Editor – Page 28 – Writers Resist

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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Behold the Anti-Trump March in London

Illustration reportage by Ollie Hayes

Demonstrators with statue of Winston Churchill, Parliament Square, London

Demonstrators with small Trump Baby balloon, near Parliament Square, London

Demonstrator with flag of the European Union, Regent Street, London

Young woman with statue of activist and suffragist Millicent Fawcett
Parliament Square, London

Demonstrators at the Bring the Noise march, Regent Street, London

Demonstrators, one with Trump mask, Piccadilly, London

Ollie Hayes is an MA Illustration student based in Sheffield, UK. He can be reached at oliver@hayesillustration.co.uk, you can see more of his work at hayesillustration.co.uk, and you can followed Ollie on Twitter, @ohaaayes.

From the editors: We have a favor to ask. If you like what you’re seeing, if you support what Writers Resist is doing, you can help us continue publishing. Give a sawbuck here.

A Year Later

By Brit Barnhouse

What you’re eating isn’t healthy. Do you see it? You
always said the Holy Trifecta of impolite conversation
was money, religion, and politics, and I ate it up until
I starved on lack of substance. Do you see that you’re
withering too? I’m not asking for atonement, as if
mistakes could be scrubbed out with tumbleweeds of
steel, though you could use a good seasoning to get all
that rust off. I want you to see things the way they are:
Torn as vocal chords and sweet from fermented
buyer’s remorse bottled up and bursting. You should
know by now dollar bills steeped in hot water don’t
sooth the throat, despite all your sucking and tugging.
I could salvage the yeast from this batch, sell it as a
novel extraction to be lapped up while supplies last,
but this is more than a vat problem, a one-off fluke to
be ignored. This is more than incorrect packaging,
though God knows we can be easily fooled by the
right font in under 140 characters. This is a source
problem I won’t wait for you to catch up with. I will
keep turning fields where failure is a fistful of nitrogen
swept under the rug. I will plant new crops of opened
eyes, soaked and salted, and one day I will become
drunk off your bitterness.

Brit spends quite a bit of time contemplating how writing can be used to communicate complex ideas in accessible language and how storytelling grips us into action when it is most needed. Most of her own writing stems from lessons found in nature but when she isn’t writing about the ever-blurred lines between animals and humans, Brit can be found hoping for close encounters with whales in the Puget Sound, giving her dogs belly rubs, or tossing treats out to the neighborhood crows. Read more of her work at britbarnhouse.wordpress.com.

From the editors: We have a favor to ask. If you like what you’re reading, if you support what Writers Resist is doing, you can help us continue publishing. Give a sawbuck here.

America Is Waiting

By Georg Koszulinski

maybe it’s the white bodies
leaving the ball

or maybe it’s the tuxedos
and gowns that walk like
ghosts across the mall

maybe it’s the black bodies
chained across checkpoints
subverting iconographies
of hate

or maybe it’s the cops
who stand in silent symmetries
beneath the rain

maybe it’s the sadness
in their eyes—
the dreams they sense
were always lies

maybe it’s the protestors
who take to street in
dark of light

the man with movie camera
who walks among them—
shadows, voices, line of sight

maybe it’s the war veteran
deaf in left ear—
metaphors find their way
into lived experience

maybe it’s the young woman
who lost her friend to
mass arrest

she tries to breathe, believe,
reprieve

maybe it’s the parade of state
cavalry, missiles, golden
power shower

maybe it’s the communion of souls
in the crossroads of the streets

the man singing in Mandarin
before the camera—
not knowing the words
we believe he sings
for peace

maybe the voice was the first weapon—
no shield against the
sounds of aggression

maybe the voice
was first song—
to breathe, to sound
commune as one

January 20, 2017, Washington, DC

Georg has been making films and videos since 1999. His award-winning works have been presented at hundreds of universities and film festivals around the world, most recently at the Atlanta Film Festival, San Francisco DocFest, and Experiments in Cinema. Many of his documentaries and experimental essay films are also available through Fandor. His nonfiction and poetry have been published in Gold Man Review, Blue Collar Review and Blotterature Literary Magazine. His current documentary project, White Ravens: A Legacy of Resistance focuses on the Haida Nation and the cultural resurgence taking place on their islands of Haida Gwaii. Georg is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington where he teaches filmmaking.

Image credit: A still from Georg’s documentary America Is Waiting. View the trailer here.

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An Explanation

By Faith Breisblatt

As far as I’m concerned, there was only
one choice. If I turned down every

candidate who objectified women, I’d vote
for no one. You get through the bad and focus

on the good.
Did I feel dirty? Yes.

Look at how much he relies on his daughter—
kind of reminds me of my ex-husband.

The man knows how to build things.

If you don’t like something,
there is a label to shame you.

This is a Christian country
paying for some else’s abortion.

Now I’m deplorable?
Poor Bill Cosby.

It wasn’t all racist white people. When my great grandparents came,
they had to learn English.

My family moved from Canada because of the horrors
of socialism. Look,

I’m not saying there are people who shouldn’t
be helped. I’m no racist.

I’m looking for a brighter future.
I laughed him off just like everyone else.

A found poem, written from articles in the New York Times, “‘You Focus on the Good’: Women Who Voted for Trump, in Their Own Words” and The Concourse, “Trump Voters Explain Themselves.”

Faith Breisblatt is a social worker living in Boston. Her writing can be found in The New Social Worker, Oddball Magazine, Found Poetry Review, Scripting Change, Toe Good Poetry, Boston Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere.

Photo credit: Original, unaltered image originally published by the New York Times.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

By Gary Laitman

Listen, as your friend I feel it is time for us to openly discuss something that’s been bothering me for a while, but it’s a somewhat delicate matter. Please understand I am only bringing this up because I feel that you have been taken advantage of and I do not want you to get hurt any longer. I know this is not what you want to hear, and I promise I am not going to say “I told you so,” but the time has come for you to face facts … he’s just not that into you.

Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand how you fell for him. He promised he was going to be different from all the others, and Lord knows we all wanted that. You’ve been through some tough times in recent years, and it must have felt good to have someone recognize that. He certainly sounded sincere when he spoke and embraced your struggle. It’s not difficult to see why you believed him when he said he wanted nothing more than to stand by your side and help you make a better life together. This makes a lot of sense when you look back on it. But the bottom line is—and you must realize this by now—he was using you. Yes, I’ve said it, he was using you. He did not care and he does not care about you. All along he was using you.

Remember how he railed against the deficit all through the months leading up to the election? You know those tax breaks that he said are going to help bring back jobs and raise our collective incomes? They are going to add $1.5 trillion to the deficit!

Did he tell you that? Did he maybe mention the fact that he and his family are going to receive millions of dollars as a direct result of this new tax law? Maybe it just slipped his mind. Oh, sure, he might have thrown you a few extra bucks in your paycheck, but that’s just like buying your wife a cup a coffee at the local diner while taking your goomah out for a fancy steak dinner.

There’s also the matter of his hotels and country clubs, raking in the dough from people who just want to spend some quality time with him. What a strange coincidence that the fee to join Mar-a-Lago doubled last year. Could he be enriching himself? Not to mention Jared‘s businesses getting half a billion dollars in loans from people with whom he met while in the White House.

Are you starting to see the pattern here? There is no “us” in his “USA.” It is all about him and his family.

I don’t mean to belabor the point, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there were plenty of red flags you chose to ignore. You certainly heard the rumors. We all knew there was something going on with the Russians. No doubt, he had cheated in the past. There was also the constant bragging, not to mention the compulsive lying.

Why were you so willing to overlook this? Did you really think he was going to change his ways for you?

I’m sorry if I sound angry, but this has gone too far, and you deserve better. I don’t care what your other friends say. I’ve heard every excuse in the book including those who justify his behavior by saying he’s a businessman with no government experience.

Really? You and I have been working for more than thirty years: Have you ever seen a successful business run like he and his cronies are running the government? The turnover rate in his administration is worse than a bad year at one of Ivanka’s sweatshops. He hires and fires remarkably unqualified people at an alarming rate, and, quite frankly, the Gambino crime family is more organized than our federal government right now.

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. Again, I want you to know that I value your friendship and I’m only saying these things because I want what’s best for you. So please reassess. Take a fresh look. Open your mind and join the movement to resist his agenda. Also, if you’re done with it, would you mind returning the shovel you borrowed last spring? Thanks.

Gary Laitman is an international man of mystery and a proud member of the resistance who has previously written opinion pieces for the Bucks County Courier Times, where this piece previously appeared.

Photo credit: Nicolas Raymond via a Creative Commons license.

Insomnia

By Amy Shaw

Maybe it’s because
These hours are quiet
Without bread or shoe
Dropping on dirty floor

Maybe it’s because
I am alone needed
No more Maybe

It’s the darkness
Which somehow feels
More vivid and light
Than the dreams I had

Maybe it’s the wine
I drank with dinner
Maybe it’s my fault

The dishes undone the bed
Unmade the face unkept
The homework unchecked
The picture unframed

No one would call me
A clean freak—though I was

Voted “Most Likely To Succeed”
In the seventh grade Maybe
It’s because I did
Succeed The bills are paid

The children fed the husband
Satiated a job well done today
My patient said I cared
More than the doctor

And me just a PA—always
Just a—

Stepmom white divorced woman blessed
The waitress asked
“Are you just one?”
Before I sat down to dinner

On my own I thought—
Not really
Sometimes but usually
Only at night—

Amy Shaw is a cardiology PA living and working in Cheyenne, Wyoming. She turned to poetry after the recent election to focus on the personal in what feels like a world coming apart at the seams. Her poems have been published on PoetsReadingtheNews.com.

Photo credit: Jim Pennucci via a Creative Commons license.