Editor – Page 29 – Writers Resist

Wednesday’s Child

By Sara Marchant

On Wednesday, during peer review, a student waves me over to say something in a voice so low and hoarse I strain to catch the words.

“ICE went into Cardenas Market and took people away.”

“What?” I say. I must have misunderstood.

The students are reviewing papers with topics like Foucault’s panopticism, patriarchy’s rape culture, Snowden’s leaks, and The Hunger Game’s inversion of the love triangle. I have to rearrange my thoughts.

“ICE went into the grocery store and took people away. They were buying food and got taken.” He’s still whispering.

Abruptly, I’m sitting at the desk next to him. He raises his voice.

“People are afraid to buy food. Food.”

All the students go quiet. His words reach them, my selfie generation sweethearts. He looks around, uncomfortable with his new audience, then back to me.

“What are we supposed to do?”

What am I supposed to tell him? To say to all of them? Am I to tell him that I am as sad, scared, and confused as he? I stand up from the desk and address the entire class.

“What are we supposed to do?”

“Vote?” Crystal says.

I’d offered extra credit to anyone who registers.

“Do the shopping for people who can’t,” Reyna offers.

“Shop at the white people grocery,” Rigoberto throws in.

Everyone laughs, including our one white student, Penny. The rest of us in the class are people of color in our varying shades of not-white. We are anxious people, but united in our sentiment, our goal: What do we do when our people are targeted while engaged in activities of daily living? There are no answers, we decide, not yet. We promise each other to keep asking and trying.

• • •

On Friday, in another class, a student asks to speak to me privately. “You can walk with me to the copy center,” I say. Because we live in the world we do: As adjunct faculty, I don’t have an office. I’m not paid for office hours. I try never to be alone with male students.

We walk across campus and my student tells me he has to be absent the next week, for his work.

“Fine,” I say. “Keep up with the assignments. Nothing is due next week anyway.”

“Everyone thinks I’m a cop,” he says. “I’m not. I’m asking you to keep this between us because everyone in class hates ICE so much.”

I trip over nothing and, worried that he’ll try to assist me, take a sideways step so he can’t touch me.

“See?” he says, as if I’d said something or done something overt. “I need you to keep my job between us.”

Never mind that he doesn’t need to share this with me at all. I’ve forgiven his absence. Did he want me to forgive his profession as well? Perhaps because I am silent, he keeps talking.

“I’m not ashamed of my job,” he says. “I’m not a traitor to my people. I was born here. The illegals are not my people.”

“No human—” I begin from habit. I am not allowed to finish.

“I know, I know,” he says. “No human being is illegal.”

You’d be surprised how often my male students feel entitled to interrupt me. Unless you are a woman, then you’re not surprised at all but merely as tired of it as I am.

“If you’re not ashamed,” I ask, “why must it be a secret? When we are discussing the subject in class, why don’t you join in? Present another side for discussion? Another view?”

“Because everyone will hate me. My peer review group might kick me out. Or they’ll get that look on their faces.”

Like the one on mine.

“Don’t believe everything you see on the news,” he says. “Most of what they say isn’t true.”

“Did you just say that to me, your critical thinking professor?” Enraged, I draw strength from the anger. “Do you think I share anything in the classroom that hasn’t been vetted and verified? Have you not heard anything I’ve said about checking sources?”

“I apologize!” he says. “I apologize. I forgot who I’m speaking to and you’re right about one thing …”

One thing. I’m right about one thing.

“Every ICE office, every station, every television is on the FOX News channel. We’re not allowed to change it. You’re right about the feedback loop.”

We are almost to the copy center. It’s a beautiful Southern California day. The jacaranda trees are in purple bloom; the lawn is being mowed. There are hummingbirds strafing the rose bushes. Everything smells fresh and clean and safe. This interview is almost over. I can see the end in sight.

“If you know that much, can recognize that …” I don’t know where I’m going with this thought. Haven’t I told my class, his class, over and over, that you can’t argue against irrationality? There’s nothing to grab onto. When people aren’t capable of critical thought, arguing against their emotions is not only futile, but dangerous.

Now I’m thankful this student, this ICE agent, isn’t in my other class. I hope no one in this class, his class, has inadvertently let slip their undocumented status. I let my last attempt at a sentence go and start over.

“I’ll only keep your secret,” I say, “if you promise never to report on any student at this school.”

He looks genuinely hurt. I shrug at his pain. It’s good he should feel something. Even if it’s only for himself.

“I’d never,” he says. “And I’m about to graduate.”

This is cold comfort. We reach the copy center. In silence I make copies, in silence we begin the return walk. Why hasn’t he left me to walk back alone? More confessions are coming, oh lovely.

“My family asks me how I can live with myself. A Mexican man with an accent, no less.”

“Good question,” I say. I always praise good questions in my classroom, questions are the basis of critical thought, after all. And I’ll grant him no absolution.

“If 80 percent of the people I’m arresting are criminals and the rest are innocent mothers and fathers, I can live with that.”

Whatever he sees on my face stops him. There’s a woman’s restroom up ahead and I point to it.

“I’m going in there,” I say, “and you should go back to class.”

He turns with a martial pivot and walks away.

The restroom is empty and after I vomit I stand for a moment with the cold water running over my wrists. The second half of the class must be taught, my copies spilled on the bathroom floor need to be picked up. I have two hours until the privacy of my car and a good cry. Thinking about my mother’s Jewish family—were they innocent mothers and fathers or criminals?—doesn’t help me. Thinking about my Mexican father’s family—would my student consider them murderers and rapists?—only makes me angrier. What does he see when he looks in the mirror? I wonder as I look at myself.

Then I shut off the water, pick up the papers, and I return to my classroom. I keep his secret, he keeps his side of the bargain—as far as I know. I never look him in the eye again.

• • •

Wednesdays and Fridays pass by, two months of them. The school year ends; my students say goodbye. Every time I shop for groceries, I think of my Wednesday child. When Jeff Sessions orders the separation of children from their parents and ICE puts them all in different camps, cages and tent cities, I email my Friday child:

What happens when the innocent mothers and fathers and the breastfeeding infants become the criminals? What then?

He never replies.

Sara Marchant received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert. Her work has been published by Full Grown People, Brilliant FlashFiction, The Coachella Review, East Jasmine Review, ROAR, and Desert Magazine. Her essay, “Proof of Blood,” was anthologized in All the Women in My Family Sing. Her novella, Let Me Go, was anthologized by Running Wild Press, and her novella, The Driveway Has Two Sides, will be published by Fairlight Books in July 2018. Sara’s work has been performed in The New Short Fiction Series in Los Angeles, California, and her memoir, Proof of Blood, will be published by Otis Books in their 2018/2019 season. She is a founding editor of Writers Resist.

Art credit: ¿Donde Esta? by Laura Orem, a Writers Resist poetry editor.

What I Want

By Judith Prest

I want the open sore
our country has become
to finish draining
and start healing

I want the kneeling
football players
awarded trophies
for honoring the fallen

I want the ancestors
to gather, sing us songs
of solidarity
stroke our brows while we sleep

I want to see the homeless rise
from subway grates, park benches
I want their empty bowls filled
with opportunity and blessing

just once,
I want to see billionaires
breaking bread with single moms,
parolees, runaways, bag ladies

I want the grandmothers, the mothers
to have enough time, enough money,
enough food to feed
and nurture all who come to the table

I want to see reconciliation
trump racism and genocide
to see compassion become our currency,
law to become infused with love

Judith Prest is a poet, creativity coach, mixed media artist, photographer and workshop leader. She has taught creative writing, expressive arts and creativity and healing workshops in prisons, community centers, retirement communities, libraries, schools, retreat centers, and at her home based Spirit Wind Studio. A retired school social worker, she works part time leading Recovery Writing and Expressive Arts groups for adults in day treatment for addiction. She believes that creativity is our birthright as humans and that accessing and using our creativity is a wonderful strategy for healing ourselves and the planet. Her poetry has been published in seven anthologies and in literary journals, and she has self published three collections of poetry over the past twenty years. She lives in rural upstate NY with her husband and three cats.

Photo credit: Gaspar Torres via a Creative Commons license.

On the Knees of Metal Gods

By G. Louis Heath

Someday soon, better later, the icons we
Worship will leap from their cathedrals

To quick pulses, the implosive blood of
Impulse. On that surge, the hooded eyes

Of eternity will blink, or they will not.
The existential surge of non-being rises

On the tide of fathomless hearts till the
Fates take their measure. Some fates cut

Threads, some do not. That is the simple
Algorithm of a globe balanced on knees

Of pricey metal gods. Let us lock arms and
Bury these false gods far from their silos.

G. Louis Heath, Ph.D., Berkeley, 1969, is Emeritus Professor, Ashford University, Clinton, Iowa. He enjoys reading his poems at open mics. He often hikes along the Mississippi River, stopping to work on a poem he pulls from his back pocket, weather permitting. He has published poems in a wide array of journals. His books include Leaves Of Maple and Long Dark River Casino.

Photo credit: Mark Miller via a Creative Commons license.

Female Fellow at the American Film Institute Doheny Mansion, Beverly Hills, 1971

By Penny Perry

She pulled up in her dented VW, twenty
miles from her cockroach-filled kitchen.
Five feet tall, wearing a three-dollar dress
from Lerner’s. The dress long and black,
looked expensive. N.O.W. had picketed
the all male institute the year before.
Marble floors. Carved wood staircases.
Louis the 14th chairs. The study where
one Doheny murdered another.
The dining room with the gold chandelier
that tinkled and rose when Hitchcock
or Truffaut screened their latest film.

Most of the male fellows looked well-fed
and had smooth white hands. Over wine
and brie in the Great Hall that first night
the men surveyed the female fellows.
Will announced she had nice-sized breasts
for such a small girl. Gilbert whispered
the women here were dogs, present
company excepted. A compliment from Ivan:
Her dialog was sharp. She wrote like a man.
Sam said because she was a writer she wasn’t
a real woman. At dinner, she and a directing
fellow, Susan, sat across the table from

Gregory Peck. Head twirling: The Louis
14th chairs. The chandelier. Dizzy with
wine, she and Susan fantasized bowling
Sam’s head down a long marble hall. Work
days, bent over her dime-store notebook,
her pen unzipped the page. She wrote under
a gnarled sycamore. Her boys, two and three,
splashed in a stone fountain. One day, chicken
pox, red as poppies, bloomed on her sons.
Male fellows came down with the pox.
Sam had sores on his thumb and on his tongue,
a wound that would scab, but not heal.

Penny Perry is a six-time Pushcart Prize nominee in poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in California Quarterly, Lilith, Redbook, Earth’s Daughter, the Paterson Literary Review and the San Diego Poetry Annual. Her first collection of poems, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage (Garden Oak Press, 2012) earned praise from Marge Piercy, Steve Kowit, Diane Wakoski and Maria Mazziotti Gillan. She writes under two names, Penny Perry and Kate Harding.

Photo credit: Doheny Mansion living room courtesy of University of California.

Bathsheba wants to write #metoo

By Crystal Stone

Her husband enlisted: eager to fight,
eager to serve. She was a good wife,
accepted this. She could argue, but why
fight? The last night the sun set pale
in their wine by the garden. The last
kiss was fragile—lips thin and chapped
with goodbyes. In his absence, she bathed
behind a wickerwork screen, enjoyed
the iridescent rainbows of shampoo bubbles,
the way soft light manicured her nails,
the curl of toes beneath hot water,
the volume of hair as humidity twirled
fingers around her loose locks. The king
would watch from the roof, share this private
moment with her. If the rainbow is god’s
promise to never flood the earth again,
why not her eyes, too? Or her body?
When a king calls, what can a servant do
but wait, for the coming to hang her
stomach in effigy of the life she once had
and the child to rip her sharply, as if only
worn fabric of her newly retired silk gown?

Crystal Stone is a first-year MFA candidate at Iowa State University. Her work has previously appeared in The Badlands Review, Green Blotter, North Central Review, Jet Fuel Review, Southword Journal Online and Dylan Days. When she’s not writing poems, you can find her on her roller skates blocking for Team United Roller Derby.

Photo credit: Image of Jean-Leon Gerome’s Bathsheba from Wikiart via a Creative Commons license.

A Dystopian Declaration

By David H. Reinarz

Following close on the heels of a surprisingly resurgent 45th President and the disappointing turnout by the Resistance in the 2018 mid-term elections, due to chaos fatigue and disorganization, the extremist wing of the Republican Party swept into even greater power in Washington, D.C. This document was issued by the Congress in joint session.

In Congress, July 4, 2019

The unanimous Declaration of the united States of America, and when we say America, we don’t mean Canada or Mexico, because those places are full of the wrong kind of people and they are not really America because America is us. And we don’t mean Hawaii and Puerto Rico and Guam because those are islands surrounded by water and not really very American anyway, but Alaska is definitely in. And when we say States we have to exclude California and Western Oregon and Western Washington because they are too liberal and left Congress in a self-righteous huff last week, and New York and Massachusetts and Connecticut are arguing against this Declaration and might refuse to sign it, so we might have to do something unpleasant with them. And then there are all those big cities in otherwise really fine States that are filled with rabble who threaten the upstanding citizenry, so we will have to figure out what is going on there and deal with it. So this is the unanimous Declaration of the really Good People in the really Good States of America who are United in defense of their rights.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with others, and by others we mean Indians and Negroes and Arabs and Mexicans or other Hispanics and anybody who doesn’t look White enough, unless maybe they want to be submissive and deferential and not be all scary and threatening and will act like they are White as much as they can, and by others we also mean Muslims and atheists and anybody with a weird non-Christian religion and we are on the fence about Catholics and we are still discussing whether Jews are OK, and then there are all kinds of liberals and tree-hugging environmentalists we don’t think belong in our country, and really chronically poor and sick and homeless people who are just a burden and generally useless, but women are mostly OK as long as they know their place and respect the primacy of men and we especially like Asian women and Eastern European mail order brides but those crazy feminist bitches have to go, and the gays, so we are reasserting our assumption of all the powers of the earth to secure our separate and superior station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s entitle us, The God Fearing Christian White Men of America.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are not really created equal, there are differences between men, and our Creator made these differences intentionally, and only the Best Men, meaning The God Fearing Christian White Men of America, are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

To secure these rights and to control the behavior of women, children, and men of lesser status in our eyes, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from God as he invests them in the Best Men and therefore the Best Men are worthy of the loyalty and submission of the governed.

The previous Form of Government in the United States of America established in the 18th Century, became destructive of these ends. It is therefore the right of the Best Men to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. When a long train of abuses and usurpations and attacks on the White Christian Culture, which is the bedrock of America, by the rabble who undermine our economy, limit our ability to acquire and retain wealth, commit acts of carnage against us, spread immorality, disrespect our flag and anthem, teach ideas contrary to The Bible, and redistribute the hard-won assets of our society to the unworthy, we declare that these evils are not sufferable, and we will abolish the Forms to which these purveyors of cultural treason have become accustomed.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the Best Men of these States, solemnly publish and declare a New Order and a New Form of Government. With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

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: Image of John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence by Purple Communications via a Creative Commons license.

War

By Rachel Custer

In the same way that an old man without a home
is more likely to be bearded, war shuffles
first into small towns. Picks up cans ‘longside
the rurr-route. War knocks first on the faded
doors of the poor. He’s a carnival barker, this
one, his eyes full of young men with bodies
that want to eat the world. War leads a boy
to the highest point, says all this can be yours.
War stands in a lineup with the regular suspects
and do his eyes shine. Do his face look pretty
next to them old boys. War sits in the gas station,
drinks bad coffee with old friends. War sees
the harvester chewing down the field like a man
kiss his way up a girl’ leg. Pastor invites him
to church to say a piece. You wouldn’t believe
how funny war can be, and how he knows
the best stories. War leans in to the needs a boy
could never speak. That lifelong smoker’s voice.
Says: Listen, boy, I can take you somewhere real,
can make you somebody new. Same old women
ain’t for you. You ain’t for here and nothing else.
War look all day long like a poor farm boy, with
eyes like he went somewhere. But see his hair?
That cut a city style, a rich man cut. War tell you:
Boy, the places you’ll see. Boy never hear what
war say through his smile, never hear a word
war say after war say but.

Rachel Custer’s first full-length collection, The Temple She Became, is available from Five Oaks Press. Other work has previously been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, The American Journal of Poetry, B O D Y, [PANK], and DIALOGIST, among others. Visit her website at www.rachelcuster.wordpress.com.

Photo credit: Image of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica by tiganatoo via a Creative Commons license.

“We have Eric Garner’s air in our lungs tonight” – Andrea Gibson

By Eve Lyons

1. Justin Damico
Some say he’d just broken up a fight
Some say he was selling loosies
We’ve seen him hanging out here before
Always up to no good
Always looking to start trouble.
Damn you, Daniel, damn your pride.
Now we’re both stuck on desk duty.

2. Ramsey Orta
We all got smart phones these days
We can all be journalists
Don’t matter anyway, even when we get it all on tape
Police officers’ word is bond.
Brown peoples’ word ain’t shit.
Three weeks later I’m the one arrested
While those murderers keep their jobs
No justice, no peace.

3. William Bratton
I grew up in Dorchester in the 50s and 60s
Graduated Boston Technical High school,
went into the army. I paid my dues.
I’ve been police in two different cities,
ran the MBTA police for a spell.
I know my way around this kind of thing.
Being commissioner isn’t the same as being police
More politics than policing
My job is to make people feel safe,
believe the system isn’t rigged.
But these days I dine with the mayor.

4. Eric Garner
“Every time you see me, you want to mess with me.
I’m tired of it. It stops today.
Everyone standing here will tell you
I didn’t do nothing. I did not sell nothing.
Because every time you see me,
you want to harass me.
You want to stop me selling cigarettes.
I’m minding my business, officer,
I’m minding my business.
Please just leave me alone
please just leave me alone.”

Eve Lyons is a poet whose work has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies, including recently in Hip Mama, Dead Mule of Southern Literature, and the Jewish Literary Journal, as well as Lilith and Word Riot. Visit her website at evealexandralyons.wordpress.com.

Photo credit: Louis Lozowick’s lithograph Lynching, 1936, from The Smithsonian via a Creative Commons license.

Playgrounds and Politics

By Ryane Nicole Granados

“Nobody would pass me the ball. Even kids who I thought were my friends wouldn’t pass me the ball.”

These words from my nine-year-old, after another round of recess, Darwinism style, bounced around in my head like a bright orange basketball stealing my sleep at 2:00 a.m. and making me despise a group of four-foot tall fourth graders.

“I blame Trump,” I tell my husband (also at 2:00 a.m.).

In mumbled sleep chatter, he reminds me that childlike cruelty existed well before Donald Trump became the president. I know if my husband were fully awake he would share yet another tale of the bullying he experienced as a child, which is supposed to make me feel better because look at him now. But I’m a fire sign, I’m a fighter, and, even though he has fallen back asleep, I continue this fight with the cracked plaster on our ceiling, wondering what the world would be like if we all simply believed in passing the ball.

It’s not as though I’ve ever played in a basketball league before, but as a native Angelino I did grow up in the era of the Showtime Lakers. By default that makes me a Chick Hearns-style sideline expert on the benefits of passing the ball. Of course, most of the Lakers back then were known for their dynamic running game and flamboyant offense, but then there were players like Coop. If you called him Michael Cooper you clearly didn’t grow up in Los Angeles. Cooooooooop, heralded for his defense and his beyond-belief Coop-a-loops, he would slam-dunk on his rivals after retrieving a perfectly timed pass from Magic Johnson or Norm Nixon. Even NBA all-stars of a basketball dynasty recognized it: To win the game they needed to pass the ball.

It seems if you’re not open it makes more sense to pass the ball. It also seems a team would get more open shots the more times they moved the ball. But 4th-grade asphalt antics aren’t about the open shot. They’re about taking the shot whether you can make the shot. They’re about ego and arrogance and power. They’re also about a pack mentality where one group of kids endeavors to dominate the other, especially if the “other” is different from the pack.

But it’s 4th grade and the kid who doesn’t pass the ball to your kid one week may be the very person your child shares his lunch with the next week, because it turns out that kid is going back and forth between the homes of his newly divorced parents and someone forgot to pack lunch for the leader of the 4th grade pack.

I’m trying to raise the kid who shares his lunch. I’m also trying to refrain from screaming expletives out my car window in the school valet line.

“Hey kid? Yeah you. The one with the ball. The one who always has some quick wit at my child’s expense. If you don’t stop your shenanigans you’ll grow up to be Donald Trump!”

• • •

Could it be that our president’s growth was stunted at fourth grade? Is he the leader of a new pack that believes any attention is worthwhile attention thereby throwing tantrums on Twitter and threatening those who cry out for inclusivity and tolerance?

Following his election win, by which I wasn’t very surprised, I expected to feel angry, but instead I just felt numb. There was a distinct void where my fervor was supposed to be. With deeper introspection, it actually began to trouble me. Have I become so cynical that I don’t appreciate the gravity of what has just occurred? Has my recent stint as a mom of a fourth grader hardened me? I’m a fire sign. I’m a fighter. I have debates at 2:00 a.m. with cracks in my ceiling.

Later that day, on November 9th 2016, I found myself unsuccessfully comforting a stranger in Target. She was still proudly adorned in an “I’m with Her” t-shirt and our eyes locked sharing a mutual gaze of melancholy. We met again in the laundry detergent aisle, but at this point our reunion just felt awkward. As I worked to wedge my cart beside hers, she looked at me, revealing irises the hue of cornflower blue welling up with tears. I have never been one of those people who can watch someone cry and not feel a tinge of responsibility. After all, I made eye contact with her and gave her the obligatory “What the heck just happened?” shake of the head.

“This is just so terrible,” she mumbled. “How could he possibly win?”

“Hmm, pretty easily it seems to me.”

The words came out far more cavalier than I intended them to, and at this point we were in a full blown traffic jam stuck behind a twenty-something man-child appearing dumfounded by all the options presented to him for washing clothes.

The woman began to wipe away her tears with such force I could almost make out the sound of her mascara smudging across her face.

She was angry at my affect of indifference. I was becoming angry too.

I tried to explain that I wanted to cry, but this election had revealed something I instinctually knew. A campaign run on themes of racial resentment, misogyny, ableism and fear, paired with a dash of nostalgic “good old days” mentality can indeed be won if you speak the loudest to people who feel they haven’t been heard. And that’s what Trump did. He talked about jobs and trade deals, even though many of his goods are produced overseas. He talked about taxes, although never releasing his own filings, and this above-the-law mentality appealed even more to his followers. He talked about punching demonstrators in the face, which was received like lines from a patriotic call to arms, and he made people feel like they were part of his elite pack. He levied vicious attacks at anyone who dared to challenge him. He behaved like the toughest kid on the blacktop. He convinced his voters he would pass them the ball.

By the time I processed my perceived aloofness, the young man and my Target aisle acquaintance had both moved on. I wanted to scream out, “He has no intention of passing the ball and you’re right to want to cry,” but what I also know about playgrounds and politics is you can only cry for so long.

As a ringleader, Trump is good at making select people feel included; however, he has already shown his character and his corruption. He has already surrounded himself with more of the same. And as for his voters, still holding out hope to be welcomed into his in-crowd, they won’t emerge as exceptions to his rules, especially because he doesn’t abide by rules.

But could there be a bright side to this upset? A Hail Mary when all else has failed. Can we overcome four years of Trump like I implore my nine-year-old to push through fourth grade?

I’m holding out hope that we can. There is progress in that people are suddenly seeing what “others” have been seeing all along. With this increased commonality with the “other,” which the hateful rhetoric of the president has so effectively unearthed, a veil has finally been lifted. People are wiping the dust or crust or mascara from their eyes and they are mobilizing against an assault on democracy. It’s “Nervous Time” as Chick use to say when the Lakers were involved in a tight game. In order to move the ball, you have to know and trust your teammates. This newfound willingness to march in each other’s shoes could very well be the one thing that turns this country around.

A week before the inauguration I picked my son up from school. With bated breath, I awaited his detailed update of the day. It turns out an unassuming classmate finally passed him the ball. Despite berating from peers, one kid passed him the ball. My son dribbled and was immediately surrounded by flailing arms making sure he didn’t take a shot. As a result, he tossed the ball back to that same kid and they continued this exchange tiring out the other players while inching closer and closer to the basket. It was a passing game that finally placed them in the position to shoot a layup.

“We were so close Mom. He looked at me, and I could totally tell he was gonna pass me the ball. I was ready for it. And I caught it. And I bet if we do the same thing tomorrow we will score.”

“I believe you will score, son. I believe tomorrow if you and this friend of yours keep assisting each other, you both will win.”

• • •

It seems that’s the thing about playgrounds and politics. The very tactics a bully uses to isolate you, he is surely utilizing to isolate others. There will always be more people on the outside of his pack than on the inside. And when the outsiders come together with a shared sense of outrage and a ball movement offense, anything is possible. Before you know it, the bully will be the one eating all alone. The only question that remains is, will you still be charitable enough to share your sandwich?

Ryane Nicole Granados is a Los Angeles native. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in various publications including The Manifest-Station, Specter Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, Scary Mommy, The Atticus Review and LA Parent Magazine. Ryane is best described as a wife, writer, professor and devoted mom who laughs loud and hard, even in the most difficult of circumstances. When not managing her house full of sons, she can be found working on her novel, grading student essays, or binge watching TV shows while eating her children’s leftover Halloween candy.

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Photo credit: Francisco Anzola via a Creative Commons license.

This essay was previously published by The Nervous Breakdown.

Peace

By Alice King

You are afraid of it
You are afraid of it because of what it could do to your heart
Melt it?
Thaw it?
Maybe just a little but not enough to make waves crash
And slam against rock
Bones stone hard
Refusing to be broken are broken
I smell your gas
It burns my lungs and those of my children
My little boy stops breathing in my arms
I would cry but my own breath is being drawn
Into the air before me
I feel a ghost around my neck
Clawing its nails into me
I hear shouts and laughter as I pass
Echoing like fire in my ears
You are afraid of it because it might make me more human
With your flesh and blood on my bones
What do you see when you look back at yourself?
Eyes any color, skin any tone
I flee but the punishments only change
Flesh-hungry bullets to protests in the streets
I am afraid to walk outside
You are afraid I am the one who wants you dead
Yet you ought to know I came because I want to be alive

Alice King is currently a senior at Longwood University, majoring in English, with a concentration in creative writing, and she studies under Mary Carroll-Hackett. Alice is passionate about writing and social advocacy, and enjoys her writing time and time with her cats. Her work has been published in Crab Fat Magazine, Sacred Crow Magazine, and Vending Machine Press.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you like what you’re reading, please make a contribution to the cause. Give a sawbuck here.

Photo credit: Megan Coughlin via a Creative Commons license.

Tragic

By IE Sommsin

Tragic, that whore of a word, conjoining with demagogic scheme and crazy scam and the most shameful patriotic sham, to dress up the bleak disaster they bring.

It’s wonderful how one word neatly pricks swollen outrage, obscuring rightful blame

so there’s no cause to curse and name by name the breathtaking scum and their clever tricks and words woven to hide their vicious traps.

You may think your indignation’s burning, but it’s the wheel of history turning—

only friction and smoke, you trusting saps. It’s fate; shit happens, and that’s all you get, not justice, not remorse, never regret.

IE Sommsin, a writer and artist from Kentucky, lives in San Francisco and has a fondness for sonnets.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you like what you’re reading, please make a contribution to the cause. Give a sawbuck here.

Photo credit: Christopher Najewicz via a Creative Commons license.

Our List

By Eric Lochridge

We are making a list of people who could hurt us.
Their names often are not easy to spell.

Could Al Sharkey, auto mechanic in Michigan,
be one of the al-Sharki clan of Yemen?

With no easy way to know, our list
will claim he is not one we can trust.

House to house, Arshad to Na’im to Zufar,
our list will compile the odd names,

dotting its I’s and crossing its T’s
uniformed men in the driveway,

pistol escorts prodding neighbors to trains
bound for a safe space—towers and spotlights,

mass showers and razor wire fence.
Our list will keep track of them like before,

tattoos down their wrists,
hoods to keep them calm as falcons.

Disinterested in true identities—blessed,
brave, honest—our list will ask questions

about alternate spellings and correct pronunciation.
If the answers do not satisfy, if the interrogations fail

to muster remorse, penitence, respect,
our list will feel obliged to enhance its techniques.

To hear the names it wants to hear, our list
will hurt those who have not hurt us.

Eric Lochridge is the author of Born-Again Death Wish (Finishing Line Press, 2015), Real Boy Blues (Finishing Line Press, 2013) and Father’s Curse (FootHills Publishing, 2007); and the editor of After Long Busyness: Interviews with Eight Heartland Poets (Smashwords, 2012). His poems have recently appeared in WA 129 and Hawaii Pacific Review. He lives in Bellingham, Washington.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you like what you’re reading, please make a contribution to the cause. Give a sawbuck here.

Photo credit: Stephanie Young Merzel via a Creative Commons license.

Deep Blue She

A music video by Tanuja Desai Hidier, featuring:

ANOUSHKA SHANKAR on Sitar

JON FADDIS on Trumpet

AMITA SWADHIN on Testimony

VALARIE KAUR on Watch Night Service

TANUJA DESAI HIDIER on Vox

& The We

A note from Tanuja: Happy Women’s History Month—Every Month!

The “Deep Blue She” music video-remix PSA is a grassroots/DIY/collective project featuring 100+ activist artists, musicians and writers, mostly women of color. The video was filmed over the course of a year, mostly on cellphones, by us, all over the world, the idea being that we choose the frame, the angle, the light. We tell our stories ourselves.

Please join the #mergrrrlmovement and dive in. We’re hoping to get eyes and ears on this, and concrete help to the causes: Proceeds from sales of the remix on Bandcamp go to rotating charities—pick your price—beginning with the Mahendra Singh Foundation (founder, activist and acid attack survivor MoniCa Singh is in the video, too).

We’re open to what the next charity to receive funds will be. If this video can be a useful tool for you, please email me at ABCreativeD@ThisIsTanuja.com.

Thank you,
Tanuja

Those involved in the production’s creation include:

Anoushka Shankar (six-time Grammy nominated sitar player/composer)
Elizabeth Acevedo (writer/Poetry Slam Champion)
Priyanka Bose (activist/actor from the film Lion)
Reshma Gajjar (artist/actor/dancer; The Girl in the Yellow Dress La La Land)
Shenaz Treasury (actor/TV host/writer/travel vlogger Travel With Shenaz; in The Big Sick)
Fawzia Mirza (actor/writer/producer/creator; cowrote, produced, stars in Signature Move with Shabana Azmi)
Abhijeet Rane (model/drag queen/artist/activist)
Leslee Udwin (filmmaker/human rights activist; director of India’s Daughter)
Ivy Meeropol (documentary filmmaker; Indian Point, The Hill, Heir to an Execution)
Kayhan Irani (storyteller/community engagement strategist/ 2016 White House Champion of Change)
MoniCa Singh (influencer/international philanthropist and president and founder of The Mahendra Singh Foundation to aid girls/women who, like her, are acid attack survivors/ have survived such kinds of trauma)
Mercedes Terrance (an Akwesasne Mohawk member of The Rolling Resistance)
Smriti Mundhra (filmmaker; Best Director with Sarita Khurana at the Tribeca Film Fest for their doc Suitable Girl!)

And award-winning writers Marina Budhos, Gemma Weekes, Kat Beyer, Uma Krishnaswami, Elizabeth Acevedo, Cynthia Leitich-Smith, Paula Yoo, Sharbari Ahmed, Mitali Desai, Eliot Schrefer, Mira Kamdar, Nico Medina, Billy Merrell sand Bill Konigsberg.

The Editorial

By Trevor Scott Barton

Jan sat at her desk, staring at a blank page in her notebook. Her left hand was balled into a fist sitting in the palm of her right hand. She shrugged her shoulders deeply and lifted her head from the page.

She had pulled up the blinds on the large window facing Main Street, hoping to fill her office with light from the breaking day outside. Early risers, in heavy coats and gloves, hurried from frosted cars toward the warmth of the restaurant across the street. Vapor rose from their mouths with each breath, like puffs of smoke from a chimney, and disappeared into the gray morning sky. This would be a wintry March day instead of her much hoped for spring, when the first tulips break through thawing ground.

She thought about the previous night, wondering what would be said over coffee at the Scrambled Egg. When they looked at the front page of the Greenville News, when they saw the headline, would any of the words be good words, words that could heal instead of hurt, forgive instead of hate?

She tried to find these good words inside herself, believing her editorials could shape actions and thoughts in the tense days to come. Or did she believe?

She pictured her neighbors, listening to the morning news on the radio or watching it on T.V. Having spent her life in Southern towns like Greenville, she knew thoughts and feelings about immigration and immigrants were shaped long before someone read an editorial, long before that someone was born.

How could her neighbors—people who ate with her, people who went to church with her, people who lived a good definition of civility—so quickly lose that civility when faced with issues of immigration? What was it about immigrants that raised pulse rates, flushed faces, clenched teeth and pounded fists in anger in an otherwise friendly place?

She rose from the chair, leaving the notebook at her desk. Her knees creaked and groaned as she stood, laboring to lift her body up and away from her morning task of trying to answer unanswerable questions and to question unquestioned answers.

Trevor Scott Barton is an elementary school teacher and a writer in Greenville, South Carolina. Follow his work on Twitter @teachandwrite.

A love poem for my sister in revolution

By LJ Hardy

Your jaw
set fierce
in the shape of battle
clenched
against the storm
you face
by the weapons
of a life
I long for
when I’m lost here.

My feet grounded
precariously
in the roots of intention
integrities
inconsistencies
in the record of my birth.

Your name
unfamiliar to my lips
like the taste of sweet Lanzones
grown from an earth
where my history
has drawn the blood of yours.

Your eyes
traveling the grounds of sinew
landscapes of war.

My love
knows what I want
from you
to fill anemic spaces
market forces
American skin.

To draw
surplus from your bones
for stories
poems.

To build factories
fill emptiness
with crunch
Balut
baby ducks
in eggs
slivers of fish
for breakfast
dried.

Chants from jeepneys
passing cities
apples cost more than mangoes
you say
pointing out
an example I will draw on a thousand whiteboards
guiding students
smash imperialism
Imperyalismo Ibaksak!

Pristinely perfect rice
hungry bile
from long days and nights of protest
in sun
on floors
a bucket of glue.

Surplus capital
Me plus you.

LJ Hardy is an anthropologist engulfed in the world of academia where she researches and writes about health equity and social justice. After a life-threatening illness and the politics of 2017, she has gained the clarity to realize that it is time to write from the heart. She lives in the Arizona mountains with her daughter, 3 dogs, 14 chickens, and two ducks.

Photo credit: molybdena via a Creative Commons license.

Nabokov Shuffled

By Rony Nair

attention spans close in on revolving doors

where Russian roulette is doled out for free in carotid bands, in naked lunches that cavort in restless smiles—the buddha lay somnolent as a vegetable while you cut me off

and said you had to go. 3 seconds into somnolence where we take deep breaths and wade in

a second adolescence. selfish as always, selfless in doling out epithet and time.

clocks whose second hands circle left hands touching tumors on your spine.

lurching forward they cling to new buddhas of suburbia

revving in, all newness and culverts

raised in purple haze, long engagements entrapping only the parents of holy cows, anxious as ever

to sever their own triptych memories of surrender.

ripped up pieces of Piscean horror, innuendo

explodes across November rains and shattered plates, over mid-western skies fumigated with grass and marijuana spines. legalized in cavorting around.

our demise.

Rony Nair has been a worshipper at the altar of prose and poetry for almost as long as he could think. They have been the shadows of his life. He is a poet, photographer and a part-time columnist. His professional photography has been exhibited and been featured in several literary journals. His poetry and writings have been featured by Chiron Review, Sonic Boom, The Indian Express, Mindless Muse, Yellow Chair Review, New Asian Writing (NAW), The Foliate Oak Magazine, Open Road Magazine, Tipton Review, and the Voices Project, among other publications. He cites V.S. Naipaul, A.J. Cronin, Patrick Hamilton, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine and Nevil Shute in addition to F. Scott Fitzgerald as influences on his life; and Philip Larkin, Dom Moraes and Ted Hughes as his personal poetry idols. Larkin’s collected poems would be the one book he would like to die with. When the poems perish, as do the thoughts!

Photo credit: Woodcut illustration of the zodiac sign Pisces used by Alexander and Samuel Weissenhorn of Ingolstadt, from Provenance Online Project.

Two Poems by D. R. James

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Still

It all recurs for the maimed, how they remain,
or don’t, atop the plots of the buried. Those
who could do something table the question.
They relax in the rocker of their certainty,
a war, any war, an abstraction that walls off
the bursting specifics. A twenty-something friend
found he’d deployed to sort body parts. Arrayed,
they’d survive the fever sweeping a land we
could never know. Welcomed by the white-blue
atrium of a foreign sky, he’d prowl his perimeter
until his duty tapped him. Then the oven-sun
would relight his nightmare, the categories
of bone and flesh his production line. What
achievement could signal his success? What
dream in the meantime could relieve raw nerve?
The perfect tour would end when he was still
in one piece, a nation’s need ignoring the gore
behind the games, the horror nestling into
the still-living because still in one piece.

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OK, Here’s What We Do: An Allegory

Well, we enlarge the grown-up table for
the far-flung fragments of our Family.
Here’s our current Winter spent in agony,
here’s our disrespected Sister, here is War
that mushrooms undiminished, glibly tears
our global Soul to slivers. And here We are;
and here’s a Brute beside us so bizarre
that nearly nothing else we’ve known compares—
as if we’d acceded to some greater Hell.
Ah, but here’s what’s left of human Dignity.
Seated here’s Resolve to trample Travesty.
But there’s our Greatest Fear that’s hard to quell. …
Hey, this isn’t fatalistic Falderal!
We must make sure the table’s set for All.

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D. R. James’s six collections include Since Everything Is All I’ve Got, Why War, and Split-Level. Poems and prose have appeared in various journals, including, Coe Review, Dunes Review, Friends of William Stafford Newsletter, HEArt Online, Hotel Amerika, North Dakota Quarterly, Passager, Rattle, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and Sycamore Review, and anthologies, including, Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford and Poetry in Michigan / Michigan in Poetry. His new collection, If god were gentle, was published by Dos Madres Press in December 2017. James lives in Saugatuck, Michigan, and has been teaching writing, literature, and peace-making at Hope College for 33 years. Read more about James here.

“Still” first appeared in Tuck, September 14, 2017, and also appears in If god were gentle.

Photo credit: Brad Montgomery via a Creative Commons license.

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What You Need to Know

By Kristi Rabe

My 11-year-old son tried to stab me with his fork.

This was 5 seconds after calling me a stupid bitch.

15 seconds after I told him to go to time out.

33 seconds after I found he had played with a lighter and snuck candy from the cupboard.

1 minute after he said, “I love you, Mommy.”

20 minutes after I hugged him while we made lunch together.

An hour after he finished binge watching Pokémon Season: 1 on a lazy President’s Day morning.

A few days after he received no Valentines at school—even though he had spent the evening before making special cards for everyone.

One month after he was last stable and completely lucid.

Six weeks since the onset of the dreaded flu in our home and three weeks of bedrest.

Six months from being released from residential psychiatric care.

One year after the first time he was violent towards others—me.

Eighteen months from the onset of self-harming behaviors.

Two years after diagnosis of rapid cycling bipolar-I, with psychotic effects.

Three years from the onset of hallucinations and voices.

What you really need to know, though, is it happened four days after a man shot 33 children and staff in the halls of a Parkland, Florida, school. And, with almost clockwork precision, the white gunman was outed by news and media as being a lone wolf with mental health issues—not a terrorist or a criminal. Words like deranged and delusional became his signifier, his adjective. Survivors interviewed were not surprised; they talked about his weirdness, temper, obsession with guns, and violence.

I recognized his condition immediately, even before the list of red flags appeared in articles—before the debates on gun laws, mental health, the lack of organized prayer in school, society’s broken family values, bad parenting, and video games.

I am not trying to perpetuate sympathy for this man. His actions are inexcusable. I don’t have sympathy for him. I have empathy for his adoptive mother.

She spent her years not only as his mother, but also as his advocate through special education and problems transitioning to mainstream. She took him to doctors and battled the maze of the mental healthcare system. In the final two years of her life, she made more than two dozen calls to police, dealt with suspension and expulsion and defiance. She had to work at forgiving her child, who was apologetic and remorseful after throwing things across rooms and threatening her—and she was his only advocate until her death, from the flu.

I know exact the vacuum of guilt, fear, pain, and worry where she lived.

It took eight weeks from the onset of severe symptoms for my son to be seen by a doctor. Mild symptoms from prior years were ignored after countless tests showed no physical disease. It took six months of being seen by a doctor and therapist for official psychological testing to be ordered, and another six months before the testing occurred.

Then there are the medications. While many claim the medications the Florida man took are responsible for the carnage, because they’re given freely to stop symptoms instead of helping the root disease, this is not my experience. These medications are highly regulated down to the exact dates I can pick up new prescriptions for my son. Insurance companies also have a say and have rejected prescribed medicines, because they aren’t on their formulary. These medications were prescribed only after every other possible option was explored and years after I first sought medical help.

Medication has never been the focus of his treatment and it is a battle each time his dosages are adjusted, with the withdrawal and lethargy it causes. I would love if this were not my parenting technique, but with the very little we know about how this disease works, the trial and error of powerful narcotics is my only option for keeping my son from hearing and seeing demons, cutting himself, cutting me—stabbing me.

But even in acute care, doctors have tried to stop the medications—despite a cardiologist’s warning that suddenly ceasing the meds could cause cardiac arrest due to my son’s backwards breastbone.

The nurses, like those blaming the dead mother of the gunman and broken families as the cause of America’s shooting epidemic, believed my son’s issues were my fault.

“Stays at our facility are usually a good way to scare children into behaving,” the intake nurse said while I signed his paperwork.

“Well, there’s more to his situation,” I said.

“Do you have limits at home? Kids need stern limits.”

She didn’t hear me. “Like I said, please read the diagnosis paperwork from his psychiatrist.”

She actually laughed. “Oh, we never look at those.”

I persisted. “We came to your facility a year ago and were told you couldn’t help him because you didn’t have the resources. That was before we had a diagnosis. The social worker insisted he come here when we committed him at the ER, even though you previously rejected our application.”

“We know what we’re doing.”

“I am sure you do, but the testing he has been through is extensive. With the possibility of schizophrenia—”

The nurse took a phone call and directed me to sit in the waiting room. Five minutes later, she seemed surprised I was still there.

“Sorry, do you have more questions?”

“Do you think perhaps a transfer to UCLA with their pediatric schizophrenia unit would be better suited for his needs? That’s what the ER doctor thought was best, and the social worker said you could place him correctly after intake.”

“We don’t transfer patients.”

When he was released, I was promised a continued care plan. I didn’t receive anything but a CPS investigation. My son had told the therapist at the acute care facility—who didn’t read the information about his paranoid delusions—that we kicked his butt, literally, when he was in trouble. After hours of interviews, the complaint was dismissed, and I was given a packet of parenting classes and organizations, and a list of domestic violence shelters.

• • •

I don’t want to stigmatize others with mental illness. My son is a rare case, having symptoms of not only schizophrenia and bipolar, but also paranoia, OCD, ODD, ADHD, anxiety, and some autism spectrum disorder symptoms. Most do not deal with more than two or three of these illnesses. I know firsthand that the American mental healthcare system is completely broken in a way most cannot comprehend. Every service, every treatment is a battle with bureaucracy or insurance companies or both. We have been rejected from all but a few care centers out of the hundreds I’ve contacted.

So, why write about my son’s mental illness?

Because correlation does not equal causation, but society’s stigmas are not just a vague PC problem.

Because due to his condition, I censor his entertainment. He doesn’t play violent video games. He doesn’t watch violent movies. He is still obsessed with death and destruction.

Because I cannot teach him religious stories. The rainbow of his logic twists the black and white of religious dogma into paranoid delusions.

Because I have to count the positive comments I make to ensure they outnumber the negative comments. I sometimes must search for nice things to say about my own child.

Because he has to be on a formal system to understand how he is behaving. He has no sense of self-control, no impulse control; he doesn’t understand the concept of following rules.

Because my days are mundane drills of routine to save myself from battles and meltdowns. There are no day trips to a park or museum or carnival.

Because after a meltdown, I hold him in my arms and he cries and begs God to not be this way.

Because he has no friends and is considered odd.

Because his fondest wish is to be a minority so he would finally belong to a group.

Because he is convinced if he were somehow someone else, he would be okay.

Because I only get to see the real him, lucid and stable, every few months for a brief week or two.

Because his mood can shift as quickly as his bright green eyes in a storm.

Because I lock my bedroom door at night—out of fear.

Because I watch with jealousy as friends raise children and celebrate milestones.

Because I have to convince myself each day it is worth it to leave my bed and fight again.

Because I do, most days, for him.

Because I love him.

Because I lose my temper more than I like to admit.

Because I sometimes do not like my child.

Because my guilt is my personal, lonely hell.

Because I don’t want my son’s teacher to have a gun near him.

Because I contemplate his possible crimes in the future more than the possibility of his becoming a victim of violence.

Because, if he cannot control his impulses with a fork, I do not believe he has a right to a gun—no matter what men wrote on a piece of parchment more than 200 years ago.

Because I see my son in descriptions of a gunman who murdered 17 people.

Because I feel utterly alone and weak and frustrated and tired and judged.

Because I know the gunman’s mother felt the same.

Because those who use her life and parenting as an argument for or against gun control need to know how it feels.

Kristi Rabe is a freelance writer and construction project manager in dreary Moreno Valley, California. She is also the adoptive mother of a child with serious mental health issues and special needs. She received an MFA from UCR Palm Desert, Low-Residency Program in 2014. Her work has been published by Bank Heavy Press and Verdad Magazine. Most recently, she was featured on the Manifest Station’s literary website.

Photo credit: North Carolina National Guard via a Creative Commons license.

National Day of Atonement

By Marc Alan Di Martino

Scream at the empty mirror of the sky,
the waiting blue, the blinding cosmic eye,
until your pain lathes the Plutonian rim
of the Solar System.

Scream at the crystal ceiling of the sky
until it cracks up like an electoral map
of the United States, our jagged earthly cry
a collective bootstrap.

Marc Alan Di Martino is a poet, translator and teacher whose work has been published in Rattle, Verse-Virtual, The Ekphrastic Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, and the Journal of Italian Translation, among others. His interview with award-winning translator and poet Michael Palma was published in Faithful In My Fashion (Chelsea House, 2016).

He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Perugia, Italy, where he works as a teacher of the English language and is an avid skateboarder.

Photo credit: Kenneth J. Gill via a Creative Commons license.

Trophies and Ribbons

By Victoria Barnes

On a late November morning
toddlers and children drag
their parents’ silky purses
stuffed with glossy trophies and ribbons
to the sewing room.

They embroider golden
monograms,
add coats-of-arms in crewel,
tie silver coins
that dangle from purse seams.

Their parents nod.

By the rose evening
the children sing quietly
of imaginary gardens with lush fruit
and canary gingko trees,
their chores complete.

Suddenly a flash: electrified air
shatters their dreamy songs
and the children scuffle into
a protective circle
without armor or weapons,
holding hands, facing outward,
singing in fear.

Silver coins drop, tinkling.
Monograms sparkle and spark
to ash as the children drop
the purses, scattering
trophies across rocky asphalt,
their parents’ folly exposed
by the flaming wrath of decency.

Victoria Barnes is a diehard native Californian who has chopped lettuce, taught creative writing, owned a toy store, and specialized in Montessori education to earn a living. Her Ph.D. is in mythological studies and depth psychology, with research focusing on Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Her home is in the redwoods of northernmost California where she writes poems and takes photographs. She sneaks out from behind the insulating Redwood Curtain to spend time with family in Philadelphia and Boulder, Colorado, as frequently as possible. Enjoy more of her work here.

Photo credit: Kit-Bacon Gressitt via a Creative Commons license.