Clowns

By Mark Williams

Anytime Giuliani talks on television the words “available
for birthdays” should flash beneath him on the screen.
                                                                – Paula Poundstone

Dear Paula,

Are you sure you thought this through? I mean,
it’s possible some kid’s mom might just call, thinking,
Once a great man, always a great man. And who’s to say
that kid doesn’t have a friend who’s coulrophobic: afraid
of guys like Rudy. A wiener dog blew up in the friend’s face,
and now he walks into the party and there’s Rudy
with that sneer of his, twisting a balloon like it’s the truth.
Only now we know a balloon isn’t always a balloon.
In the mouths of some, a balloon is an elephant, a butterfly
or swan. And speaking of elephants, you probably know
the idea of sending in clowns started with the circus.
A beautiful flying trapeze artist falls to the sawdust
and the cry, “Send in the clowns!” fills the Big Top.
Then the clowns come in, and they’re so busy squirting
giant flowers and squeezing into tiny cars
that we forget the trapeze artist is no longer flying—
or beautiful. As you’re no doubt aware,
Stephen Sondheim wrote “Send in the Clowns”
for Desiree Armfeldt (played by Glynis Johns) to sing
in Act Two of the 1973 musical, A Little Night Music.
Rejected by her lover, Fredrik, Desiree sings,

Where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns 

But as for calling Rudy and sending in his friends, Paula,

Don’t bother, they’re here.

 


Mark Williams’ writing has appeared in The Hudson Review, Indiana Review, Rattle, Nimrod, The American Journal of Poetry, Poets Reading the News, New Ohio Review (online) and the anthologies, New Poetry from the Midwest and American Fiction. His poem, “Carrying On,” will appear in The Southern Review this fall. He carries on in Evansville, Indiana, where he wishes balloons, not animals, were used at the annual Thanksgiving circus.

Image from the original Broadway show.

Street Art by Jennifer Meneray


Jennifer Meneray (Jenn) is best known for her participation in feminist resistance. Witnessing the injustice that took place in her hometown of Hinkley, California, encouraged her to focus on documenting stories less heard in the mainstream. As an artist, she explores how social movement is a way to demand social justice. Now, based in Washington, DC, Jenn has documented forms of resistance, starting with the No Dakota Access Pipeline (No DAPL) water protectors. She continues her work in the city today.

Monster’s Lament 3.o

By M.A. Banash

 

It’s 11:55 a.m. I’m crouching on the toilet at work. Pants buckled. Jabbing my phone to download an app. I want to get pizza for dinner but I’m too—what’s the word?—nervous, uptight, about ordering on the phone. The acoustics are daunting. Figure I should finally get in step with the world and do it with an app. But the reception sucks and I don’t want to spend all afternoon in the can. Abort. I get up, flush, wash my hands and walk out.

Like yesterday I wanted to get out. Go for a walk on the greenway. But I diddled around all morning and by the time I got in the car a few stray raindrops were falling on the windshield. I drove by the entrance to the trailhead. Turned around a few hundred feet up the road. Drove right past the entrance again and headed back home. I blamed the impending rain. And parking. And that I didn’t have my umbrella. And that I was late already and would have to cut my walk short to get back home to eat lunch in time to read enough of the new book, a novel about a being trapped in ice, real and metaphorical.

Now I want to give my ham sandwich to the guy wearing a cardboard sign full of holy scripture at the intersection of South and Tyvola, but worry he doesn’t like mayo on ham. Who does? Why can’t I get over this? Or anything really?

The dead hawk in the middle of Johnston Rd. The day splitting the horizon into a singed orange through the trees and a roiling purple on top, on my way to the dumpster in the morning. The sound of babies crying the next aisle over in the grocery store, making me want to sweep everything from the shelves, the cans of sweet corn “packed in the field,” Extra-Strength stain removers, the store-brand Oreos, Sriracha Ramen noodles, “Spring Morning” scented dryer sheets, Garlic Tandoori naan, Cheddar Colby Jack cheese in aerosol cans. Nothing goes away. It just kind of changes its shape, its tone, its presence. But it never leaves. It’s always there. Here.

And now the President of the United States knows about me, too. He said that I’m like a “boiler ready to explode.” That I need to be in a hospital. How does he know about me? How can he know that? Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing.

I may want to wipe everything off the grocery store shelves, may think about what it would be like to feel the wind rush past me as I fall into the Grand Canyon, may tell myself over and over that truth, reality, happiness are only one or two slight adjustments away and that I deserve it, that tonight I will stop and tomorrow I will start. That it’s a marathon and everyone has to be in shape to run a marathon. And I’m not quite in that shape yet. Or anyone to talk to.

I just want to lie down. And rest. Sleep. No dreams. Just sleep.

 


Matt was born and raised in PA and has lived in the Carolinas for the past twenty years. He writes poetry and short fiction. His work has appeared in Penumbra, Poetry Quarterly,  SurVision, The Blue Nib and Micro Fiction Monday.

Photo credit: Mike Mozart via a Creative Commons license.

Remodeling the kitchen won’t expand your mind

By Ying Choon Wu

My fellow law-abiding citizens –
as we steer our carts
through Costco and Walmart
and Target and Best Buy,
let us remember this:
We are somewhere.
Inside our shoes.
Between the cans of soup
and bags of noodles.
Between crossing off sanitizer
and searching for arugula.
Between the chill of dawn
and the cool of night.
Between apex and nadir.
Between the arc of the sky
and our parking spots.

We are more than 7 billion in the world.
Each one of us is somewhere.
The bones of our forefathers are somewhere.
Our baby bonnet buttons,
the old TVs we forsook for flat screens,
the prizes from our Happy Meals – are somewhere.

My law-abiding brothers and sisters,
as we dream frontiers from our cul-de-sacs,
and pull the crab grass,
and whiten our teeth,
I ask of you this: Touch your navel.
We came into life through connection.
Feel the soles of your feet –
We are somewhere.
We are here.

 


Ying Wu is a poet and cognitive neuroscientist who studies insight and creativity.  She hosts San Diego’s Gelato Poetry Series (www.meetup.com/BrokenAnchorPoetry/) and is part of the organizational team for the Kids! San Diego Poetry Annual.   She embraces poetry as a medium for creating community and connecting people.  Her work has been featured in Serving House Journal, Synesthesia Anthology, Blue Heron Review, The San Diego Poetry Annual,  The Poetry Superhighway, and The Clackamas Literary Review, and is on display at the San Diego Airport.  She is a recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship, and was awarded honorable mention in the 2017 Kowit poetry competition.  She lives in the San Diego Bay on a sailing catamaran with her husband and daughter.

Photo credit: Polycart via a Creative Commons license.

This poem previously appeared in the Clackamas Literary Review.

Elegy

By Bänoo Zan

For Jamal Khashoggi

I am Allah—
Al-Rahman[1]
Al-Rahim[2]

banished from
faith
and love

mourning—

beauty—
my Word—

censored—

I am mourning
my death—

The robe
of my Kaaba
stained with blood
of free speech

I have witnessed
Terror—

my sons beheaded
my daughters
deprived of light

I am Allah—
Beloved of
bards and prophets
Idol of rebels and Sufis

fleeing from
custodians
who desecrate
my house of
refuge

My body dismembered—
scattered over the woods—
I am seeking hearts
to take me in

They have stamped me
on their crown—
used me as cheap gold—

Bleeding
I wonder
if I will survive

Free me—

Free Allah
from despots

Free yourself
from fear

Let me live—

apostate infidel that I am—

At times like this—
with watan[3]
soaked in worshippers’ blood—

with faith soiled
and values sold—

which god do you worship?

 

 


Bänoo Zan has numerous published poems and poetry related pieces (over 170) as well as three books. Songs of Exile, her first poetry collection, was shortlisted for Gerald Lampert Award by the League of Canadian Poets.  Letters to My Father, her second poetry book, was released in 2017. She is the founder of Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night), Toronto’s most diverse and brave poetry reading and open mic series (inception: November 2012). Follow the poet on Facebook, Twitter @BanooZan, and Instagram.

Photo credit: TMAB2003 via a Creative Commons license.

This poem was previously published in Dissident Voice.

[1] Gracious, compassionate
[2] Merciful
[3] Homeland

 

Citizens United to Make Oz Great Again

By Nancy Austin

 

When the Supreme Rulers lifted limits on campaign contributions,
The wind began to switch, the House, to pitch,
and the Senate, fat on fundraising festivities.
Wizards and witches from east to west, north to south
could now hide behind curtains, throw balls of fire,
send flying monkeys, flaunt crystal balls.

Oz TV buzzed with slogans as candidates paired with PACs.
Almira Gulch with Western Witches for Oil,
I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog too.
Lion with Independents for Advancing Education,
Elephants, donkeys and me, oh my.
Scarecrow avoided all PAC’s and was branded
If I only had a brain.

Dorothy snagged The International Landscapers,
Look no further than your own backyard,
and the Realtors Network, There’s no place like home,
and almost took it, but the Wizard was backed
by Foreign Flying Monkeys, whose slogan,
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,
was lost on the newly courageous heartless and brainless.
Now, there is liberty and justice for all
(very bad wizards).

 

Text in italics from or adapted from Wizard of OZ. Director Victor Fleming. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., 1939.


Nancy Austin was born in Whitefish Bay, WI, but has lived on both coasts and points in between. She holds a master of science in psychology, ran a community support program for individuals with mental illness in Green Bay, and retired early to move to the northwoods.  She relishes time to write in between operating an unofficial bed and breakfast on Bear Lake, for her family and friends. Austin’s work has appeared in journals such as Adanna, Ariel, Midwestern Gothic, Portage Magazine, Sheepshead Review, Verse Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Poets Calendars. She has a poetry collection titled Remnants of Warmth (Aldrich Press/Kelsay Books, 2016).

Image credit: Mark Rain via a Creative Commons license.

 

Dave

By David H. Reinarz

 

Dave stepped out of his air-conditioned house and sat down on the front porch. Not on a chair. On the concrete step.

The concrete step on the porch of Dave’s house was very hot. Dave could feel the heat through the seat of his stone-washed denim blue jeans and Fruit of the Loom boxer briefs.

The concrete step of Dave’s house was very hot, because it was 97 friggin’ degrees. Dave’s forehead instantly bloomed with perspiration, followed closely by his armpits. The humidity was probably about 97, too. He took off the turquoise and orange plaid cotton button down shirt. He didn’t want sweat stains on it. He had bought it on an impulse in the fashionable menswear store in Regency.

Dave’s shoulders and arms and back and chest now glistened. The soft soles of his feet were uncomfortable.

This must be what it’s like for those poor devils crossing the Mexican desert, trying to get to the Rio Grande, he thought. Or those poor bastards trying to escape North Africa across the Mediterranean to Europe. Or those poor kids working all day in that factory in Asia who made my plaid shirt. Bloody shame, that is. The world is not an easy place!

Dave took a sip of iced mocha cappuccino. He could go back inside. Inside Dave’s house, the computer-controlled environmental enhancement system kept everything at exactly 72 degrees Fahrenheit and 45 percent humidity.

But, no, he would sit outside on the concrete step of the porch of his house in the heat for a bit longer. You know, in solidarity with all those poor souls trying to claw their way across the face of the planet in search of … what?

Well, he raised his glass in symbolic salute, thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers.

 


David H. Reinarz was born in Minneapolis and now lives in Omaha, Nebraska, and he has a BA in Philosophy and Religious Studies from the University of Nebraska, Omaha. Retired from a career as manager of retail professional bicycle shops, he is an alumnus of the 7 Doctors Writers Workshop (2015) and has been writing short stories and poetry since 2015. Dave is the author of two collections: Story City: Ten Short Stories and One Long Story in the Middle (2016) and The Sweet Jesus Trilogy and Other Stories (2017). His books are available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon.com.

Photo credit: Mr. TinDC via a Creative Commons license.

Goddammit, you gotta vote because

By Tara Campbell

 

when hate comes marching into town
it bashes streetlights left and right
incited by a raving clown.

They’ll yank the phone- and power lines down
to shock and choke us in the night
when hate comes marching into town.

We’ll stand together—black, white, brown
queer, Muslim, Jew—against the blight
incited by a raving clown.

When angry men fling fists around
we’ll arm the women (impolite!)
when hate comes marching into town,

and we’ll sing loud enough to drown
them out, when they shout all their shite
incited by a raving clown.

But only votes retake the ground,
rebuild, and reignite the lights
when hate comes marching into town
incited by a raving clown.

 


Tara Campbell (www.taracampbell.com) is a Kimbilio Fellow, a fiction editor at Barrelhouse, and an MFA candidate at American University. Prior publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Jellyfish Review, Booth, and Strange Horizons. Her novel, TreeVolution, was published in 2016, followed in 2018 by Circe’s Bicycle. Her third book, a short story collection called Midnight at the Organporium, will be released by Aqueduct Press in 2019.

Takes the Cake

By Karen Greenbaum-Maya

“I was sitting at the table, we had finished dinner,” T***p told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “We’re now having dessert—and we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen—and President Xi was enjoying it.”

So many problems are being solved by chocolate cake. Beautiful cakes, perfect 10s, are being sent to NATO heads of state. The ones that came out kind of flat, the 6s and the 4s, are being used to bomb Syria. And Iraq, too, why not?  Now we are waging war with chocolate cake. Surplus wheat, butter, eggs, sugar, all so much cheaper than ordnance. Only the chocolate is imported. Cakes are raining down on Assad’s wasted cities, bringing comfort to displaced people everywhere. No blasted hospitals, no amputations. A little gut maybe, but hey. People everywhere are happy to see American planes releasing materiel. To be struck by a falling chocolate cake, no worse than getting slapped by flung custard pie. In Korea, chocolate is considered a medicine. Like the healing that chocoholics dream from Death by Chocolate. Cakes are being launched, pushing Kim Jong-Un’s nuclear buttons, showing how good it tastes to choose butter over guns. Let them eat cake.

 


Karen Greenbaum-Maya, retired clinical psychologist, German major, two-time Pushcart nominee and occasional photographer, no longer lives for Art but still thinks about it a lot. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including  B O D Y, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Comstock Poetry Review, Off the Coast, Otoliths, Naugatuck Poetry Review, and Measure. Kattywompus Press published her two chapbooks, Burrowing Song and Eggs Satori. Kelsay Books published her book-length collection, The Book of Knots and their Untying. She has been politically engaged since she was 12. She co-hosts Fourth Sundays, a poetry series in Claremont, California. For links to work online, go to: www.cloudslikemountains.blogspot.com/.

Image: Internet meme.

Tayaran

By Christa Miller

 

The first time Haitham flies he is trying to flee the gang of teenagers in the camp who think he has something worth stealing. He is running, running, and then there is a building before him, the kitchen where his mother works during the day. Before he knows what he is doing, he takes two steps up the concrete-block wall, grasps the edge of the roof, and hauls himself upwards. He scrambles to the top and there he stays while the boys bellow and whoop below. Eventually they get bored and go off, and that is when he takes flight. A few running steps along the shallow pitch and then launch, he soars into the air. But young boys do not have wings. As he falls he has just enough time to tuck himself into a ball so he can roll along the ground.

His shoulder is sore for four days afterward. But he has tasted the air, felt it cushioning his body. It is gritty with sand and tastes bitter like turmeric, he wants to taste and feel it again.

Haitham has wanted to fly ever since he and his mother first came to the camp. They crossed the border late at night on foot, knotted tightly together with other families for protection from the government forces. Then just five, he wanted to be a bird so he could swoop into the air to escape without his feet and legs aching, without his knees and shins bloodied and bruised from his numerous stumbles and falls in the rocky sand.

He is nine now. The next time he flies, it is not to escape, but to see what else he can do, how far he can go in this tent city of a refugee camp. He has seen other boys fly on YouTube, where he watches videos of something called “parkour.” While his friends play video games that allow them to capture the government flag with guns and bombs and flame, he sits in the corner of his tent with his phone, watching boys in faraway cities—Berlin, Paris, Toronto, even Essen where his uncle now lives—balance atop high rooftops and leap from one roof to the next.

He cannot jump from tent to tent, of course, but the caravans in camp have hard rooftop surfaces. He pretends he is back in his old apartment building in Homs. His movements are awkward, tentative, a boy simply jumping from caravan to caravan, not the light tiptoe touch-and-go of the run across them he has envisioned. He tells himself this is merely because he does not yet know the camp’s layout, that, like the birds, he will come to know where it is safe to land.

But after he lands hard on the fifth caravan, a woman comes out, her jilbab flapping in a way that makes Haitham think she has pulled it on hastily. He climbs down rather than leap and roll, and he makes his apologies to her, shame warming his cheeks because he has made her risk her covering in public.

She rails at him for disturbing other people’s homes, their quiet spaces, their private time. And then, unexpectedly, her face softens. She is not angry after all, just startled, and he realizes that he reminds her of someone as she holds out her arms to him. He accepts her hug. She is a young woman whose dark eyes are warm and sad, and she holds on to him for longer than he expects. When at last she lets him go, tears have tracked down the high bones of her cheeks. Before Haitham can speak, she spins and disappears inside her caravan.

After this he—they—makes a game of it. Around the same time every day, he lands hard on her roof; she comes out and scolds him, then offers him tea and some basic riz.  From her stove it tastes better than anyone else’s riz, including his mother’s. They sit in the baked shade of her caravan, and they talk. She is from Damascus, and she has never heard of parkour. Before the war she was a university student, she tells him, studying architecture, but after the men in her family were gone, she had to take a job cleaning the classrooms she once learned in. When he asks her who she came here with, her eyes grow faraway and sad, and she does not answer.

Still it is better conversation than Haitham can find with his own mother, who doesn’t seem to notice when Haitham slips away, who bursts into tears without warning, who mutters to herself about the things she left behind. It’s as if she has abandoned the family members who gave them to her, although the rest of them escaped to Germany long ago. If she only knew where her husband was, Haitham hears her tell the other women in the kitchen, she would rejoin him. She would rather be killed there than be trapped here.

Haitham flies to escape her tears, to escape the tiny space that is perhaps the size of one room of their old home, to escape the neighbors on either side who tell them they may have to live here for years yet, years before they can flee to Germany or Canada to start again. He flies to escape the knowledge that his mother’s dreams seem to hold no place for him.

His new friend, Amal, tells him she thinks he should attend school in the camp. Why spend his days running around, she asks, her face creased with worry, where the older boys can torment him? School is safe. In school he will give himself a better chance to make it wherever he ends up. How can he tell her that school is the last place that feels safe? Bad enough that the mortar fire, far away as it is, makes her entire caravan shake; how can he explain to her what it felt like, to have seen his old school building in crumpled ruins, to realize that, had the shelling happened just a few hours later, he would never have known what hit him?

He flies to escape the mortar shells.

Before long he realizes that he has achieved the ability to touch and go, to kiss the corrugated metal rooftops with just the tips of his toes before sprinting to the next. He balances carefully on beams in construction sites. He teaches himself to launch his body and climb up the cinder-block walls of shelters and kitchens like a spider; to tuck-and-roll, as he did that first day, when there is nothing but empty space to fly through. He can go anywhere, be anything. He hardly notices when the people on the ground point him out.

That is why it surprises him one evening, not far from the market, to come out of a roll only to hurtle into another human body. For a moment he thinks it is Amal, this is near where she lives, but there is too little fabric for a jilbab. He steps backward, gazes into the hard face of one of the teenagers he has been flying to avoid.

He doesn’t know if these are the same boys who have tried to rob him. He has nothing, he tells them, but they don’t care about that. They have seen him fly, and they want him to use his skills. For Allah, they tell him, al-Nusra has a plan for you. You could return to Homs, live as a man. Surely you can make use of your speed for His glory?

Haitham does not know how they know he is from Homs. Perhaps once they were neighbors. It doesn’t matter. If he were ever to return to Homs it would be to fight at his father’s side, not for al-Nusra. He feels afraid, deeply afraid in the very center of his core, for he knows these boys do not want him to rejoin his father, nor do they believe in Allah’s grace or mercy. He knows it is not money the boys want to rob him of, but his very life. He does not know how he manages to slip between the knot they have formed around him, but he does, and he hears them laugh like the striped hyenas who skulk around the edges of the camp in the night.

The next day he remains with his mother in their caravan. When his friend Sabir comes to the door and asks if he can play, he declines. But his mother invites Sabir inside, and for the remainder of the afternoon the two boys huddle on Haitham’s bedroll, playing video games on their phones.

Haitham avoids YouTube altogether.

After three days Haitham begins to feel the familiar twitch in his legs telling him it has been too long since he has flown, he must practice. Still he does not go outside. His mother, teary-eyed, asks him what is wrong, but he cannot tell her, he cannot give her one more thing to cry about. He says simply that he injured himself and needs rest. Sabir continues to come over. Their other friend Khalil stops by after school. Khalil talks about what he is learning, asks Haitham and Sabir to join him. Haitham asks if he can still feel the mortar shells shake that building. Khalil doesn’t answer.

On the sixth day, Haitham can no longer bear the hot stuffiness of his mother’s caravan, so on the morning of the seventh day, after his mother has gone to the kitchen, he crawls out of the caravan’s window and up onto the roof. He lies flat on his back so no one else can see him, and he breathes deeply as the camp begins to rise around him.

Before long he hears voices at the nearby kitchen. A woman is looking for someone, a lost child. Her voice is near tears but still she sounds familiar, a voice Haitham remembers, from Homs perhaps? He turns over onto his belly and spies.

He recognizes Amal’s black jilbab right away, because it stands out so in a land of white tents and the brightly colored jilbabs that his mother and other women wear as if to brighten drab days, or to stave off darkness. Amal is teary, and she is speaking with his own mother, and it takes him several moments to realize that it is he she asks about, not some younger brother or neighbor’s son she was responsible for. He scrambles down from his mother’s caravan and goes to the two women, his face cast down at the dusty ground, ashamed again for causing Amal such grief, and for embarrassing his mother, though he is not sure how.

Amal catches him up in a hug, holding him as if she will never let go. When she finally does free him, he expects a scolding, but instead she looks deep into his eyes as if searching his soul, and he cannot look away. Finally, she asks, if she can find a way to teach him how to buy and sell in the market, will he come with her?

Haitham glances up at his mother, whose eyes and mouth have formed round Os of surprise. He sees something else dawning in them as well: hope, the same hope he sees in Amal’s face and hears in her name. He cannot bear to disappoint either his mother or his friend, and so he says yes.

The next morning he wakes up with his mother, who fusses over him in a way he cannot recall her doing since before they left Homs. She makes him a good breakfast of pita and vegetables, and she tells him that if there is ever a hope of his leaving this camp, learning how to run a business is it.

Amal has found him a job cleaning a flower shop. He is to sweep the outside and the inside of cuttings and fallen petals and deadheads. In exchange, the shop owner, a man named Mohsin, will teach him how to set prices and haggle and make change.

In the beginning, the responsibility excites Haitham. He sweeps meticulously, inside and out, making sure the corners are free of dust and cuttings and insects, and he listens to Mohsin haggle with customers. Several times Mohsin calls him over to watch how he makes change. He is given a piece of fruit for lunch, and he eats it behind the shop so that he will not disturb the customers.

But after a few days the excitement wears off. Mohsin seems to forget that Haitham is there. He doesn’t praise his new young worker for a job well done, nor does he scold him when he finds Haitham underfoot. He even begins to forget to involve Haitham in the purchase and sale process. It is not, Haitham reflects, as if he is the man’s son or nephew, or the son or nephew of Amal, who herself seems to have disappeared. Mohsin doesn’t seem to care whether he shows up or not.

One morning, Haitham leaves the caravan as if he is going to work, but instead he spends the day flying.

It feels good to be on the rooftops and in the air once again. It has been too long. He is stiff, his movements less fluid, and neither the air nor the ground are very forgiving. By lunchtime, he is winded and a little bit sore, but he keeps going.

While he flies, he thinks. About his mother telling him that the only way out of the camp is to learn a trade. About the things she says to the other women at the kitchen, how her husband needs her more than her son does. About the al-Nusra fighters who want him to return to Homs.

If he joins them, he wonders, if he pretends to fight for them, could he eventually find his way back to his father?

He is so lost in his thoughts that he does not even notice Amal until she plucks him out of the air.

Actually, she swats his foot as he flies above her head. It isn’t enough for him to fall, but it’s enough to make him stop running, to halt on the roof he lands on, to make his way down to the ground carefully rather than in the tuck-and-roll he hasn’t done since the day the older boys encircled him.

She isn’t alone. She is with his mother. He braces himself for the scolding, though he feels no shame this time and does not hang his head. He stares defiantly at the two women.

His mother holds aloft a paper with writing on it. She is triumphant as she tells him that she has heard from her brother in Germany. He is traveling here to Jordan to take Haitham away, bring him to Essen. He will attend school with his cousins and perhaps work in his uncle’s shop.

When his mother is finished speaking she gestures to Amal, who regards Haitham with great sad eyes. Amal kneels, takes both his hands in hers. “Haitham,” she says softly. “Your name means ‘young eagle.’ I should have remembered, eagles cannot be caged—in shops or in schools.” Her dark eyes twinkle when she says this. Then they grow somber once more. “Nor in camps. Isn’t that so?”

Haitham doesn’t blink. He pulls his hands from hers. Over her shoulder the hyena-boys skulk. He tells her, tells his mother, that he wants to soar far away. To find his father, to fight for Syria, to recapture his home for his mother, for Amal, for everyone in the camp who cannot fly. His words hang in the air between them.

Finally his mother speaks. “No,” she tells him. “There is no life for you there. Only death.”

“But you speak about rejoining Abee,” he cries.

At this, his mother drops her gaze to the dust at her feet. “Yes, and I am wrong. I miss your father, but not enough to risk your life.”

“Al-Nusra is as much a cage as this camp,” Amal tells him.

“Cages are everywhere,” he spits back.

Even as he says it, though, he recalls the parkour videos filmed in Essen, in the other cities. Those boys must attend school and work in shops, too. What if he could become the one to post videos on YouTube, give hope to some other boy who yearns to escape the camp?

He meets Amal’s gaze, then his mother’s. He smiles. In Essen, the air will be lighter to fly through, not full of heat and sand, and it will taste as sweet as honey.

 


Too goody-two-shoes for the rebels and too rebellious for the good girls and boys, Christa Miller writes fiction, which, like herself, doesn’t quite fit in. A professional writer for more than fifteen years, Christa has written in a variety of genres ranging from crime fiction to horror to children’s, but her favorite stories to write—and read—are those that blend genres. Her work has been published in both Volumes 1 and 2 of the Running Wild Novella Anthology, a 2008 anthology called Northern Haunts, in Shroud Magazine, Out of the Gutter Magazine, Spinetingler Magazine, and in a handful of online zines. Her affinity for the dark, psychological, and somewhat bizarre doesn’t stop her from snuggling baby animals as a volunteer at a local wildlife rescue, adventuring with her two sons in rivers, swamps and salt marshes, or relaxing with a good book and a cold beverage in her hammock. Christa is based in Greenville, SC. You can find her at www.ChristaMMiller.com and on Goodreads, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Photo credit: Marco Gomez via a Creative Commons license.

24-Hour Relevance

By Larry D. Thacker

You’ve got twenty-four hours to wring out the story.
Maybe not that even. Something shinier could surface

out of that early morning Twitter abyss, from so deep
and lightless the thing might be unrecognizable

but for its stench of current interest, eyeless,
translucent hide capable of handling the depth pressures

that crush lesser beings, angler decoyed skin oddities
feeling into the murk as lures for the cycle hungry,

clueless creatures convinced they live to feed
the larger monsters, the leviathans never bothering

to ask such petty questions where no sound travels.

 


Larry D. Thacker’s poetry can be found in more than a hundred publications, including, Poets Reading the News, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry South, Spillway, Tower Poetry Society, Mad River Review, Mojave River Review, Town Creek Poetry, and Appalachian Heritage. His books include Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia and the poetry books, Voice Hunting, Memory Train, and Drifting in Awe. His MFA in poetry and fiction is earned from West Virginia Wesleyan College. Visit his website at www.larrydthacker.com.

Photo credit: Robert Couse-Baker via a Creative Commons license.

I Sing What I’ve Seen

By M.A. Durand    


I sing of chickens being eaten. Every. Single. One. In the rooms. Someone paid. The price high. The bodies cheap. I sob you do not want to be there. What I sing is what I have heard and seen. My eyes and ears are old they see and hear young Black bodies under shotgun guard in sugar cane fields. My eyes see young bodies of all colors on school room floors. In homes. In streets. And you don’t want to see, but you should see the bullets the blood the bodies. Slavery to AR-15.  Hear and See. Hear and See freedom ring.

 


M.A. Durand is an undergraduate student just three credits from earning a BA at Antioch University in Creative Writing with a Concentration in Literature. She lives in the Mojave Desert, in Barstow, California, has traveled overseas and lived in Cairo, Egypt, and began writing stories at age seven.

Photo credit: James Emery via a Creative Commons license.

Hysteria

By Daryl Sznyter

in the 1800s we were banned
from riding trains        because it was thought
our uteruses would fly            away
as though that should scare us
as though some           small    part of us
didn’t want that           all along
as though our wombs
weren’t tiny saucers                from the beginning
of time             sick of scientists
using the same breath
to call our names & warn the others
as if the others                         would listen
as if     curiosity          and lust
could be separated
& we wouldn’t respond
with the creation         of a more efficient
form of            transportation

 


Daryl Sznyter is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and content writer from Northeast Pennsylvania. She received her MFA in Poetry from The New School and is the author of the poetry collection Synonyms for (Other) Bodies (NYQ Books). Her work has appeared in Phoebe, Gravel, Cleaver Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, Poet Lore, WomenArts Quarterly, and elsewhere. To learn more, please visit darylsznyter.com.

Image credit: an illustration from Dr. Hollick’s Complete Works: Diseases of Male and Female Generative Organs, Marriage Guide, The Matron’s Manual of Midwifery and Child Birth, and The Diseases of Women Familiarly Explained, published in 1902

Feeding the Fire of Winter Solstice

By Cate Gable

One stick one stick one match
one fist of newsprint
and the future is set
into flames. Passion and idiocy
are alight in the trees,
the possums are playing
dead, civil traditions
melt.

Our bones are reversing themselves
one flake at a time, and the temple
of our beloveds has long been
desecrated for pennies.
Our soul-mates the bears,
the deer, whales,
elephants, manatees
have withered

into oblivion. We watched
them go, everything
in slow-motion, so slow
we felt nothing, the needle
barely into our flesh
when the long-forgetting
began—our ancestors.
shadows on the wall,

never spoke,
or if they did, muttering
nonsense, we smote them
from the record. Words
were brands, random
tattoos on our arms,
over our hearts,
the smell of smoke
on our clothes.

 


Cate Gable has an MFA in poetry from Pacific Lutheran University; an MA from the University of WA; and a BA from University of Pennsylvania, graduating magna cum laude. Gable won first place in San Francisco’s Bay Guardian poetry contest; she has an award-winning chapbook, “Heart;” and a book of poetry and commentary on Stein/Toklas, entitled Chere Alice: Three Lives, (launched as part of the UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library, “A Place at the Table” exhibit). Her poem “Kilauea” was selected for Aloha Shorts Radio. Gable lives in Nahcotta, WA; Paris, France; and winters in Oracle, AZ.

Photo credit: Mendolus Shank via a Creative Commons license.

Heads on the Chopping Block

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt


Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh,

Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley,
Lindsey Graham and all other D.C. misogynists:

Beware.

You think Medusa was a monster?

Politics hath no fury

like a sexual assault survivor scorned

mocked, belittled, lied about,

ignored.

Our rage is beautiful and terrifying.

Our votes will turn you

not to stone

but to rubble.

 


A GOTV note from K-B: If you don’t like what’s happening in our country, let your voice be heard—at the polls. The midterm elections are Tuesday 06 November.

Your vote does count, particularly this year. It’s OK to be sorrowful, angry, frustrated, enraged, but don’t let that stop you from voting. Today, casting your vote is a dire responsibility.

If you’re not registered, or not sure, the deadline in some states is soon, but you can look up your state at this link (https://www.headcount.org/deadlines-dates/).

If you’re unsure of your polling place (they sometimes change election to election), you can look it up via this link (https://www.nass.org/can-i-vote/find-your-polling-place).

Whether online, by mail or in person, we must GET OUT THE VOTE.


Kit-Bacon Gressitt, publisher of Writers Resist and a co-founding editor, is an award-winning writer, an editor, and a Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies lecturer. Her work can be found in Not My President: The Anthology of Dissent, Ducts, Trivia: Feminist Voices, The Missing Slate, Evening Street Review, Publisher’s Weekly, San Diego Poetry Annual, and Chiron Review, among others. A former feminist newspaper columnist in a conservative bastion, K-B has learned to duck swiftly. Her website is at www.kbgressitt.com.

This image is a satirical adaptation by artist Kim Kinman of sculptor Luciano Garbati’s “Medusa With Perseus’ Head.”

 

Breitmark News

By Mark Ozeroff

 

Breitmark News
1/24/17

President Trump has officially declared the day of his inauguration a national holiday, filing the paperwork on Monday. The proclamation read:

“Now, therefore, I, Donald J. Trump, president of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim Jan. 20, 2017, as National Day of Patriotic Devotion, in order to strengthen our bonds to each other and to our country—and to renew the duties of government to the people.”

In the background, counselor Kellyanne Conway sang D, O, N  –  A, L, D  –  T, R, U, M, P to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club, whilst simultaneously twirling two batons.

•     •     •

Breitmark News
12/13/17

Judge Roy Moore took the high road last night, conceding defeat like the gentleman he is. He noted: “That &*#! *!&}*! I told that ^*%#@ he couldn’t &*$!< his *%@ if his own &?@ was +$#%!”

•     •     •

Breitmark News
12/26/17

Almost a year into his presidency, Donald Trump has firmly established himself as the Fast Food President. He has no discernible taste, adds nothing nutritional to the political diet, and is mostly composed of fillers and strange colorings. He is The McDonald.

•     •     •

Breitmark News
4/30/18

The Nobel Committee today undertook an action it hasn’t performed since 1969, when the Economics Prize was added to the original five awards. In response to a Michigan campaign rally, where the president led calls to be short-listed for the Peace Prize, the Committee has created a seventh category. Thus far, Donald Trump is the only nominee for the Ignoble Piece Prize.

•     •     •

Breitmark News
5/10/18

News from the Mideast for President Trump is mixed today. On the plus side, the new U.S. Embassy will be open for business soon in Jerusalem. On the minus side, Jerusalem may no longer be standing.

Summary: At this point any Trump supporters left are, in actuality, athletic supporters.

•     •     •

Breitmark News
6/18/18

Some children are born with silver spoons in their mouths; others shiver beneath silver space blankets.

•     •     •

Breitmark News
7/10/18

Presidential advisor Stephen Miller recently picked up a large takeout order of sushi from a Washington restaurant. While departing, a bartender reportedly extended both his middle fingers. Miller “protested” by throwing the entire order into a trashcan.

Irony in life is rich and ever present: Witness a poisonous blowfish throwing away an order of poisonous blowfish. It even turns out that Miller’s middle name is Fugu … At least that’s what it sounded like the other protesters were yelling at him.

•     •     •

Breitmark News
7/12/18

Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt yesterday predicted the course that Donald Trump’s upcoming NATO meeting would take. He claimed the president would “fly into Brussels like a seagull, defecate all over everything, then squawk and fly away.” Every now and again, the pressure builds up in Fox newscasters until the truth just explodes like a grenade.

•     •     •

Breitmark News
7/19/18

Well, it’s been quite a week for the president. First, he stirred NATO up like a hornet’s nest, before fleeing Brussels for a quiet visit in Britain. But the only silent object on the entire island was a balloon he preferred to avoid, so he took flight to Finland to visit an old, dear friend. By the time Trump touched down on American soil, even Republican senators were scowling and muttering under their collective breath. Welcome home, Benedict Donald.

•     •     •

Breitmark News
7/28/18

President Trump is considering the nomination of Thomas Tramaglini to replace the unpopular Betsy DeVos, as Secretary of Education in his cabinet. Tramaglini became famous in his last job as the Superintendent of Kenilworth, N.J.’s school system, when surveillance video caught him with his pants down, defecating on a high school track. The so-called “Pooperintendent”—who has filed a million dollar lawsuit for the staining of his reputation and invasion of privacy—recently relieved himself of his duties.

Trump was quick to take up his cause, tweeting: “I think we’ve all done something like this. Trumita…Tremijal…Tom will help us drain the swamp! MAGA!”

 


Mark Ozeroff holds an MBA and a Commercial pilot license. He is a ravenous reader, one who believes that fiction can sometimes tell a more profound truth than history. Mark may be the most undisciplined author since Jack Kerouac—he writes slower than a glacier descends a fjord, and his first drafts are rougher than forty-grit sandpaper. Mark’s debut novel earned a gold medal from the Military Writers Society of America, just in time for his first publisher to go belly-up. He relocated to California, to lick his wounds and write In the Weeds. Follow Mark on Facebook at www.facebook.com/mark.ozeroff.

Photo credit: Kit Niederer via a Creative Commons license.

 

If I Could Write a Political Poem, It Would Say

By J. David Cummings

 

Are we fast becoming Nazi Germany?
Tune in, not tomorrow, but later today.

Let me confess to you my naïveté:
I thought the good among us were many.

Now I fear we stumble, prayer-like, as if to our last breath:
O, Dark Angel, afflict him who is the Anti-Savior.

Everyone can smell the smell of rancid death.
Everyone seems stone. Where is the Warrior?

Friend, if that’s an honest question, then stare
Into the bathroom glass: there or nowhere.

 


David Cummings has a published collection of poems, Tancho, which was selected by Alicia Ostriker for the 2013 Richard Snyder Prize and published by The Ashland Poetry Press, Ashland University, Ohio. The poems are meditations on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book also won the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Award in Poetry/Literary Criticism from the Independent Book Publishers Association.

Image credit: jamesr12012 via a Creative Commons license.

 

Storm Front

 

By Judith Skillman


Artist Statement

In “Storm Front,” oil and cold wax on canvas,  12” x  12”, the artist used a rag in equal measure to paint and wax. A paint scraper was employed to etch out the trees at the bottom left. Nature provides solace during times of affliction, whether that affliction be physical or political. One can imagine that those who have been targets of fascism and racism—dreamers who deserve their amnesty, “illegal” Mexicans who perform heroic jobs American refuse to do, and the poor from whom government support has been taken and put into the pockets of the very rich—these people still and always remain citizens of the natural world.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the German term Sturm and drang (transl. as storm and urge, or action and high emotionalism—in the German usage, however, against 18th century norms in literature and music)—a website by the same name, “Stormfront,” which had its domain name “seized for displaying bigotry, discrimination, or hatred,” has become a growing force for white nationalists and neo-Nazi’s. To call this site troubling would be euphemistic. Inherent in the attitudes of those who patronize this site lies a disturbing reality. Not only is the current administration bent on making the rich richer and the poor poorer, it is determined to sacrifice nature in the bargain.

Regulations of vehicle greenhouse gas emissions implemented under the Obama administration have been undone; FEMA has stricken the term “climate change” from its plan book and “climate change” websites have been likewise censored; the Trump admin has decreed that accidental bird deaths, in violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), are legal.

To date, the actions of this administration have broken with a tradition of environmental protection—the result of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), and other like-minded literature that focuses on understanding the impact humans have had on the earth. The actions taken by Trump and his cronies undo measures to safeguard the only place we have to live. They are shocking; they fly in the face of science, spirituality, and God-given rights for plants, animals and humans.

“Storm Front,” then, can be seen as what has happened since the Trump administration came to power, and what is to come. Viewing the painting requires an admission that this is not the time to sit idly by. Both the natural and the human world require concrete forms of protest—resistance—in order to survive the onslaught of such a dangerous and powerful ignorance.


Judith Skillman is interested in feelings engendered by the natural world. Her medium is oil on canvas and oil on board; her works range from representational to abstract. Her art has appeared in Minerva Rising, Cirque, The Penn Review, The Remembered Arts, and elsewhere. She also writes poetry, and her new collection, Premise of Light, is published by and available from Tebot Bach. Judith has studied at the Pratt Fine Arts Center and the Seattle Artist’s League under the mentorship of Ruthie V. Shows include The Pratt, Galvanize, and The Pocket Theater, in Seattle. Visit jkpaintings.com.

Deaths of Canaries

By Katherine D. Perry

 

We were standing together, our fingers loosely grasping
each other’s hands, around the planet.
Here, in the good ole U.S. of A., we had been looking elsewhere
for pain:  we didn’t notice when we began
to choke from our own smoldering: arrogance
and first world privilege let us take our Zyrtec and Claritin
for months and months thinking we were overproducing
histamines instead of blaming our own toxic fumes.
We thought we would know better when the moment arrived.

The graffiti at the Krog Street bridge
told us that we needed to call our senators,
told us that we needed to march, to rise up,
told us, with bleeding letters, that the dangers were here and now.
The journals and anthologies filled with poems
about death marches and end of days.
But we went to work anyway, and let the men in Washington
roll over the few-and-far-between women.
We grocery shopped and wrote our outrage on social media
as one by one the artists dropped dead.
We mourned them on SNL and in tributes to the hurricane victims,
but we kept moving.
We forgot to notice the yellow feathers
littering the dying grasses.
We couldn’t be bothered to begin the arduous task:
putting people on elevators, sending them up.

When I looked down at my hand, now empty,
I wondered where my sisters’ fingers had gone.
Even as I dropped to my knees, unable to summon another line
for the next poem, the survival instinct whispered
that help would come.

We were the hope we asked for,
but we were also the fingers pulling the triggers.

 


Katherine D. Perry is an Associate Professor of English at Perimeter College of Georgia State University. Her first book of poetry, Long Alabama Summer, was released in December of 2017 from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have been published in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Writers Resist, The Dead Mule of Southern Literature, Poetry Quarterly, Melusine, Southern Women’s Review, Bloodroot, Borderlands, Women’s Studies, RiverSedge, Rio Grande Review, and 13th Moon. She is a co-founder of the Georgia State University Prison Education Project which works in Georgia prisons to bring literature and poetry to incarcerated students. She lives in Decatur, Georgia with her spouse and two children. Her website is www.katherinedperry.com.

Image credit: SJDStudio via a Creative Commons license.

The Traitor’s Flag

By Michael Begnal

 

Fluttering fields of red polyester
hang on aluminum poles

in dystopic yards cleared
from the forest,

posts erected next
to splotchy swing-sets and cracked

plastic pools of mosquito eggs
the South never lost

grab the Polaroid, and
quick rub the self-
developing snapshot:

the traitor’s flag
pickled in urine,
new-gen Piss Christ

 

 


Michael Begnal is the author of Future Blues (Salmon Poetry, 2012) and Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry, 2007), as well as the chapbook The Muddy Banks (Ghost City Press, 2016). His work has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Notre Dame Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Public Pool, Empty Mirror, The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing, 2016), Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has an MFA from North Carolina State University and teaches at Ball State University. Visit Michael’s website at mikebegnalblogspot.com.

Photo credit: Randy Heinitz via a Creative Commons license.