that forgotten fear fails us
when your insistence becomes force
when your hands become fists
when your love becomes hate
When women drink, we love
and are somehow condemned
When you drink, you hate
and are somehow pardoned
Why is that
Why is that
Julia Tagliere’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Writer, The Bookends Review, Potomac Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Washington Independent Review of Books, SmokeLong Quarterly, various anthologies, and the juried photography and prose collection, Love + Lust. Winner of the 2015 William Faulkner Literary Competition for Best Short Story and the 2017 Writers Center Undiscovered Voices Fellowship, Julia recently completed her M.A. in Writing at Johns Hopkins University. She serves as an editor with The Baltimore Review and is currently working on her next novel, The Day the Music Didn’t Die. Follow her at justscribbling.com.
Photo by Kevin Butz on Unsplash.
By Grover Wehman-Brown
when asked to bring
my ancestors into the room
alongside those they would
want to harm the answer
is surely no. and i must.
over the years my attempts to bring
an orb of collectivity glowing into the rubble,
or a lantern to the wounded cave
has been met with dank pessimism.
turning “i will give up no one” into
i will not give up myself
is a slippery kind of magic
that lends itself to selfishness
and also to liberation.
the collective accounting of rape
has risen through inferno this week.
we each pitch in a stick, a log to the pile.
our molten bodies are turned
to each other now
versed in cautious solidarity.
last night the back of my body
grew dragon wings that were made
from the fire of ancestors screaming
from beyond and within two thousand years
of coercive christianity. of bodies picked apart.
the women of my people are terrified. the women
of my people scream through me and I am the
most recent one to catch fire.
at first afraid, i gathered Leslie Feinberg’s shadow into me.
a butch working with the goddess
asked me to step back into the unknown.
dry heaving next to a toilet in manhattan. a profoundly
stone. butch. blues.
what is it
about grief that makes us brave Leslie?
the risk of accounting for ancestral harm.
ancestral trauma. ancestral ambivalence.
a full body incineration. a legacy
to inhabit that whole.
Grover Wehman-Brown is a transmasculine butch poet and essayist. This poem is part of a larger collection of work engaging lesbian, queer, and transgender ancestry via the work of foundational lesbian-feminist essays. You can find Grover on twitter @gwehmanbrown and learn more at this website.
Poet’s note: This title (and poem) is derived from words within a passage by Dorothy Allison: “I am certain that none of us wants to live with the fear, the sense of loss, betrayal, and risk that I worry at all the time. I know that many of us want what Barbara Smith described in her short story—the ability to love without fear of betrayal, the confidence that we can expose our most hidden selves and not have the women we love literally disappear from our lives. I know, too, that we cannot inhabit that safe ground easily. If we are not to sacrifice some part of ourselves or our community, we will have to go through that grief, the fear of exposure, and struggle, with only a thin layer of trust that we will emerge whole and unbroken. I know of no other way to do this than to start by saying, I will give up nothing. I will give up no one.”
“Public Silence, Private Terror.” Skin: Talking about Sex, Class & Literature. Firebrand, Ithica. p. 119
Photo by Jonathan Bean on Unsplash.
This poem was first published at Medium.
By Christopher Woods
The house stands at the end of the road, near a river. He stands in the night street appraising the house, the ghost glow, the promise, a hopeful omen. He gathers his bags with the tools of his trade and begins to climb the stairs when he hears the cry from inside. A child’s wail, loud and desperate.
A haggard woman opens the door and shows him inside. A weary smile on her face, she seems too old to be the child’s mother.
“Thank you for coming,” she says, and she tries to stifle a deep cough. “My son is upstairs. I think it is almost time.”
“I hurried. I had a feeling,” he says. But he does not tell her how he stopped several times along the river road. Such a strange thing, the sight of glowing trees. Even the grass seemed lit. He had stopped to take photographs.
“You’ve seen the trees,” she says. “I can see it in your eyes.”
“I have.”
“Wasn’t always this way. But the people started their work up river. Nothing is the same now.”
The stairs are narrow, but strangely illuminated, though he can’t see a light or a lamp, a source. Once they reach the second floor, he feels as though they are drifting toward the room at the end of the hall. It is a dizzying thing, but he takes it for what it is. He holds his camera close to his chest in a protective way.
When they enter the bedroom, he sees the boy, all aglow, on top of a quilt of many colors. He sees that the quilt is a pattern of trains, the old steam engine kind. The steam rises from the train engines and gathers in clouds near the ceiling. The clouds glow softly. The trains and the clouds are not going anywhere in the small room. Yet.
“Should I stay?” the mother asks.
“It’s fine,” he says. “What is the boy’s name?”
“Isaac.”
She again stifles a cough, then backs toward a window to make room for him to do his work. She folds her arms tightly around her chest. With light from the window behind her, he sees that the boy’s mother is translucent. Her bones are visible and white. They shine through her woolen sweater and pants.
“Isaac, I have come to make your memory portrait,” he says soothingly.
“Yes sir,” the boy whispers, obviously in pain. “But I might not smile.”
“I understand. Just relax and I’ll be finished soon. Then you can sleep.”
He can feel the boy’s fever in the air, but he does not back away. Instead, he carefully takes the camera from its case and focusses on the glowing boy, the white effervescent sheets, and the smoking quilt. As he does, he wonders how soon he will return to this house on the river road, to take the memory portrait of the mother. He is not good with time, but he thinks it has only been a month, or maybe six weeks, since he was there to take the portrait of the boy’s father. And maybe four months since he began the memory portrait series of the river people.
“Smile for me, Isaac.”
But the boy merely stares blankly into the camera. Dazed, all of them.
These river people do not pay him for their portraits. Instead, he receives envelopes of cash from someone he does not know, a person who wishes to remain anonymous. His work at the camera store as a clerk doesn’t pay much, so he has begun to appreciate the cash from the mysterious stranger. He has puzzled over this, who the employer might be and what it all might mean, but he has become so busy taking the memory portraits that he has almost stopped thinking about it. What he can be sure of is that he is living better because of the cash, though he is unsure how long he has been receiving it. Four months? Five?
As he clicks the shutter, he feels that numbness in his fingers again. The numbness comes and goes, but lately it has become more pronounced. His skin also seems much paler than before. When he is finished taking the portrait of the boy, the mother steps toward the bed. She strokes the boy’s forehead. Her bony hand moves like a soft light across the boy’s face. The boy’s eyes are closed now. He is gone. Elsewhere.
“I’m sorry,” he says to the mother. She nods and lowers her head. She is quickly becoming accustomed to this, to grief.
He leaves the house and walks toward his car. The stars have become more and more faint lately; the grass and trees have become brighter. He wonders what is happening up river. So far he has not tried to investigate. If he does, he might lose his job. The only instruction he has received from his mystery employer is to take the photographs at designated houses, but to never drive up the river road. So he has not, nor has he asked anyone about it. He has wondered all along if he should ask someone, if he should drive up the river road. Down deep, he has wondered if his employer is some kind of mass murderer, a wealthy one who is collecting memory portraits for a private exhibition.
He starts the car and he notices another change in his hands. His fingers are now ghostly things, nearly translucent. He drives a mile or so and then pulls to the side of the river road. His first impulse is to keep driving up that road, to find out what is happening upstream. First, though, he must do something else, something important and lasting.
He takes out his camera. He takes a self-portrait.
Christopher Woods is a writer, teacher and photographer who lives in Chappell Hill, Texas. He has published a novel, The Dream Patch; a prose collection, Under a Riverbed Sky; and a book of stage monologues for actors, Heart Speak. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Columbia, Glimmer Train, and others. His photographs can be seen in his gallery.
Photo credit: “Night Palace” by Christopher Woods.
“Portfolio” was previously published by Devilfish Review and Canary.
By Laura Grace Weldon
Our daily walk is a simple
necessary practice,
especially now
when each day’s news
spirals us into tighter circles.
Beyond birdsong and breezes we hear
jeering laughter, see teens
jumping on an elderly neighbor’s hay bales,
hooting as their weight breaks
his farm’s winter food into uselessness.
They grew up on this street.
They’ve seen the old man walk the pasture
handpicking weeds wrong for cows
before letting his 30 or so Jerseys,
Guernseys, and Holsteins out to graze.
Seen his falling down house, his rotting fenceposts,
his shoulders bent like a question mark
curving ever closer to the ground.
My husband calls to them,
his voice lost to the wind,
advances toward them, calls again.
Only when he holds up his phone,
yells “dialing the sheriff”
do they angrily leave,
first dumping cans of Coke
on a bale still standing.
All the way home my eyes water in the wind,
streaming as if scratched
by hayseed tossed in the air.
So much already crumbling into chaff.
Laura Grace Weldon is the author of the poetry collections Blackbird and Tending as well as a handbook of alternative education titled Free Range Learning. She works as an editor and leads workshops on memoir, poetry, and creative thinking. Her poetry appears in Verse Daily, J Journal, One: Jacar Press, Neurology, Penman Review, Mom Egg Review, and others. She lives on a small farm in a conservative community, but has strange sculptures in her gardens and peace flags on her porch.
By Yuan Changming
I would paint my skin
Into a colorless color, & I would dye my hair
Wear two blue contacts, & I would even
Go for plastic surgery, but if I really do
I assure you, I will not remove my native village
Accent while speaking this foreign tongue (I began
To imitate like a frog at age nineteen); nor will I
Completely internalize the English syntax &
Aristotelian logic. No, I assure you that I’ll not give up
Watching movies or TV series, reading books
Listening to songs, each in Chinese though I hate them
For being too low & vulgar. I was born to eat dumplings
Doufu, & thus fated to always prefer to speak Mandarin
Though I write in English. I assure you that even if I am
Newly baptized in the currents of science, democracy &
Human rights, I will keep in line with my father’s
Haplogroup just as my sons do. No matter how
We identify ourselves or are identified by others, this is
What I assure you: I will never convert my proto selfhood
Into white Dataism, no, not
In the yellowish muscle of my heart
Yuan Changming published monographs on translation before leaving China. Currently, Yuan lives in Vancouver, where he edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan. Credits include ten Pushcart nominations, the 2018 Naji Naaman’s Literary Prize, Best of the Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline and 1,489 others worldwide.
Photo by Rishi Deep on Unsplash.
By Lisa Eve Cheby
the high desert stretches hours west of airbnbs and selfie backdrops here Joshua Trees weep
their ancient heads droop in sorrow warning
warning: injustice ahead Adelanto means progress the land of unlimited promises
promises can be a curse a trick like a traffic ticket that makes a father disappear
like a detention center a euphemism for eradication of brown bodies,
not-so-temporarily uniformed in blue or orange or red coded by threat level
AC blasts windowless rooms 109 degrees water sucked from skin I must remember
we could not bring in paper, pen, phone Ximena denied entry: “no leggings allowed”
or was it no brown skin friends? Refugio’s in bright orange talks slowly,
as if to his 3-yr-old daughter Martha and I listen struggle to understand:
9 months no patrocinador patrocinador no patro cin ador
sponsor the man in blue at the next trio of chairs pauses his visit interprets
asked no sponsor asked no response asked no attorney asked asked savings no
access a fiancée no crime a cousin no letters no calls no visits no rights
Espero una oportunidad / I want a chance
English sneaks into Refugio’s story – appliance, Best Buy, Sears – and I understand: he is a man
who knows how to use straps and triceps to contort stoves over the counters into tight spaces,
like the cirque du soleil show in my kitchen by men wearing tan costumes streaked in grease
of course it was not him in my home was not my stove on his route now he cleans
for an extra plateo a phone call to his daughter who struggles to understand, too we leave
money through the kiosk outside even our cash kindness is suspect subject to surveillance:
name birthday address phone number & a $4 transaction fee unlimited profits
will I get a receipt? “We withhold any guarantee of a disruption to our system, GEO & ICE”
Lisa Eve Cheby’s poems, articles, and reviews have appeared in various journals including The Rumpus, Entropy, Knowledge Quest, The Citron Review, Tidal Basin Review, A cappella Zoo, and TAB: Journal of Poetry and Poetics, which nominated her poem for a 2015 Pushcart Prize. Lisa’s poems are also found in the anthologies Drawn to Marvel, The Burden of Light, and Coiled Serpent. Her chapbook, Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Dancing Girl Press) was featured in The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed Series. Lisa holds an MFA from Antioch and an MLIS from SJSU. You can follow Lisa on Twitter and on Facebook.
Photo credit: Tony Webster via a Creative Commons license.
By D.R. James
—a villanelle to commencement speakers everywhere
Tonight, fatigue’s grim flower unfurls,
but Gandhi, gunned down, had this to say:
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Oh? Even when casting before swine my pearls,
every action seems absurd, and all the day—
and tonight—fatigue’s grim flower unfurls?
Even though, in my disgust, I’d hurl
the grenades myself, I should, anyway,
be the change I wish to see in the world?
What about how resolve just sways and swirls?
What about colleagues countering, “Let’s pray”?
Especially then fatigue’s grim flower unfurls,
failure feels relentless, all fervor whirls.
But still I’m to spin—on these feet of clay—
this Be the change you wish to see in the world?
The global Bottom Line confirms I’m the churl
and binds me with a twist to the old cliché:
tonight, fatigue’s grim flower’s unfurled
by the change I’d wished to see in the world.
D. R. James has been teaching writing, literature, and peace-making at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, for 33 years and lives in the woods outside of Saugatuck. Poetry and prose have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, and his newest of seven poetry collections are If god were gentle (Dos Madres Press, 2017) and the chapbooks Split-Level and Why War (both Finishing Line Press, 2017 and 2014).
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.
