The Cancer of Misogyny

By Pam Munter

Longtime Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill famously said, “All politics is local.” But for me, all politics is personal, especially when discussing the circumscribed role and demonization of women in society. The current spate of misogyny, with its soaring rise in the public forum, has uncapped an ineptly sealed lid on the sexism that has always been dominant in our society.

I grew up in a time when white women of privilege were proudly seen as appendages of men, had few legal rights, couldn’t own property in their own name, were unable to adopt as single parents or even have independent credit cards. Comedians—both male and female—evoked predictable guffaws about the cartoonish consensual roles. Women, who inevitably stayed at home with the kids, were seen as shopping-oriented, recklessly spending the husband’s hard-earned money if she weren’t leashed. Women were parodied as motor-mouthed and too emotional. In comedy routines and in the media, women characters were just short of being harridans, commonly viewed as the natural enemy of men. Henny Youngman’s famous quip, “Take my wife … please,” brought roars of laughter from both “henpecked” husbands and the oppressed women who were the subject of the joke. Quips about men related to their domestic coping styles were often restricted to the hostile one-liners husbands used to shut out their talkative wives. It was a matter of human nature, it was thought. Men were stoic, consensually superior—smarter, more accomplished, better educated. Women were helpers, facilitators and, of course, unpaid domestic servants. There was no escaping one’s fate. If women weren’t married by their early 20s, they were “spinsters” or “old maids.” There was no equivalent indictment for unmarried men.

Heterosexual relationships were about seduction, gamesmanship, indirect communication, covert lying. “A man chases a woman until she catches him,” went the clever cliché. Honest disclosures were not prized or common, unless they were inadvertent slips in the heat of anger. The relationship between men and women has been characteristically adversarial and hierarchical.

I first noticed this normal combativeness as a kid, while watching movies and TV. The legendary feminist Katharine Hepburn might have adroitly sparred with Spencer Tracy, but in the last reel, she gave up her whims, acknowledged defeat, and married him. Repetitive plot arcs of the ubiquitous sitcom “I Love Lucy” involved Lucille Ball trying to put something over on husband Desi Arnaz. When he got wind of her schemes, he would nonverbally threaten her with his rage-filled countenance and a raised fist, causing his wife to comically cringe. Ralph Kramden engaged in similar threatening behavior with his wife, Alice, in “The Honeymooners,” all mirrors of the pathology in our culture.

From my earliest memories, I was advised by well-meaning adults to keep my IQ points under wraps and never, ever comment on any of my accomplishments. The conversation should always be focused on the boy. As I grew into adolescence, my mother cautioned me to be careful around boys because “they’ll take advantage if they can. You don’t want to get pregnant.” She made them sound like barely restrained animals, requiring vigilance else I be consumed by their inevitable sexual demands and ruin my life.

Home wasn’t any better. During large family gatherings on holidays, the women would cook all day for the men, then encourage them to eat copious amounts of lovingly prepared food, as if gluttony were a testimonial to their worth as women. As might be expected, conversation at the table centered around the men and their sons. When there was an uncomfortable silence, one of the men would seize attention and tell a joke, a well-timed antidote to any meaningful conversation. After the meal, the women repaired to the kitchen where they cleaned up and often good-naturedly complained about the idiosyncrasies of their husbands. The men moved toward the living room to sit in front of the TV, observing a sports event, intermittently cheering loudly to display their knowledge as if it were admission to a special, secret club.

You can probably tell from this brief summary of my childhood social education that I was angry even then. I didn’t understand why women were complicit in allowing themselves to be the butt of the joke while the only common generic slam against men was their unwillingness to ask directions when lost, a poke always done with levity. In fact, the sex wars were always painted with humor, as if a light touch would cover the sense of umbrage and pique lurking just below the surface. I knew then that I would not be like them—not like the women and not like the men. I would have to chart my own personhood even with the disappointing dearth of role models. It would be my responsibility to search and reflect, constructing and assembling the values and beliefs that fit who I was and who I wanted to become. That meant risking going against the norms, engaging in dangerous rebellion that often brought me in conflict with authority.

While in high school, I didn’t use illegal drugs or drink too much, didn’t get in trouble with the law, didn’t drop out of school (though I briefly considered it as a junior in high school). My mouth got me in trouble often enough with my “inappropriate” questioning while actively challenging the sex-role rules. For me, however, it turned out that the best way to resist the misanthropic status quo was through education, choosing fields that were unusual for a woman at that time. My family—especially my tradition-bound mother—and teachers often sought ways to warn me about what might lie ahead. Early on, any act of rebellion was met with, “Girls shouldn’t/can’t do that.” When I followed my dreams through education, I was advised, “You’ll price yourself out of the market. Men don’t like women to be smarter than they are.” The implicit message was, you don’t have value unless you are with a man.

In fairness, men were schooled in the same rigid ways we were, even though they had more behavioral latitude. They, too, were modeled after two-dimensional stick figures, and provided an unwritten list of desirable characteristics for manhood. “Locker room talk” was a tribal merit badge, a way to bond with other men, reinforcing their sense of supremacy over women. The male teenager’s goal was demonstrable macho dominance and sexual conquest. For women, the list of “desirables” was headed by compliance and deference. As we know, it is extremely difficult to undo early training, especially when it’s universally reinforced.

The 1960s was the decade in which I reached adulthood. It coincided with the dawn of the second wave of public feminism. As a result of a series of lawsuits, a new generation and the morphing of society, women began approximating the rights and privileges of men. Evangelical groups ranted about “permissiveness” and the threat it represented to the hallowed family unit as women evolved into the workplace. But then, there was a stronger boundary between church and state than there is now.

Although I was teaching political science at a university in the 60s, I joined in the fray, ran “consciousness-raising groups” and even marathons to help women rise above the oppressiveness. Much later, when I earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and taught at another university, I instituted a Psychology of Women class and served as a mentor to students, both male and female. It was a time when women were exerting their power, perhaps for the first time. Though I was the only full-time female faculty member in the psychology department, I carved out a small niche where my feminism and political activism were “allowed” by the men. And in my clinical private practice, I enjoyed working with both genders, helping to release them from the institutionally imposed limitations.

Another topic, essential but perhaps the subject of another essay, are the significant dues paid by those of us who realized we are LGBTQ. It is only marginally safe to identify with this group now; in the 1940s and 1950s it could be a lethal choice, both figurately and literally. There was only one mainstream and those who did not conform were ostracized and far worse.

Just when we were all thinking there was progress on these fronts, along came the election of 2016. Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape and his repeated pejorative remarks about anyone who did not worship him were warning signs that obviously went unheeded. He was elected, not in spite of his womanizing, but because of it. He was a “man’s man,” conquering all in his wake. What happened? This is a complicated question and not the subject of this essay. The point here is that some things have not changed. At the head of our government is a man who espouses those toxic, anachronistic 1950s values about the roles of men and women. On the plus side, his loose-cannon tenure has inspired the #MeToo movement, along with overdue revelations about men in power who routinely victimize women. Trump has selected mostly white men as his sycophants, those who reflect his provincial and barbaric values. Who knew there were so many Trump clones in public service? And such a wellspring of misanthropy?

I am very fortunate that I have never been a victim of physical violence. However, chronic indignities, ridicule, blocked professional advancement and bombardment by derogatory jokes on a daily basis affect one’s life, too. What strengthens us is self-esteem, and we cannot delegate it to others, even to well-meaning people. Doing so renders you vulnerable and drains your power. The most predictable and efficacious means of resistance to sexism is to build an internal self and develop trust in your own judgment, giving you the confidence to assertively address sexism whenever and wherever it appears.

Because I am in a late decade in my life, I have a longer-term view. My perspective, of course, is limited, coming from a privileged white woman’s perspective. Women of color and others relegated to the fringes of society are victimized many more times than I was and in different ways. But the relentless malignancy touches us all. There is no escape. Having lived through familiar oppressive times for women, I am saddened and angry that this cancer has found renewed footing in our culture. I no longer march in the streets, but I can write a check to organizations that support equal rights and to candidates who advocate for women’s equality. I can write letters, send emails, call lawmakers. It’s not enough, but it’s what I can do. We can never eradicate this pernicious virus completely. Like a cancer, it will only go into remission, emerging again when permission is implicit.

Pam Munter has authored several books including When Teens Were Keen: Freddie Stewart and The Teen Agers of Monogram (Nicholas Lawrence Press, 2005) and Almost Famous: In and Out of Show Biz (Westgate Press, 1986) and is a contributor to many others. She’s a retired clinical psychologist, former performer and film historian. Her many lengthy retrospectives on the lives of often-forgotten Hollywood performers and others have appeared in Classic Images and Films of the Golden Age. More recently, her essays and short stories have been published in more than 90 publications. She is the nonfiction book reviewer for Fourth and Sycamore. Her play Life Without was a semi-finalist in the Ebell of Los Angeles Playwriting Competition and was nominated for the Bill Groves Award for Outstanding Original Writing, along with a nomination for Outstanding Play in the Staged Reading category. Her second play, That Screwy, Ballyhooey Hollywood, will open the new season for Script2Stage2Screen in Rancho Mirage, CA. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts. Her memoir, As Alone As I Want To Be, was published by Adelaide Books in October 2018. You can find much of her writing at www.pammunter.com.

Where the dem things were

By Cheryl Caesar

The day Don wore his Shutdown Mantle
and made mischief of one kind

and another

the Washington Post called him “BOTTOMLESS PINOCCHIO!”
and Don said, “I’LL SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT!”
so he went off to bed with 2 Big Macs and Fox and Friends.

That very night in a junk food and Adderall crash
some green turf grew

and grew

and grew until his room became the Bedminster golf course
with undocumented workers standing all around

and a golf cart puttered by just for Don
and he puttered off through night and day

and in and out of weeks
and almost, dear God, two years
to where the dem things were.

And when he came to the place where the dem things were
they roared their terrible facts and gnashed their terrible stats

and showed their terrible logic and literacy skills

till Don said, “NANCY CAN’T TALK SHE’S A GIRL!”

and tried to tame them with his magic trick

of stamping and sulking and shouting over them

but they weren’t frightened of him and Chuck laughed at him instead of ganging up, boys against girls. NOT FAIR!

“And now,” cried Don, “let the Tall Wall be built!”

“Oh, stop,” said Chuck and Nancy, laughing.

“You’re acting like a clown!” “I don’t care!”
“We can’t shut the country down!” “I don’t care!”
“Don’t hunch sulking in your chair!” “I don’t care!”
“Is that syrup in your hair?” “I don’t care!”
“I would think that you could see – “I don’t care!”
“your ass is where your head should be.” “I don’t care!”

So the dem things left him there.
They wouldn’t build walls anywhere.*

And Don stomped into the antechamber and threw his magic blank papers on the floor and had a wild rumpus all by himself.

But Don the King of the Tall Wall, Tariff Man, was lonely and wanted to be where everyone shouted “Lock her up!” “ICE!” and “Build the wall!”

Then all around from far away across the world
he smelled Big Macs and KFC
so he gave up trying to be king of where the dem things were.

And the dem things cried, “Oh, won’t you go—
we’ll vote you out – we loathe you so!”
And Don said, “No!”

The dem things went out and talked to reporters
and laughed with their terrible facts and terrible stats
and terrible logic and literacy skills and new names for Don
but Don stepped into his private golf cart,
muttering, “I’ll be back,”

and puttered back over two (endless) years
and in and out of weeks
and through a day

and into the night of his own room
where he found his Big Macs waiting for him

and they were still hot.

Fox and Friends were starting to cool down, though.

*Sorry, wrong Sendak.

Cheryl Caesar lived in Paris, Tuscany and Sligo for twenty-five years; she earned her doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne and taught literature and phonetics. She now teaches writing at Michigan State University. She has published her poetry and translations of Jean Tardieu’s in Blackberry, The Coe Review, Labyris, The Wayside Quarterly, Stand and The Dialogue of Nations.

My Illiterate Mother

By Fabiyas M V

A software to read and write is not installed
in my mom’s system.
We download pages of ignorance. Sometimes,
her monitor is blank.

Our neighbors wake up hearing the divine songs
from a rural temple,
when I jump up listening to the metal words
rattling in the kitchen.

She pours calumnies into the ear-buckets nearby
from her vast tank.
There are pores on her palms, and her liquid money
always leaks through.

My dad is often tossed on her tongue. Today
the sea is serene.
I hear the roar of some unnamed anxieties
from her white shell.

I grew up on her barren lap. My tap-root
went down so deep.
I resisted the droughts. Thanks, Mom. I owe you for
all my burning blooms.

Fabiyas M V is a writer from Orumanayur village in Kerala, India. He is the author of Kanoli Kaleidoscope, published by Punkswritepoemspress, USA; Eternal Fragments, published by erbacce-press, UK; and Moonlight And Solitude, published by Raspberry Books, India. His fiction and poetry have appeared in several anthologies, magazines and journals. His publishers include Western Australian University, British Council, Rosemont College, Forward Poetry, Off the Coast, Silver Blade, Pear Tree Press, Zimbell House Publishing LLC, Shooter, Nous, Structo, Encircle Publications, and Anima Poetry. He has won many international accolades, including, Merseyside at War Poetry Award from Liverpool University; Poetry Soup International Award, and Animal Poetry Prize 2012 from Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelties against Animals. He was the finalist for Global Poetry Prize 2015 by the United Poets Laureate Internationa. His poems have been broadcast on the All India Radio. He has an MA in English literature from University of Calicut, and a B Ed from Mahatma Gandhi University.

This poem was previous published in Westerly Magazine by Western Australian University.

Image credit: Asarum europaeum from a 16th-century edition of Pedanius Dioscorides’s work on herbal medicine, De Materia Medica, via PublicDomainReview.org.

Autoimmune

By Sadell Costello

trigger happy t-cells
mistake the good guys for the bad guys

carrying myself like a weapon
a product of too many enemies
or an excess of victims

Stephon Clark was, as they say, gunned down
in his grandparents’ backyard
Syria’s children asphyxiated with sarin gas
when i open the news, Fox says:
“Woman’s Armless, Legless Body Found in NYC park”

pow pow pow

the assaults of the long exhalation of traffic
from the freeway i use as a walking path
biota from my cubicle colonize me
i eat plastic-wrapped wads of salt and fat prepared by others
even the men who love me need to be told to be gentle

all passive phrases on purposes
evil is amorphous
you can’t tell who’s behind the blood
more than one of the hydra’s heads looks like mine

the pagans say i am an excess of trapped heat
the doctors order drugs for breakfast and dinner
Fox says, “It was not immediately clear whether the woman was the victim of foul play”
meet your dreams slick with steroids

swipe, scroll, click
disappeared into a tiny room that extends forever
i fumble – stupid – with my time and responsibilities

my leukocytes are blurry eyed
but damn, man, they tried to shoot back
the cop, russia, whoever cuts off a woman’s limbs and leaves her in a park

drop bombs in damascus in the dark
of course they missed, but give them a break
i’m as see-through as glass
i shake my fist at first light towards the sky

they are fighters
forget my peacenik parents
and the psychology cultivated in the garden
this is warfare on the skin

take shelter
and dab with oatmeal

Sadell Costello writes and publishes under various pseudonyms. She can be reached at sadellcostello@gmail.com.

“Autoimmune” was previously published in Tuck Magazine.

Image credit: By Blausen Medical – BruceBlaus, medical gallery of Blausen Medical 2014.

On the Mesa

By Frederick Pollack

The young went north
or joined, indifferently,
the cartel or the police;
all were brutalized, as one must be
either to be excluded or to belong.
Now only dogs are left,
and an old woman tending
the last cabbages and chickens.
She would like to make confession
in the nearest functioning town,
but the bus has stopped, and who would guard
the chickens? She rehearses past sins,
invents (alarmingly) others;
the silhouette she imagines
on the far side of a grille
is kindly, attractive, has all eternity
to listen. She anticipates penance.
Eventually she’s responsible for everything.

At feeding-time, the dogs circle
the wire, but leave it alone.
In any case, rodents
have reclaimed the stony fields
beyond the village; the dogs eat, though not well.
The old woman stands, in their minds,
for masters, though the latter
for most were always a myth.
There must be a master. Their scarred pitbull
leader (pain makes him fierce) is,
like them, like the burrowers
they eat, a half-being; he can be challenged.
What joy they feel when an SUV
hurtles past on cartel business!
Perhaps they’re still thinking of that,
thirsty and cold, silent
or squabbling as the moon comes out,
regretfully becoming wolves.

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness, both published by Story Line Press. Has appeared in Hudson Review, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Die Gazette (Munich), The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Representations, Magma (UK), Bateau, Chiron Review, and others. Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, Diagram, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire Review, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Camel Saloon, Kalkion, Gap Toothed Madness, and Nine Muses Poetry. He is an adjunct professor of creative writing George Washington University.

Photo credit: Rennett Stowe via a Creative Commons license.

Last minute gift shopping?

Give the gift of resistance.

Writers Resist: The Anthology 2018

What readers are saying …

“Yep, I might read the book. Pretty cover. Mysterious eyes. What, honey? What did Sean Hannity say? Oops, nope, wouldn’t touch that book with a ten-foot alligator. Thing of the devil.”

–MAGAgirl,
Amazon Top-10,000 reviewer

“Everyone knows Marchant and Gressitt are angry lesbians who can’t edit or write. Living proof of what happens when you educate women and let them vote.”

–Milos Yiannopoulos

Food and Shelter

By Melissa Reeser Poulin

A week before Trump’s inauguration, I began bleeding, miscarrying a baby just shy of ten weeks—my daughter’s little brother or sister. While women marched on Washington and in my city’s streets, I huddled in bed, losing this new life and the last of my false impressions of my country. I wanted to protest, but felt consumed by necessary grief. The baby had died weeks earlier without my knowing; Trump’s election was a mirror held up to centuries of racism, violence, and greed. That January was a time of reckoning for me as a white American, and as a mother.

I planned to join the second annual Women’s March the following January. But I became pregnant in the interceding months, and spent the day of the protest in bed again, healing my body as I nourished our newborn son.

It’s summer now and my son is eating. Sweet potato, banana. Some rice cereal, an avocado. Watching us from his booster seat, he smacks his lips. With great purpose, he moves his hands over the pieces of soft carrot on his tray, raking them, pressing them clumsily between fat palms.

I put him on his belly in the middle of our bed. He folds in half, moves like an inchworm to the edge, laughs as he pitches headfirst into me. Time is ticking by. But it doesn’t tick—it glides, drips, rushes, sweats, streams, pounds. Swells in the plums outside the window. Collects in the folds beneath my son’s chin. Ripples at the edges of my eyes. Sifts into the lines on my husband’s palms. Hides between strands of my daughter’s hair.

This time, when women gather in the streets, I gather my children and join them. I wrap the baby on my back, and my husband hefts our preschooler onto his, and we ride the bus downtown carrying simple burdens: children, diapers, wipes. Goldfish crackers to delay the inevitable tantrum. A hastily-scribbled sign: Families Belong Together.

Of course they do. It’s a phrase inadequate to the rage I feel at the Trump administration’s so-called zero-tolerance policy—an extreme reduction in the admission of immigrants and refugees, including asylum-seekers, that uses children as tools to generate fear of separation in people fleeing violence in their home countries. Families belong together, but more than that, families do not belong in prison. They belong in a place of welcome and compassion, as I thought the United States once aspired to be. They belong in a country that offers rest, that responds generously to the tremendous courage required to leave one’s home and resources in order to protect one’s children.

We stand at the edge of the crowd, holding our children. It is a small act, but the size of the crowd makes it larger. It makes the shrunken lump of hope in my heart grow larger, too. Leaning against a building, I nurse my son with one arm, and with the other I snap a photo for the mother next to me, her stroller festooned with balloons and crayoned posters: Please don’t hurt kids.

My daughter tugs on my sleeve. What are we doing, Mama? Why are we here? I say we are here because we are sad about the way families are being treated. Someone is hurting others, and when you see that, it is your job to try to stop it. Fear leaps in my belly. Will I be able to follow this myself, to set an example for my children? What if it means putting my own children in danger? To myself and to a handful of close friends, I had confessed anxiety over showing up today, at a peaceful rally made up primarily of mothers, fathers, and children. Now that I am here, I don’t feel fear. I feel love. Here, it seems so clear that we are dependent on one another. Interdependent, interconnected. The border is artificial.

A clock is artificial. My son studies it along with his paper mobile, shadows on the wall. The generic light fixture at the center of the ceiling in each room in our house. My face. His hands move in circles from my mouth to my eyes and hair. He grabs fistfuls, shoves them into his mouth.

Breath and heartbeat, simple rhythms. I listen for his breath in the nursery, put my hand to my chest at the stoplight, take a full inhale. What passes for silence, for stillness. Here’s a sundial where things collect: fragments of speech, frames of sunlight, the thing my daughter said that I want to remember to tell my husband. A stem twisted off the top of a thought, in a hurry to pass a granola bar over the seat. Hmm? Almost there honey.

My little guy in the bathtub, laughing and chirping around his washcloth. Through the speed and noise of our lives together, he has somehow arrived here, on the brink of crawling, at the edge of new freedoms. But where is here? There are no real edges in childhood, no clear lines between phases of development. Every second, he is working, his body taking in food and sound and light and turning it all into a self.

At the border, they are taking children this size from their parents, children who can’t yet crawl. Our government is detaining toddlers taking their first steps, imprisoning three- and four-year-olds. My three-year-old wakes in the morning singing, and doesn’t stop asking questions until she falls asleep at night. She is a bundle of insatiable curiosity. On the radio it said the detained toddlers are quiet and still in the cages—in the cages—behavior so opposite my daughter’s it makes every hair on my body stand up.

The park is all filtered light and she’s swinging on her tummy, pretending to fly, her yellow hat floating off like a butterfly. When I was not looking, her legs turned muscular. Her attention shifted toward big kids, playing big kid games. Why are they playing a sword game, Mama? Is that a bad game?

The questions I don’t answer nestle beside the ones I answer seventeen times a day, and beneath those, my own questions, like boulders: How can I send her to school? What do I tell her about guns? How do I protect her? My animal heart can find no shelter, my chest a forest floor exposed.

Motherhood has made me permeable, my body etched with the children I’ve carried, so that their survival is my own. It has changed the way I see others’ children, knowing the weight and cost of having arrived, together, in the present moment. Knowing the feat of having kept them alive.

2,500 Families Separated at U.S. Border. Some Parents May Not See Kids Again. They seem so close, these terror-stricken faces just beneath my fingertips on the screen. My hands put the screen down to soothe the tantrum, mash a banana, spread peanut butter on bread. My stomach rumbles and I ignore it. It’s bedtime and dishes, lunches packed for the next day, then night fractured with my son’s cries for milk. A bread trail leading toward sleep or something like it, somewhere to put down the weight.

I do everything. I do nothing. With my mother hands, I care for my children. If I had to, I would take them and run, too.

Like any mother, my body’s deepest hunger is for their protection. This hunger is there when I wake in the morning, when I buckle them into their car seats, my mind flashing on an image of where the clasp should rest, high on their chests. It’s there as I watch my daughter climb the tall slide, lanky limbs wobbling. My heart swerves in tempo with my thoughts, a constant calculus that tries to balance my fear of the unknown with her need to learn, explore, and experience risk. It’s there on a drowsy day at the pool, where danger is a ripped Band-Aid, a honeybee kicking next to her water-wings. Together we raft it to cement where it crawls, drips away.

Tonight, my children sleep safely down the hall, while a 19-month-old has died after detention in an ICE facility without proper medical care. Families like hers are finding pain and suffering here, and the deepest loss imaginable, instead of relief from the instability and danger in their countries of origin. These families flee with the intention to apply for asylum as part of the legal process, to protect their children. As I would, fiercely, protect my own children.

But I am a United States citizen. The many ways in which I am privileged insulate me from this treatment. I am an educated, middle-class, able-bodied, straight, married white woman in a single-income family. My children are never hungry. I don’t fear racial profiling against them, my husband, or myself. We are in no danger of being deported or imprisoned indefinitely at the edge of the country, far from the eyes of those willing to look away.

I won’t look away.

Protecting the children of asylum-seekers isn’t just about this moment, and this issue, but all of the actions and structures in place that have led to this point. Just as Trump’s election wasn’t an aberration, but a continuation of our country’s racist history, so this policy is upheld and quietly expanded because of entrenched, unexamined racism in individuals and systems, and because those who hold privilege and power—white people—refuse to see the connection.

Protecting my children means not sheltering them from the truth. It means seeing with my own eyes and helping my children to see the realities of injustice that might otherwise be invisible to them, helping them to understand the ways in which they are unfairly advantaged, and teaching them to see what their country’s current leaders cannot: that we are all human, deserving of respect and dignity. It means teaching them to speak up and stand up when their government is committing inexcusable crimes. It means teaching myself to do all of these things.

For now my son cannot yet stand, cannot yet speak, but soon he will learn to run like my daughter, and they will fill the house with their voices, with the bright whirring of their youth. It would be easy for me to take the ease of their childhoods for granted, to pretend that ease is disconnected from the childhoods shattering at the border, to look the other way. That’s what this administration is counting on.

Melissa Reeser Poulin is a poet and writer. She is co-editor of Winged: New Writing on Bees (Poulin Publishing 2014) and author of the chapbook Rupture, Light (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming January 2019). Her most recent work appears in Hip Mama, Coffee + Crumbs, and Relief Journal. Visit her website at melissareeserpoulin.com.

Photo credit: A Stoller via a Creative Commons license.

Four Lights

By D.A. Gray

The focus on the yellow sign, dwarfing its black
letters, allows us to move on – to return
to our regularly programmed night of silence.

For a day the gold box burns in the mind,
the darker letters WAFFLE HOUSE hang
like ash. A tragedy happened, someone says,

then turns the channel. The focus on a shooter’s
mental health lets us grieve for the sorry
state of things. We can’t even say it – murderer.

We let the rain soaked streets of Nashville
carry the grief down, leaving us our silence.
Gather enough silence and we, whose angst

drowns the mother, the father weeping
on the screen, can cover ourselves. Gather enough
silence and a city can bleach itself great again.

No one wants to see the faces and each alone
in silence find an image, a gold sign whose black
letters have cooled. Still something burned once.

It’s the eyes that interrupt the silence
cherished more than the heaving chest
witnessed with the sound turned down.

We who’ve never felt the rush of air
through a hole in our sides, stand quietly
beneath the fanned leaves of a maple tree

relishing the fact it holds back the rain.
It is the silence of a lone wolf hiding, quieter
than the star, the worker, the athlete, the artist.

We belong to the silence that keeps prejudice
hidden in the darkness of letters, behind a gilded
sign, hiding from the imagination

in a place, someone might say, terror lives.

D.A. Gray’s poetry collection, Contested Terrain, was recently released by FutureCycle Press. His previous collection, Overwatch, was published by Grey Sparrow Press in 2011. His work has appeared in The Sewanee Review, Appalachian Heritage, The Good Men Project, Writers Resist, and Literature and the Arts, among many other journals. Gray holds an MFA from The Sewanee School of Letters and an MS from Texas A&M-Central Texas. Retired soldier and veteran, the author writes and lives in Central Texas.

Photo credit: bradhoc via a Creative Commons license.

The Great

By Alex Penland

He had a reason for his name: “The Great”
Now buried in the Valley of the Kings—
Statues and treasures, all of which abate
Behind the wheel of fate that spins and sings
And has four thousand years beneath it now!
Yet Ozymandias somehow persists—
Face on our screens, obscuring ancient snow,
We laugh, despair, continue to resist.
We plebeians, outside the formal walls
Marble temples, or gold as they see fit—
Endure as empires rise, stagnate, and fall.
And forget King Ramses when we see it.
Four thousand years have passed and still we stand
On broken stone, our visage in the sand.

Alex Penland was a museum kid. The child of a photographer and a Scuba diver, she spent her teenage years in the field: Penland has worked with Smithsonian archaeologists, NASA software engineers, volcanologists and photographers. She has been bitten by a shark, she watched the final shuttle launch from the fire escape outside Launch Control, and she has been a certified diver since age twelve. She likes dogs, long walks on the beach, and socialized medicine. Also books. She is one of two directors of The Writers’ Rooms in Iowa, an editor for hire, an amateur linguist and a Taurus. Her work has received many accolades, including an Honorable Mention for The Great in the Writer’s Digest Annual Contest 2017. You can follow Penland on Twitter @AlexPenname or visit her website at www.AlexandraPenn.com.

Photo credit: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU, via a Creative Commons license.

If You Have to Ask, the Answer Is ‘Yes’

By Marvin Lurie

It sensitizes certain nerve endings.
You can see and hear what many can’t.
Your training begins young,
the neighbor who won’t let her daughter play with you,
taunts and shoves in the playground.
You are woven an invisible garment
act by act, word by word.
to wear for life.
It has a star on it
that can be made visible by those who hate you.
If you forget for a while,
you will discover gangs of haters
dedicated to reminding you.
You may find comfort with others like you
in your own holy place,
only to find it too is threatened.

A new Pharaoh arises.
He is attractive to those who hate you,
who believe they are now empowered
to say “America First.
This is a white Christian country.”
He continues to hint approval
while weakly denying it.

Now you understand
why your ancestors
slept with their shoes under their pillows,
sewed coins in the hems of their coats.

Marvin Lurie is retired from a career as a trade press editor, president of an association management and consulting firm, and senior executive in an international trade association. He began writing poetry as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois. He and his wife moved from the Chicago area to Portland, Oregon in 2003 where he has been an active member of the local poetry community including service on the board of directors of the Oregon Poetry Association for two terms, as an almost perpetual poetry student at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters in Portland and as a participant in several critique groups. Visit his website at marvlurie.com.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of Faigl.ladislav.

Liberty Turns Her Back

A ghazal by Shawn Aveningo Sanders

Step on a crack; you’ll break your mother’s back.
Cross the border at midnight; they call you wetback.

Pick the apples, the nuts, the oranges from trees,
up down up down up down—such a strong back!

Share stories by the fire in your native tongue,
how it stirs such hatred, such ire—Go back

to your shithole country! they chant, they scream.
Your children can no longer dream; we take back

our promises. After all, it’s what Americans do best,
like taking from the Natives, and never giving back.

This behavior trickles straight down from the top,
learned from our leaders as they hoard their greenbacks.

Now, show us your papers or we’ll send you back.
No empty seats for Jesus. Not even in the back.

Shawn Aveningo Sanders started out as show-me girl from Missouri and after a bit of globetrotting finally landed in Portland, Oregon. She is a widely published poet whose work has appeared in more than 130 literary journals and anthologies. She’s a Pushcart nominee (2015), Best of the Net nominee (2017), co-founder of The Poetry Box, and managing editor for The Poeming Pigeon. A proud mother of three, Shawn shares the creative life with her husband in the suburbs of Portland.

Photo credit: William Marnoch via a Creative Commons license.

Life on ICE

An essay by Jorge Antonio Millan, illustrated by Christopher Woods

“With liberty and justice for all.”

To some, the morning pledge of allegiance was a formality, routinely required. For me, it was something different altogether. As I remember it, I could sense the somber notion of being part of something bigger. The pledge harnessed in me feelings of safety, affirmation and equality.

Now in my mid-thirties, I lay here on my bunk, on my 1,718th day in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention and wonder where all that palpable justice went.

Although my beginning was in Mexico, my principles of Americanism began early: I arrived in the United States an infant. Growing up, I never gave my citizenship much thought. I knew I was different; I just didn’t feel it.

Do I feel it now? Yes, yes I do.

In our looking-glass world of immigration enforcement, ICE can decide, for any number of reasons, to detain a noncitizen for weeks, months, or in my case, even years. To my family, my detention excites indignation, astonishment. To the legal system, perhaps little alarm.

Courts and commentators have long assumed that ICE detention is a form of civil confinement merely because the proceedings of which it is part are deemed civil. But how can they know what we detainees are going through? We are experiencing it—they are not. Likewise, as immigration activists and lawyers argue the dangers of prolonged detention, they, too, can only speculate.

To set the foundation, I want to make it clear. I may be on American soil, but the American solidarity I grew up in stops at the locked steel doors of my detention facility.

ICE detention—as I see it and live it—is nothing more than outright racial antagonism.

Although the most punitive features of penal confinement resonate through these walls, ICE detention runs on a different frequency. Here—you can feel it in the air—detainees are placed on the lowest human level. Whatever your race, the color of your skin, or the nature of your beliefs, you can’t help but feel the mixture of indignities. It’s not just the fact that most of our basic freedoms are taken away, it’s the whole process itself. Our lives are being dissected at every stage, and we are often criticized for past behaviors that don’t reflect who we are today.

This has made me question my self-worth and personal identity. What is to become of me? Do my life-long history in the United States and my family ties mean nothing? And while this psychological warfare runs its daily course, my living conditions are tightly regulated. I am truly an alien to the free world.

During my detention, I’ve been the recipient of many bond hearings. Let me tell you, as I’m sure my fellow detainees will agree, at these hearings you are on trial. And when the Immigration Judge denies your release, it might as well be a jail sentence.

I know how this all sounds, but I don’t bear any ill feeling toward this country. After all, I am an American—at heart. I suffer here not just for my livelihood, family, and children, but for the way the American flag made me feel when I pledged allegiance to it. Yet I truly believe I will someday experience those feelings again.

So, I definitely would not use the word “civil” to describe ICE detention. Whatever cloak or disguise ICE detention may assume, this place tests the deepest notions of what is fair and right and just.

Thus, it is critically important to consider the question Immigration Judge Anthony S. Murray once asked me, “How long can ICE hold you?”

Jorge Antonio Millan entered immigration custody in 2013, where he remains to this day. To level the playing-field, Millan has undertaken comprehensive paralegal and criminal justice studies while in immigration detention. Millan wrote “Life on ICE” to provide acute insight into our immigration system.

Christopher Woods is a writer, teacher and photographer who lives in 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 and Glimmer Train, among others. View his photography gallery at Christopher Woods.zenfolio.com.

Sudan

By Carolyn Welch

The last white male rhino is dying. What
among us is meek? The largest?

The trophy sized slow moving giants
whose downfall is simply a matter of

being trophy sized and slow?
Scientist ready to rush in with swabs and

test tubes to save cells, hair, semen.
The stock market, however, is fine,

our precious blinders intact and well.
Tonight we build a fire, not

because we need fire or heat or light.
We watch flames struggle, nurse them

against the odds, until they devour
our wooden offerings. A bit of heat.

A little light. The rhinoceros quieting
half a world away.

Sudan, the last male white rhinoceros, died at the Dvur Kralove Zoo in Czech Republic March 19, 2018. Extinction attributed entirely to human activity.

Carolyn Welch worked for many years as a pediatric intensive care nurse and currently works as a family nurse practitioner. Carolyn’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, Sundog, Tar River Poetry, Conduit, Connecticut River Review, High Desert Journal, The Southeast Review, Zone 3, The Minnesota Review, American Journal of Nursing and other literary journals. Her poem “Rain Run” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry collection, The Garden of Fragile Beings, was published October 2018 by Finishing Line Press. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and lives in Tennessee with her husband, children and three spoiled rescue dogs.

Photo credit: Laura Bernhardt via a Creative Commons license.

Shot Three Times

By Karly Noelle White

I think often of the musician,
I forget his name,
who drove home from a gig one night,

his elderly van coughed up smoke,
was braked to the shoulder,
he called for a ride and he waited.

Just standing by the side of the road,
humming a worship tune he had led
that past Sunday; God is great, God is good.

The flashing red and blue;
police pulling up with grim faces.
“Help is on the way,” he told them.
But they took one look and agreed

this guy fit the profile––they turned over his gear,
disassembled the drum kit,
but found no stash or secrets.

His hands were flat against his legs,
he knew the drill. He complied and complied.
But their body cams went dark.
He died.
Shot three times.

Another man; with the same slender build,
sang the same sort of songs,
drove to the same sort of gigs
in the same sort of van,

And then of course, there’s his skin:
the color, my husband refers to as mocha,
warm and inviting,
a sharp contrast to my cream.

I burrow into my husband’s arms,
he assures me that he is not afraid.
But I can’t stop hearing the bullets fly,
the musician’s widow’s cries.

Karly Noelle White is an author, copywriter, and editor. Her work has been featured in the award-winning anthologies Lines of Velocity, Untangled, Nothing Held Back and Pieces of Me, all by WriteGirl Publications. She is a proud wife and mother and nurses a tea addiction. She earned her degree in English Literature at Biola University and cares a lot about faith, justice, literature, equality, education and Batman. She can be found online at Mrs. White in the Library and on Facebook.

Photo credit: Infrogmation of New Orleans via a Creative Commons license.

Philomela in the Rooms (2017)

By Michelle M. Tokarczyk

Where we listen.
Each day is a hand opening possibilities.
Each story is a nugget of success, or
a remnant of lost days and broken bonds.
Reminding us the straight and narrow
is wide enough to support us.
Hold us firm against the cravings
that still salivate in our mouths.

Where we listen.
Until a woman’s voice cracks
the way that truth cracks secrets and lies
and all the walls that still, we build.
“_____ ____ ____ raped me.”

We listen. Picture
the man holding more
power than we can picture. Look
at the woman I do not know but know
she is trying to recover. Staring
at the space here her words hang. Powerless.

And we, women, listen, crossing our arms
across our chests as if we’re afraid
they’ll crack open and our own hearts
will spill out.

We will listen, but not speak.
We are powerless. We can do nothing.
Not now.
Not yet.
We will never forget.

Michelle M. Tokarczyk has published two books of poetry Bronx Migrations and The House I’m Running From; as well as work in numerous journals and anthologies including the minnesota review, The Literary Review, Slant and For a Living: The Poetry of Work. A professor of English at Goucher College, she divides her time between Baltimore and New York City, and spends as much time as possible in resistance work.

Image: Tereus Severing Philomela’s Tongue, Virgil Solis 1562

Horror Story

By John Sheirer

After a year of making hundreds of calls each day, wearing out another pair of shoes every few weeks, and knocking on more doors than he thought could exist in the whole country, David planned to take his family for a well-earned weekend in the country on the first Saturday of November.

As he watched the famous buildings of the capitol city fade in his rearview mirror, David nicked a tiny patch of early morning ice and spun his car through the railing of the Virginia side of the Francis Scott Key Memorial Bridge. His wife and kids slipped through the windows before the car dipped beneath the water. They had only cuts, bruises, and a terrible scare.

But David had to be pulled from the Potomac River’s chilly water by the strong hands of a local fisherman who happened to be a former college swimmer. His plunge sent him into a coma that lasted for two long months in a sad wing of the city’s largest hospital.

When he unexpectedly awoke, the medical staff sprinted for the room’s television, clicking off a shouting match on a news program that he couldn’t quite hear. Dark expressions hovered above the lab coats crowded around his bed.

“I’m alive?” he asked.

The faces nodded but remained troubled. David grimaced, swallowed hard on his arid throat.

“My wife?” he croaked. “My children?”

“They’re fine,” the nurse told him, expelling a held breath. She encouraged him to drink slowly from a small plastic cup. The icy water burned.

“Why?” he asked between painful sips. “Why do you all look so terrified?”

“We have some—” The head physician halted. His gaze found the floor.

The nurse rescued his sentence: “Some bad news.”

She inhaled a long, slow, deep breath of filtered hospital air and spoke two hushed words: “Trump won.”

David’s screams could be heard all the way to Pennsylvania Avenue.

John Sheirer a teacher and author who lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. He has taught writing, literature, and communication full-time at Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, Connecticut, for the past quarter century. His books include memoir, fiction, poetry, essays, political satire, and photography. His most recent book is the satire, Donald Trump’s Top Secret Concession Speech, available in print and as an audiobook read by Mike Hardeman (Rocky Mountain Mike of the Stephanie Miller Show.) Find John at JohnSheirer.com.

Photo credit: Mike Maguire via a Creative Commons license.

Some Facts for This Moment

By Shana Ross

Not only is man far from the only animal to use tools, some birds have even been observed making and using prosthetics—mostly artificial legs, after losing them to predators, sometimes in botched attempts to save a nest and fledglings, but one ostrich was observed replacing its wing even though it could obviously not fly.

Pluto is highly unstable and will likely fracture itself in a geologically near future. This, of course, is one of the main reasons its planetary status was revoked, even though scientists deny any such bias based on unpredictability and fragility.

Despite popular mythology having Joan of Arc cropping her hair short like a boy’s, she actually invented the French twist, later popularized by Grace Kelly, whose marriage into the Monaco monarchy gained her ownership of the castle where Joan’s mortal remains were interred. Some of them.

Squirrels only hide nuts in caches of odd numbers. They feel great about their prospects for the winter, but many will die before spring.

One of the great pyramids is sinking, slowly but surely, and it is illegal under Egyptian law to photograph the now obvious difference. Older images hid the discrepancy with perspective and unusual angles.

In upper Scandinavia, where the sun sets for a fortnight over solstice, reindeer faint at first light each year. One myth casts this as relief that the sun has returned, but scientific study finds that the endocrinology is identical to that of the beasts’ reaction to very large bears and repeated sonic booms, so they are certain it is pure fear.

Debussy was colorblind. Ironically, he tends to be a favorite of synesthetes, particularly his nocturnes. I have been known to cry, seeing what he fumbled into.

Shana Ross is a poet and playwright with an MBA. She lives in Connecticut and works globally as a consultant and leadership expert. This decade, her work has been published in Anapest Journal.

Image credit: Carl Glover via a Creative Commons license.

This poem was previously published by SHANTIH Journal.

And now for a brief moment of self-promotion

Need holiday gifts, a distraction from battering news, a sense of camaraderie—or perhaps something with which to annoy a Trump-loving family member?

Buy this book!

Or, as our jacket blurbs say:

“DON’T BUY THIS BOOK! The Whacked Out Writers Resist book is BAD. Its FAKE fiction! Poetry doesn’t rhyme! Essays are TOO LONG! Writers are NOT smart! Should be in jail. It goes down as WORST ANTHOLOGY EVER by far! Don’t read!”

–@realDonaldTrump

“You’re asking me if it’s irresponsible for the president to try to censor a book? Let’s talk about books. Their publishers are what’s irresponsible. They kill trees. You’d think the liberal elite would be all over that.”

–Kellyanne Conway, Senior White House Advisor

America

By Asante Keron Hamid

Picking and choosing what to
keep and what to crop.

Pick of the litter. Pick
of the cotton. No
Afro picks. No
cornrows.

Three-fifths out of the photograph
and one stanza too censored for an
epitaph and one bullet too deceased
for the polygraph to detect our truth.

Blue in black water and white up
brown nostril and white on black
chalkboard and nappy hair knotted
into spiritual song. Strum along:

We will not die, USA.
P.S.A: We can’t die.
Shackles, whips, chains,
tar and feather, names —
We won’t die, USA.

Asante Keron Hamid is a poet / writer born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. His work can be found in The Ibis Head Review, Dissident Voice, and Tuck Magazine among other publications, and he can be found on Instagram @asante.avenida.

Photo credit: USDA NRCS Texas via a Creative Commons license.

Post-Election

By Anna DiMartino

Tonight, we’ll eat salad–
it’s all I can handle.

Under water, I try
to rinse the dirt
from the lettuce.
No matter how careful,
I always manage to miss
a little bit of grit.
Without fail, it turns up
in that last bite.

But not tonight.

One by one,
I tear each leaf
from the core,
inspect every pucker.

When I reach the heart,
I startle. There, lurking
in the fold, a paper wasp,
still, except for the twitch
of its venomous stinger.

Anna DiMartino’s work has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Lake Effect, Whale Road Review, The Cancer Poetry Project 2: A Year in Ink (San Diego Writers, Ink Anthology), Serving House Journal, and in the book Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life, and Slipstream. Her website is www.annaodimartino.com.

Author: Editor