Author: Editor

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.

I Only Smile at Dogs

By Lizz Schumer

 

Femme is an act of war
Living in this body performance art
Like daring to walk down the street.

(Does my topknot offend you?)

Keeping men’s words out of my head
(Hey baby, smile for me)
To make room for my own.

Lipstick and lace body-armored
My skin is a weapon in your country.
It belonged to all of us until a hostile takeover
Long before any of us was born
Made it unsafe to live without a Y chromosome
In these streets.

What are you so afraid of?

My pheromones give you the wrong idea.
The chemicals I’m wearing in my too-sexy bloodstream
interact with your masculine fragility
And make it ok for you to rape me

Just like that.

I didn’t sign up for the 321,500th regiment
But here we are
An army of one in six
With only our closed legs to protect us.

And you say I’m angry
Like that’s my crime.
Not my thousand-year stare that still doesn’t see equality
Not my pencil legs or grapefruit tits or thigh gap or back fat or asking for it just by virtue of

Being
Here.

I apologize before I act, then after
Because headphones aren’t a barrier you respect

Like my skin
Like my lack of enthusiastic consent
Like my autonomy

Because I don’t exist to you except as a border to be breached
In a conflict my body drafted me into
As a prisoner before we began.

 

Lizz Schumer is a pansexual, disabled, cisgender white woman (pronouns: she/her) living and working in Astoria, NY. She writes primarily on the themes of living in a body in the world and how our physicality—including the way human brains process surroundings and society—affects experiences. She writes that “I Only Smile at Dogs” grapples with feeling unsafe as a cisgender femme in a patriarchal society. It examines the responsibility placed on female-identifying persons, to “protect” themselves against men, and the expectations society has them because of the bodies they inhabit. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Salon.com, Self.com, Greatist.com, Wordgathering, Breath & Shadow, Minerva Rising, Manifest-Station, and others. She can be found online at www.lizzschumer.com, facebook.com/authorlizzschumer, and on twitter @eschumer.

Photo credit: Gigi Ibrahim via a Creative Commons license.

Soup and Democracy

By Susan Swartz

 

I took a day off from the news and made soup. No NPR. No New York Times. No local paper. No TV. A lot of curry.

I took shelter from Syria and Parkland in my sunny kitchen. Had it not been for two teaspoons of neon orange turmeric I might have entirely dismissed thoughts of His Awfulness, too.

I made the soup for my book club. We call our club Foxfire, named for the title of one of our early choices, the story of a gang of teenage girls by Joyce Carol Oates. Sometimes in emails we address each other: Dear Foxies.

We take turns choosing a book and hosting each month. Tonight, we will be talking about Democracy, by Joan Didion. I expect since we are mostly of the same generation we will recall where and how young we were when we first discovered Didion. The writers in our group will say something about how we wish we could write like her. We will all likely praise Didion’s way with words and some will surely argue that Democracy, published in 1984, is not her best.

The title is ironic since no one in this novel really believes in democracy except as a way to sell American superiority to the rest of the world. Democracy is just the brand. The Americans in Democracy believe in power and money and other rich people. Didion doesn’t much care for any of them except she is somewhat sympathetic to the heroine, Inez. I doubt anyone in my book club will find any character they’d like to be friends with.

I’m pretty sure that no one in my book club would find Didion herself likeable. She’s the bony, brainy one with oversized sunglasses and unsmiling face on the back of her books. Joyce Carol Oates is also bony and brainy with big eyes. Both would be too intimidating and intellectual to invite into my living room. And Didion, who reportedly feeds largely on diet Coke and nuts, wouldn’t appreciate my soup.

My book club friends often make soup for winter meetings. Sometimes minestrone or butternut squash, last month leek and potato. Mine is lentil with curry and cardamom and cinnamon and cloves. Stir to release the fragrance says the recipe. In the crockpot it is already perfuming the house and putting the dog to sleep.

The soup has carrots and onions, winter vegetables with hard skins, tough outsides. I think of peasant women in wintry places digging into the frozen ground to find a carrot or an old potato to put into a pot to simmer all day, to fill bellies and calm the heart. Many of us had peasant ancestors and grandmothers who lived on farms and cooked what they had in the root cellar and what they had put up from the summer. Our mothers’ generation was liberated by soup in a can. They made the Campbells family billions.

The recipe says to sauté the carrots and onions in unsalted butter. I follow the recipe except for the French lentils. My grocery store has only the humble brown-green variety. There are no luxury ingredients except for maybe the coconut milk and organic chicken broth.

I’d hoped the grocery store would have had tulips to brighten the table. Imagine that, tulips in the winter. But all they had were stiff bouquets of tight-faced roses.

The news walks in with my husband. He’s storming over the man with the turmeric hair and says I need to read one of the columnists. Krugman or Brooks. I’ll read it tomorrow.

Democracy is about the geo-political military industrial corporate rulers of the world who are living the country club life in Hawaii while they orchestrate the destruction of Vietnam. Of course, the women are secondary. Bored, stuck, rich women who smoke and drink cocktails and make lousy mothers and let their servants make the soup. The women in my book club are one generation away from those in Democracy but we remember when a lot of mothers were bored and stuck.

On my refrigerator I have a newspaper photo of a string of refugees walking single file against an orange sky. It’s like Inez says in Democracy, being American does not exempt you from history.

 

Susan Swartz is an author, retired journalist and columnist in the Bay Area (Sebastopol, California). Her books include The Juicy Tomatoes Guide to Ripe Living After 50 (New Harbinger).

Photo credit: Steven Jackson via a Creative Commons license.

Tethered by Borders

By Sneha Subramanian Kanta

The space aboriginals find home is soon lost
thereafter; it never belonged to them. Their woe,
the dream of governments, the nightmare of politicians.

Press conferences quibble in placards of justice handed –
smudged in red ink over a white cardboard surface,
as though a widowed woman in India dare wear sindoor.

There are things one is denied by virtue of birth – those
that stick to their entire life, as an uncalled for birthmark.
I have seen militants draw a line of control, patrolling

during the wee hours of night: the owl hoots, insects
sleepily crawl over marshes of white chalk scribbling:
like teaching in silent sermons the value of borderless

spaces. Still, we’re taught to measure prosperity in other
quantum: the import and export in shared extra margins –
while an old woman lying in the corner cries in the cold.

 

Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a GREAT scholarship awardee and has earned a second postgraduate degree in literature in England. Her poem “At Dusk With the Gods” won the Alfaaz (Kalaage) prize. Her work has been published in Figroot Press, Dirty Paws Poetry Review, Longleaf Review and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal, a literary initiative that straddles hybrid genres across coasts and climes. She loves horses and autumn.

Photo credit: Ben Watts via a Creative Commons license.

This poem was first published in Rise Up Review.

Dead in the Water

By Dick Eiden

“German liners struggled heroically to emulate Wagnerian castles, English liners fell into the dark wood and leather habits of a London club.”

                        – Melvin Maddocks, The Great Liners,  (Alexandria, VA, 1978)

 

The bow went down first, while the stern stood tall, slowly
disappearing two and a half hours after the kissing stopped.
The iceberg ripped a hole, filling five “watertight” compartments.

I’m not conversant with hydraulics, but I’ve seen ships
sink on TV news and countless films. They come to a stop
dead in the water, and with a sense of basic physics I see
how they list — left or right, then sink slowly at first, so slow

         It’s hard to see what’s happening.

The size of the ship makes a difference, the nature
and shape of the rupture, where it is in relation to the keel,
bulkheads, engine room. Boats with one compartment can fill
and go down fast. Ocean liners take time as waters bubble up
in cabins, hallways, up stairs to the dance floor on deck four.

It’s too complex to fully understand, but we sense the rupture,
feel the list like an airplane banking into a slow turn. Playing cards
slide on the tray, objects start to roll, but we shuffle and deal,
pour another drink and hope for the best — nothing we can do.

Listen to the ship’s band?
Rearrange the deck chairs?
Make a list of doomed ships?

 

Dick Eiden is a retired lawyer and lifelong peace and civil rights activist (since 1965). He ran for the U.S. Congress as an independent in 2012. Paying the Rent, a memoir of his adventures as a traveling movement lawyer, will be published in 2018.

“Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet.” – Alice Walker

Photo credit: Jevgenijs Slihto via a Creative Commons license.

They

By Kate Delany

“They burned their own houses and ran away,” Myanmar police forces said of the Rohingya minorities fleeing burning villages, leaving behind all possessions and their dead.

They burn their own villages.
They won’t learn proper English.
They choose the Mommy track.
They choose to live like that.
They lie. They steal. They rape.
They weep and rage, hormonal,
their finger on the button. They
destroy the projects we build
them. They show up late.
They drop out. They sell drugs.
They come illegally. Look
what they wore. Look how
they acted. Look how what
where they worship. They just want
pity.attention. a pass. Believe me,
they aren’t like us.

 

Kate Delany is the author of two books of poetry, Reading Darwin (Poets Corner Press) and Ditching (Aldrich Press). Her fiction and verse have appeared in magazines and journals, such as Art Times, Barrelhouse, Jabberwock Review, Room, and Poetry Quarterly. She holds an MA in English from Rutgers-Camden and a BA in English and in Art History from Chestnut Hill College. She lives in Collingswood, New Jersey, with her husband and two children. She blogs about parenting, herbs, gardening, and sustainability at https://tigerseyebotanicalsblog.wordpress.com.

Bad News

By Ellen Girardeau Kempler

 

In one stop-
action second
you
spin
in
slow
motion
over the sharp edge
of knowing.

There was then
& there is now.

No scrabbling back
up the cliff face.

No rewind button.

No cartoon-stopping
on the way down.

No spaceship
to beam you away.

No, the pressure
is in the here
& now.

Like the whole ocean
bearing down.

Like chloroform-cotton.

Like a pin
piercing you,
straight through
the thorax.

 

 

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

Photo credit: By Sam Shere (1905–1982) – Zeppelin-ramp de Hindenburg / Hindenburg zeppelin disaster, Public Domain.

The Sestina of Forbidden Words

By Mark J. Mitchell

                                                For Ruth Hulbert

 

In the dream you’re vulnerable—
small, twisted on yourself—a fetus
waiting for limbs to awake to their diversity,
still unsure of your transgender.
As yet, you have no sense of entitlement,
just a fear, unnamed, somehow science based.

It’s cold where you dream. Evidence is based
on fake mathematics—vulnerable
to logic, but it isn’t entitled
to the attention you give a fetus
(and you’re small—an embryo, ungendered
And stranded in a diverse city).

Your unshaped hands explore the diversity
of cold walls and flowers. Your science is based
only on touch. Not blindness but a trance. Gender
calls your name, telling you how vulnerable
you are—naked, unprotected as a fetus
in the cold, with no sense of entitlement.

Still, you remember books. You know what titles meant
and the cold splendor of word’s diversity.
You would explore the city but a fetus
has no mobility—no evidence to base
direction. Everything is vulnerable
to mistakes—empty eyes, small hands—gender

perhaps. Of course, you’re asleep. You’re transgendered,
fluid as snow about to melt. Your entitlement
runs downhill like water. It’s vulnerable
as a newborn—raw cells, fresh from the diversity
of division. You try to stand on a science base
but there is no footing for a frozen fetus.

Still, it’s your dream and your brave fetus
isn’t awake slipping between transgenders
to search a city for evidence to base
your journey. Your only defense—entitlement
to life and death and this cruel diversity
leaves you puzzled. Frightened. Vulnerable

You’re a poor fetus in a cold world, entitled
to be untransgendered, trapped in fake diversity.
You must stay faith-based—forever vulnerable.

 

Mark J. Mitchell’s latest novel, The Magic War, was published in 2017 by Loose Leaves Publishing. Having studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver and George Hitchcock, Mark’s work has appeared in the several anthologies and hundreds of periodicals. He has also published three his chapbooks and a novel: Three Visitors, Lent, 1999, and Artifacts and Relics, and Knight Prisoner. He lives with his wife, the activist Joan Juster, and makes a living pointing out pretty things in San Francisco. He has been active in politics all his life.

Photo credit: Joe Flood via a Creative Commons license.

Two poems by Ginny Lowe Connors

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Onslaught

It spins like a gyroscope,
Our planet. My head.
Wobbles like a promise
too difficult to keep
as the news comes crashing
this way—space stones
hurling toward us from beyond
or from that hidden place
we carry within—
a secret darkness,
unknowable, unthinkable.
O disaster with a tail of flame
you’re hurtling this way again
you’re cratering my brain
and all the pretty cities we have built.

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Forget about It

Hit the snooze button, my fellow Americans,
hit the slot machines. Turn the page, switch

the channel, toss another steak on the barbeque.
Pay no attention to the plagues, the projectiles,

the flying limbs, or to the children who look
toward us, as if we could explain. Tell them our

electrons are all abuzz, they’re attracted, they’re
repelled by the golden glow beyond the power

plants, dust floating everywhere, fires we can’t
explain, flames that have replaced the eyes

of the last coyotes. No wonder we’re running
in circles, no wonder we’re all falling down.

Tell them the towers emit messages of evil
straight into our brains, bzzzt, zap, it makes

us a little crazy, ha ha, our heads floating off
like balloons. Our cell phones spy on us

as we sleep. We’ll turn away, we’ll wander
through the mall, what could be more

American, Big Mac ourselves to smithereens,
to oblivion. Our duty: to be oblivious, to be one

nation, under god, our father up in heaven—but he’s not
coming back, our family’s splintered, rearranged,

commandeered, forever changed, and we’re blind,
and we’re deaf but still yakking, yakking

all the time on the streets, in the vehicles we use
to slaughter our own beautiful hopped-up, zoned-out

young and we keep yakking in the ten million
aisles of merchandise because our family values

the plastic water, artificial turf, Barbie’s sharp
stiletto heels, size of fingernails, size of the astrodome,

home, sweet home, and no, you don’t need,
you’re American, you don’t need to explain

reality, it’s something we watch on TV. If
the desert’s erupting with blood, we’ll pump it with a derrick,

we’ll swill it like cheap wine. We’re chugging
Mai Lai cocktails, chowing down on hot wings straight

from Hiroshima, hot as hell, we’re spitting out the bones,
and if your appetite’s the kind that gnaws at you, gnaws

at you, gnaws, there’s Charlottesville stew a-simmering,
we’ve saved some just for you— we’re stuffing

ourselves silly, we’re tweeting, we’re plugging into iTunes,
it’s all the rage. All the rage. Children strut the streets

in tee-shirts sporting photos of their dead, shot,
stabbed, another one today, did you know him?

I heard his sister moan No, not him, while his best
boy insisted he was turnin’ his life around. His blood,

it soaked the ground as this old wound, our so-called
world, kept turning itself, turning itself around.

Don’t wait for the facts, let it all just spin itself out.
Let the ground turn itself over, let the trees splinter.

Let the hurricanes howl, let glaciers creep over us again
with their slow, cold, pale indifferent melt.

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Ginny Lowe Connors is the author of several poetry collections, including Toward the Hanging Tree: Poems of Salem Village. Connors has also edited a number of poetry anthologies, including the recently published Forgotten Women: A Tribute in Poetry.  She is the editor of Connecticut River Review. Connors runs a small poetry press, Grayson Books. Visit her website at ginnyloweconnors.com.

Image credit: Trauma and Dissociation via a Creative Commons license.

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What ‘War for the Planet of the Apes’ Reveals about Humans

By Martin Ott

 

Yes, we can be convinced to cheer
for our own extinction.
My coworker debates which side
to root for but settles on apes.
Humans act like monsters or have
always yanked borderlines into garrotes.
The creatures learn to communicate and are
almost undone by curses, signs, and guns.
Least among us is a mantra from the rich
and mercy is a weapon of the rich.
Space is an egg and potentially a prison
or hope depending on what came first or last,
the sameness of war no matter the cause.

 

Martin Ott has published eight books of poetry and fiction, most recently Lessons in Camouflage, C&R Press, 2018. His first two poetry collections won the De Novo and Sandeen Prizes. His work has appeared in more than two hundred magazines and fifteen anthologies. This poem is from his manuscript Fake News Poems, 2017 Year in Review, 52 Weeks, 52 Headlines, 52 Poems. More at www.martinottwriter.com. Follow him on Twitter @ottopops and at his blog, writeliving.wordpress.com.

Image credit: Internet folly.

Active 3D printer situation

By Tara Campbell

 

Before you download
the plans for your AR-15
please also download
the plans for our son

In case of loss
please reprint the following:
one son
who loves his dog
and his friends at school
and his little sister
and even his parents
you know
he’s still young enough
to say “I love you”
and give us a kiss
without blushing
do you have the right
printer for that?

Please inform us
which resin you’re using
because we need to know
you’ll be able to reprint his laugh
and reproduce how he held
his baby sister
brow furrowed
shoulders hunched
like he was balancing an egg
on top of a balloon

Do you know the right setting
for how he always sat down
when he held her
because he was so afraid
of hurting a delicate thing

If you have all of that
then go ahead
but please also download
just one more thing:
this blueprint of an intact family
so you can recreate our life
before
just in case

 

Tara Campbell (www.taracampbell.com) is a fiction editor at Barrelhouse and an MFA candidate at American University. Prior publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, b(OINK), Booth, Spelk, Jellyfish Review, Strange Horizons, and Queen Mob’s Teahouse. Her debut novel, TreeVolution, was published in 2016, and her collection, Circe’s Bicycle, was released spring 2018.

Photo credit: Electric-Eye via a Creative Commons license.

From the Field

By Anthony Ceballos

 

With the barrel of a gun, you have drawn
a line in the soil and told us to stay on our side,

we are merely creatures of the dirt to you;
from us you have taken food and shelter,

water and dignity, our children swallow thorns
and pride is hanging from a broken tooth.

Our seeds desire earth’s careful nourishment,
yet you keep us hollow and deprived, stripped

of that which makes us human, makes us holy,
we are less than worthy beings in your eyes,

we are composed of rust, of bombs and
needles, broken glass and landmines.

You toss hand grenades and beer cans
on our side of the field and cry “filth” when

we don’t clean, when we do you toss
more our way and expect us to pick off

any meat left after you feast, scraps of
dignity you leave behind in corroding piles;

but dirt is never static, it can be moved,
and lines drawn by the barrel of a gun

can be blown away by a simple breath
from an unexpected direction, so I, so we,

these so-called creatures of the dirt, will fill
our lungs with neon, we will fill our lungs

with the breath of a revolution and exhale.

 

In 2015, Anthony Ceballos received his BFA from the Creative Writing programs at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has been a guest on KFAI’s Write on Radio and Fresh Fruit radio programs and has read for Intermedia Arts Queer Voices Reading Series, Minneapolis Community and Technical College’s Night of Native American Music and Poetry, The Many Faces of Two-Spirit People gallery show at Two Rivers Art Gallery, and the Five Writers, Five Minutes, Five Watt reading series at the Five Watt coffee shop, all located in good ol’ Minnesota. In 2014, he won the George Henry Bridgeman Poetry Award from Hamline University. In 2016, he was selected to be a Loft Literary Center 2016/2017 Mentor Series mentee. His work has been featured in the Indigenous lit journal Yellow Medicine Review. He lives and breathes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is currently working on a first poetry collection. “From the Field” was previously published by Homo Hotdish.

Photo credit: Elaine S. via a Creative Commons license.

Out of Brokenness

By Kathy Lauderdale

 

December 25, 2016 finds me in Richmond, Virginia, trying to put a festive face forward while feeling stark desolation and heartache. The election leaves me questioning the values of my neighbors. Everything I know to be true has shifted, resulting in an odd sense of being off balance.

My sweet daughter-in-law, Katie, treats me with the tenderness one bestows a loved one suffering the loss of a close relative. My son, Shin, holds me at arms length until the five o’clock hour provides him respectability. He touches my shoulder and asks if I would like a shot of Rye.

And so we navigate Christmas.

One grey December morning we find ourselves at the entrance of a newly constructed pedestrian bridge crossing the James River. It was built to memorialize a Civil War era bridge burned long ago by Confederate soldiers, an act designed to slow the advancement of the Union Army and the eventual fall of Richmond.

With the rock remains of the original bridge in clear sight, I step into a moment of days past. I make my way very slowly as I read quotes, sanctified in steel, on the floor of the new bridge. Words uttered by various people before and after that fateful battle.

“All over, goodbye; blow her to hell.”

“Sir! I think Richmond is burning. The Sky is Red.”

“Smith, I may feel like a woman, but I can act like a man.”

I set aside, for a moment, the history of the Civil War and allow myself to feel the full sorrow of the people as their homes burned and their lives forever changed. In my grief, I weep.

December 23, 2017 I find myself once again visiting my children and this beautiful city of Richmond. As we discuss events for the next two days, we agree to again walk across the Civil War pedestrian bridge. Somehow, I think, revisiting this site might help me understand my frame of mind after a year of activism, an emotional state that leaves me feeling whiplashed at times. I am awash with feelings ranging from hopefulness and pure joy to barrenness and total failure.

I hesitantly step onto the bridge and the familiar quotes surround me; sadness creeps in. A few steps further and a sentence stops me short. I catch my breath as one who witnesses a burst of sunlight in a summer rainstorm. How did I miss this last year? Surely, I read it; I read everything.

At my feet lies a proclamation. A proclamation by an African American woman. An enslaved woman, I presume. A proclamation made in a crowd surrounding President Lincoln at Capital Square after Richmond fell. A woman who rose up out of the ashes and pronounced, “I know that I am free, for I have seen Father Abraham.”

Faces of the past year rush my consciousness. Faces of the Women’s March. Faces of people who stood up and said Doug Jones will be our next Alabama Senator. Faces willing to call, visit offices of representatives, and protest this new reality in which we find ourselves. Faces of women and men with the courage to rise up and say, “Me, too.” Faces of my children, my brothers and my nephews and nieces. Faces of my new extended family from every corner of this vast country coming together to lay down their bodies in peaceful civil disobedience to protest the repeal of the ACA, assault against Medicaid, and the new immoral tax law.

Not a perfect one among us. Each of us broken. But out of this brokenness, I am able to raise my face to the sky and proclaim, “For I have seen Father Abraham, I too am free.”

Peace,
Kathy Lauderdale

 

Kathy Lauderdale is a retired Nurse Practitioner from Northeast Alabama. The majority of her career was spent working in federally-funded, rural health clinics. Many of her patients were uninsured and faced impossible healthcare decisions. Against this backdrop, she became politically active in resisting the repeal of the ACA and the passage of the latest tax law. She attended numerous marches and protests and was arrested four times in Washington, DC, while engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. “Out of Brokenness” was previously published by Tennessee Valley Progressive Alliance.

Photo credit: Richmond burned from the U.S. Library of Congress collection.

This Union

By Samara Golabuk

 

In the hegemony of discontinuity,
we have laughter on the stairs
that flies up like a murder of crows
into brushed metal skies tasting nothing like
the pure rule of dog law.

In the circling year,
spiders crawl through our eyes
while our hearts sing ruddy bloody chanties
ripe with crocus and tequila rose,
a modest harmony worlds apart
from the subtraction of us from this place.

Clock in, clock out, clock in, clock out
is the circus slaughter of eagles—
a functional theory of regimes
that marches on us in the deadly faith of toy wars—
and in our ears, celebrity;
mandatory oil import quotas;
and tax deferred investment opportunities.
The old man upstairs listens close to wavelengths
like in the old days, says,
          “We almost lost Detroit.
          Sure’n yeah, that was close.”

In the hegemony of discontinuity,
that fucktional theory of regimes,
all our clouds are artificial, and
the birds—sacrificial, ornamental.

 

Samara is a Pushcart nominee whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eyedrum Periodically, Anti-Heroin Chic, Eunoia Review, Plum Tree Tavern and others. She has two children, works in marketing and design, and has returned to university to complete her BA in Poetry. More at www.samarawords.com.

Photo credit: Paul Sullivan via a Creative Commons license.

Nike Adjusting Her Sandal, Again

By Anastasia Vassos

 

She stops, breathless, she lifts her heel behind her to straighten her stocking before she pulls at her jacket to make sure there are no wrinkles, before she runs into H.R. breathless to tell Susan, who’s sitting at her desk, that Bob continues to make lewd comments and won’t let it go, no matter that she’s told him three times to stop it or she’ll go to H.R., but still, he persists and so she runs to tell Susan, who she hopes will do something, but if she doesn’t, it’ll be all over the news before the sun goes down, and it will feel as close as anything to victory.

(after Nike Adjusting Her Sandal, Temple of Athena Nike, Acropolis)

 

Anastasia Vassos is a poet living and writing in Boston, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared most recently in Gravel Mag, Haibun Today, The Literary Bohemian, and Right Hand Pointing. Her poem Tinos, August 2012, was published by MassPoetry.org, as Poem of the Moment in March 2017. She recently participated as a contributor at the Breadloaf Writers Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. She is a long-distance cyclist.

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