Editor – Page 3 – Writers Resist

Sisters

By Kate Rogers

– After Marta Ziemelis

My friend, in Canada 12 years,
a citizen now, fled Iran
to let her shining dark curls, fragrant
with coconut oil, flow free
of the restraining cowl
imposed by men unwilling
to incarcerate their own desire.
Her locks tumbling loose
over her shoulders, she chose exile,
yearning to love whomever she wants.

Mahsa Amini, red-lipped,
only a few strands straying
from under her hijab,
skull fractured like an eggshell
by the morality police, blood seeping
from her ears, those velvet doves—
will never be older than 22.

Armita Geravand, her tresses flying
streamers in the subway wind,
a train, Martyr’s Square Metro station, Tehran,
was shoved to the floor out of range
of the security camera. At age 16—
too beautiful and confident to be allowed
to escape beating. A brain-dead coma.

At a poetry reading, my friend introduces
her sister here on a Visitor’s Visa. For now.
She huddles into a heavy winter coat, her uncovered
hair lush as the plumage of the Hoopoe, that bird-guide
from Attar’s poem* who showed the way
to all the avian pilgrims, eager to meet God,
wings unclipped.

* “The Conference of the Birds”

Kate Rogers’ latest poetry collection is The Meaning of Leaving. She won first place in the subTerrain magazine 2023 Lush Triumphant Contest for her suite of poems, “My Mother’s House.” Kate’s poetry also recently appeared in Where Else? An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology. She has been published in such notable journals as World Literature Today; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and The Windsor Review. She is a co-director of Art Bar, Toronto’s oldest poetry reading series.

Image credit: Sandra Strait via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist
Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Respect

By Rachel Turney

Artist’s Statement
I am an educator who works in two roles. I coach and supervise new teachers and teach immigrants and refugees. Education as a general theme influences my work. I write a lot about my childhood, which I call suburban dramatic. It is a rose: alluring, sweet, but thorned. Growing up in the Midwest, and now living in the beauty of Colorado, shapes my view and interactions with society. I have also lived, worked, and traveled abroad a fair amount over the last twenty-five years. This influence is particularly clear in my visual pieces. Passionate love for my spouse is a new theme of much of my work. That goes along with sexual freedom and pride in body image, which are important causes to me. The most crucial and prevailing lens and reach of my work is based on my identity as a woman and urgent protectorship of other women globally. I took this photograph in the Khan Market in Delhi in 2019. I captured this sign because I found the representation of women striving to gain respect relatable, a global struggle. My understanding of why the Venus symbol is inverted may be two fold. First, it may represent the lack of balance between the masculine and feminine. The second is that the inversion may be a signal to include other marginalized communities. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have more knowledge of this particular symbol’s use within India. These are my conjectures after some research, but have not been sufficiently verified nor validated—@turneytalks on Instagram.

Rachel Turney is an educator in Colorado. Her poems and prose are published in The Font Journal, Red Rose Thorns, Ranger, Through Lines, Blink Ink, Bare Back, The Hooghly Review, and Teach Write Journal. Her photography appears in San Antonio Review, Umbrella Factory Magazine, Prosetrics, Vagabond City, Dipity, and Ink in Thirds Magazine. Her artwork appears in Cosmic Daffodil. Blog: turneytalks.wordpress.com. Instagram: @turneytalks

Endless War

By Linda Bamber

Cassandra swore there was no Gulf of Tonkin
but of course
no one believed her.
She knew the Trojan Horse was loaded with death
and that there were no WMD’s in Iraq

and if Paris, her brother, stole Helen
Troy would fall
and all its people be enslaved.
Then the Pentagon Papers came out.
Didn’t I . . . ? said Cassandra when people were shocked.

Now infanticide
hostage-taking
retaliation beyond imagination.
Genocide. Starvation.

Cassandra tears her hair.
Since Balfour’s birth
(frantic, disbelieved)

she’s tried to tell us this
is what would be
from the river to the sea.

Poet’s Note
In classical texts, Cassandra was admired by the god Apollo, who gave her the gift of prophecy. In a different mood, he added the curse that no one would believe her.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 is generally referenced as the moment when Britain decided it would suit its geo-political interests to establish a Jewish Protectorate in the Middle East.

Linda Bamber is a poet and a Professor of English at Tufts University. Both her poetry collection, Metropolitan Tang, and her fiction collection, Taking What I Like, were published by David R. Godine, Publisher. Widely excerpted and anthologized, her critical book on Shakespeare, Comic Women, Tragic Men: Gender and Genre in Shakespeare, was published by Stanford University Press. Bamber has published in periodicals such as The Harvard Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, The New York Times Book Review, The Kenyon Review, The Florida Review, and The Missouri Review. She is currently writing a novella based on the cross-country expedition of Lewis and Clark.

Photo credit: “Trojan Horse” by Terra Incognita! via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

The Coming

By Craig Kirchner

His wife rushed in looking like she couldn’t breathe.
They’re coming, the man at the gate told me.
They call ahead so he is not an issue. We have an hour.

He printed out all the poems and put them in a box,
buried them in the woods behind the condo,
gave his wife the key and a scribbled map.

When they come, they’ll take the laptop,
so I deleted and scrubbed the best I could.
Don’t lock the door, they’ll just beat it down.

Tell the grandchildren I was just trying to be me.
It wasn’t meant to be disrespectful or unpatriotic,
and that I love them.

If I return and things ever get back to normal,
we’ll dig them up and be careful who we share them with.
I’ll burn the ones about the camps and the purge.

If I don’t come back, and no one has yet,
you know I have loved you, as much as it is possible to love,
and never meant to ruin your life with my words.

Craig loves storytelling and the aesthetics of the paper and pen. He has had two poems nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has a published book of poetry, Roomful of Navels. After a hiatus, he was recently published in Decadent Review, Yellow Mama, Chiron Review, The Main Street Rag, and several dozen other journals.

Photo credit: Ralf Steinberger via a Creative Commons license.

French Kissed

By Angela Townsend

I went back to Frenchtown, but Frenchtown could not come back to me.

Frenchtown is the daintiest of the “river towns,” a flower crown ringing the Delaware. They hold hands across two states. They hold out bread for every stranger. Nothing snide can survive this soil. New Hope remembers its own name whether you are tourist or mayor. Lambertville will sling its arm across your shoulders. Stockton has never met an outsider. Frenchtown is counting the days until you come back.

Quakertown was landlocked, but it was mine. It was a freckle on the county seat, a guaranteed source of squished eyebrows. “Quakertown, Pennsylvania?” “No, Quakertown, New Jersey.” “There is a Quakertown in New Jersey?” “Yes. We can walk there from here.”

As long as we had a post office, we had Quakertown. We did not have much else. My apartment was attached to that post office, in an aging storybook house covered with murals and mistakes. Narrow stairs led to a spackled wall, and an oak trapdoor opened to the sump pump in my kitchen. My landlord, a meek behemoth whose head lifted the ceiling tiles, promised we would be safe. He forgot to pay the heating bill twice a winter, but “if civilization ever goes kablooey, we can hide under the door in the floor.”

I was happy and confused most of the time. I had come to Hunterdon County to practice my preposterous new degree, a Master of Divinity. But the Presbyterians itched with pox when I “talked about the love of God too often” with their youth group. I was likened to both Jezebel and the Sugar Plum Fairy. I was a twenty-five-year-old virgin who thought my job was to make everyone feel incandescent and safe. I took a job writing PR for a cat sanctuary.

I took myself to Frenchtown on Sundays, singing hymns from my childhood and yowling with Bruce Springsteen about God and sex and getting the hell out of New Jersey. I wondered if I might be a Quaker or an anarchist. I promised my mother I would text her when I got home, as she could not unclasp the fear of my death from her wrist.

Frenchtown was ten minutes away, and it took me in. Glamorous, haggard women yarn-bombed the trees all winter, leaving limbs sweatered in magenta. Life-size porcelain horses appeared and vanished in front of the bank and the river, painted with gnomes or narwhals. The man at the book shop hid used arrivals for me, Bonhoeffer and Hauerwas. “You like your God fellas with lots of syllables.” When I stayed late, lights stringed the river like pearls so I could find my way home.

I did not mind being seen in Frenchtown. I wore gingham dresses and Eliza Doolittle hats. A Nikon jangled light around my neck, and I turned myself into a tendril to catch the light on the water and the foreheads. Strangers let me photograph their dachshunds and their plein air in progress. The woman at the Magick Shop called me a “precious little thing” in a way that made me feel larger. I wished her eight more lives. I took generic pictures of the river. I followed an exasperated stray all the way to a widower asleep on a bench. I did not doubt that I was a seer.

On July 14^th, Frenchtown set fire to every contract with “cool.” Bastille Day was a chance to be as corny as a child. The town erupted in unauthorized innocence from the river to the lumberyard. Eiffel Towers were $3. Mimes on stilts blew bubbles. I saw a German shepherd dressed as a baguette. I saw God laughing so hard, God cried.

I etched Bastille Day on my calendar, setting annual reminders for the holy day of obligation. I acquired Eiffel Towers in colors not seen since Eden. I blew kisses at children on shoulders and men my grandfather’s age. They were singing hymns in French outside the Methodist Church. “We have been practicing for weeks,” a woman in a name tag whispered when I bought a lemonade. “La Grande Bertha” was wearing a beret so inflated, it resembled the Jiffy Pop popcorn foil. “I’m sure we pronounced everything wrong.”

“I pronounce you the jewel of Bastille Day,” I responded, and blew her a kiss. She kissed me on both cheeks, and we laughed until we nearly fell down.

I wrote a blog post for the cat sanctuary called “Find Your France.” I dressed the cats in stripes to make the point that “Paris” is anywhere you feel safe. I named our next impound “Jean Valjean.” I hid an orange Eiffel Tower in my boss’s lunch box. I was happy and confused.

A man from Philadelphia gave me a box of certainty. We married in two months.

The midpoint between his factory and my cat sanctuary dropped us in Bucks County, too far ashore to touch even New Hope with my fingertips. We found a second-floor condo. I wrote a story to supplement the lack of pictures.

He convinced me I had an excess of Eiffel Towers. If I wore bright garments, everyone would think I wanted them to look at me. I had to be careful with flowery language. He asked when I was going to discontinue my monthly donations to the manatee rescue and the radio station. I had to consider that God did not get involved with cats or weather. I had to stop talking to my mother so much if I wanted to finally grow up. I brought everything pink to work.

I turned forty and greeted him at the door wearing a rose fascinator. He asked if I was finally going to drink some wine. It was getting ridiculous to have never drunk alcohol at this age. I made it five more years.

Bucks County wasn’t Quakertown, but my landlord had died, and my long-haired cats loved the light on the second story. I would stay in Langhorne and send the man on a raft with just enough forgiveness to make it across. My mother arrived with such urgency that syntax collapsed. Her trunk was filled with calico pillows and a rose window sized for Notre Dame. My mother turned Langhorne pink.

I lived happy and confused among the cats in the clean condo. I wrote essays and courted rejection letters. I wore a blinding orange parka with a collar that looked like Elmo’s pelt. My Nikon hibernated as I turned to narrative. My language found homes in journals with names like Mollusk Family and Electric String Cheese. I exposed the image of God in people who send $10 checks to cat sanctuaries. I leaked secrets. A man across the Atlantic published my uncareful praise and asked me to come read aloud.

I told him I wished I could. He told me to picture the Seine giggling with “our community,” sharing “most excellent food and companionship.” I told him I wished I could. He said, “It is a shame, for your presence would illuminate the proceedings.”

I told my mother I was going to get that sentence tattooed on my ankle. She was still recovering from my tattoo of the cats, etched by a man named Big Mike in New Hope. I drove to Frenchtown instead.

I went back to Frenchtown. The teenager in the crystal shop asked if I’d seen the new amethysts. The boy surrounded by Frisbees saw my confusion and soothed, “You’re not crazy. This used to be Ooh La La.”

“What happened to Ooh La La?”

He wasn’t sure. His baseball cap was backwards. “But everyone still asks. It’s been five years.”

I bought a root beer and thanked him. The bookshop was closed, but proud to be “Under New Management!” There was no yarn in the trees. I took a picture of an Australian shepherd with my phone, but he turned his head. The pedestrian lane of the bridge was closed for maintenance.

The Methodist Church marquee said COLLECTING MEN UNDERPANTS FOR HOMELESS THRU 2/15. GOD IS GOOD ALL THE TIME. I drove home and wrote about it. Frenchtown could not come back to me, but we were both safe. I dreamed of lights on rivers and woke laughing aloud.

Angela Townsend (she/her) is the development director at a cat sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Paris Lit Up, Pleiades, and Terrain, among others. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 34 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.

Photo credit: Regan Vercruysse via a Creative Commons license.

Poem in Response to Mass Shooting Number 130 in the United States of America 2023

By Ellen Girardeau Kempler

This poem is a scaffolding
built of assault weapons
& high-capacity magazines
for recurring questions I have,
a terrible structure for hanging
reloadable horrors in bright daylight.

What questions?
you might ask. I’m dumbfounded.
I can’t even

answer, can only instruct you
to remain perfectly quiet & listen—
maybe hide behind/under a desk,
evaluate your escape routes,
hug your friends, text your family,
dial 911, take out your ear buds,
stop talking, notice the sound
of your heart throbbing in time
with the blood still mercifully
coursing through your body.

My questions arise again & again
in sudden gasps, forever-startled
intakes of breath, metallic taste of
bile in my mouth, unanswerable,
mute.

Ellen Girardeau Kempler’s poems have appeared in the Dewdrop, Wild Roof Journal, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Narrative Northeast and many other small presses and anthologies. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” her chapbook, Thirty Views of a Changing World: Haiku + Photos, was published in December 2017 by Finishing Line Press. Her next chapbook, Fire in my Head, Flame in My Heart: Poems of the Pyrocene, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2025.

Photo credit: Stephen Melkisethian via a Creative Commons license.

When I hear ‘migration,’ I think of ships

By Christian Hanz Lozada

chopping through tides and promise.
My coworker says, “I mean, I’m white,
so, implicit bias much? We have no story,”
referring to her kid’s project asking
about how the family’s migration
was affected by World War 2 and the Cold War.

She says, “I understand I can’t say anything,
but we’ve been American since the 18^th century,
so there’s been no migration.”
In my head I have solutions: Has your family moved
from state to state, like the Japanese Americans pulled
from their homes or the African Americans moving

to fill a Japanese American-sized void to work factories
and shipyards? Has your family migrated from economy
to economy, like the migration from planting and picking
to packing and making? Has your family never had to run,
never had that nothing-holding-us-here, never had that

nothing-to-stake-a-future-on, always the absence
of the absence? Maybe write about your migration,
after the ship, when you carried the sword and the gun,
the whip and the blankets. Maybe write about the bow-wave
your presence creates, even when the ship doesn’t move.
Maybe write about the unintended migrations that happen
as your presence displaces everything around it.

Christian Hanz Lozada aspires to be like a cat, a creature that doesn’t care about the subtleties of others and who will, given time and circumstance, eat their owner. He authored the poetry collection He’s a Color, Until He’s Not and co-authored Leave with More Than You Came With. His Pushcart Prize nominated poetry has appeared in journals from California to Australia with stops in Hawaii, Korea, and the United Kingdom. Christian has featured at the Autry Museum and Beyond Baroque. He lives in San Pedro, CA and uses his MFA to teach his neighbors and their kids at Los Angeles Harbor College.

Photo credit: Dennis Jarvis via a Creative Commons license.

Breathe

By Ryan Owen

When her husband lowers the newspaper and stops hiding his cancer, Stacy learns that their voting rights have eroded as quickly as his health.

The front fold rests on his lap. “How?” she asks.

“With new laws.” He taps the headline with an ink-stained fingertip.

From the kitchen countertop, a screen’s colorless aura startles awake, its glow spilling onto the tan tiles of the floor.

“Let me explain voting rights to you,” a robotic voice replies from the countertop.

Their eyes go wide.

“They can hear us now.” Arthur mouths the words. A hoarse whisper.

A powdery crescent scars the wall where Stacy pitches the device. Black plastic thorns litter the tiles. She steps around them as she picks her way to the bathroom.

She stares at its dead screen as she closes the door. Arthur yells that it can’t hear their words anymore, communicate them to false protectors, misguided champions. Nevertheless, she’s cautious to act, resist . . . persist.

She can’t let them win, or they will silence her words and know her thoughts. Steal her voice. For a forever that feels like death.

She has already locked her smartphone into its metal box in the attic. When she exits the bathroom, she descends the cellar stairway to cut the power to the house.

“Flip the main breaker,” Arthur shouts his deathbed advice.

He’ll be dead by the election. They both know this. Neither says it aloud.

She comes up the stairs, following the smooth grain of the wood handrail. She sits at Arthur’s desk, harvesting the loose threads in her thoughts. An early-morning rain soaks the sounds drifting through the window.

Her fingers rest on the cool glass keys of the typewriter. Their smooth steel rings brush her fingertips.

She is safe here. No one sees her words, reads her thoughts, as she launches them at the page.

Her inspiration comes alive.

She presses the keys. Like soldiers, the hammers rise, striking the paper, creating the letters, forming the message.

Will it work? She steels herself against self-doubt.

Her finger slips. The word ‘vote’ has two o’s.

She sighs.

Arthur was a gardener once, and she finds a thick thorn like a dinosaur claw, in the desk drawer. She scratches away the ink of the extra letter. She finishes the word, vote, the t grainy on the rough parchment.

Her fingers shake.

The years have swelled her knuckles, her fingers unbendable rods, rigid stems.

Her gray hair sways in the reflections of each of the forty-nine glass panes forming the keys.

Vote. Or you never vote again, she types. She breathes.

Arthur breathes beside her. He watches. It’s all he can handle.

She adds the period. They exhale.

Arthur hands her a new sheet of paper. An eyelet on her sleeve catches on the carriage return lever.

She inhales.

She begins the next letter.

Ryan Owen is a writer living among the glacial erratics and waist-high stone walls of central New England. Ryan resurrects antique typewriters and writes all first drafts from their glass-and-chrome keys. Ryan’s fiction has been recognized with an honorable mention in the Writers of the Future contest and has been published in Idle Ink, Litbreak Magazine, and Penumbric Speculative Fiction Mag, and is forthcoming in Literally Stories and Writers Resist. Find Ryan on Twitter/X, @4gttnNewEngland or on Bluesky, @iviesofinkribbons.

Photo credit: Ben Rogers via a Creative Commons license.

The Dream Children of Addison Mitchell McConnell III

By Michael Henson

What are the dreams
That await the sleep of Mitch McConnell?
Do children enter with their hungers?
Do they sit at the side of the road of dream
with their empty bowls
and their wide curious eyes?
I believe they wait each day in their hidden places
along the congressional corridors,
hidden in the pedestals of the heroic torsos
or in the pages of the latest allocation.
They listen closely
as he takes counsel
with donors, with lobbyists,
and with the men who line their pockets
with congressional silver.
And when at last he reaches the end of his workday,
and his heels click along the marble floors,
the dream children follow him home
to the commodious house where he takes his rest.
They watch and they wait until,
after all the calls to more donors, more lobbyists,
he lays his wearied head, at last,
onto his expensive pillow.
There, they gather each night.
I fear they might stumble
into his commodious jowls
and be smothered under his multiple chins.
But they are adept.
They enter, like miners,
through the drift mouth of his ears
or down the haunted portals of his nostrils.
And there they begin to explore.
Their tiny encandled skulls
flicker in the catacombic corridors
and all along the calcified neurons of his cerebellum.
They tiptoe carefully to avoid
the pockets of methane and legislative obstruction
as they explore each lobe, from stem to cerebellum:
Frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital,
through the fraught closets of the hypothalamus,
careful not to stumble
into the stagnant, trauma-riddled pools of his amygdala,
wherein lie the fraught tangles of its medial, basolateral
and fearfully anterior subnuclei
and into the committee rooms of the medulla oblongata.
There they observe the nodes of prevarication and avarice,
the glands of duplicity, the ganglia of manipulation
and those synapses
in which are sparked the neural signals
for insult and vituperation.
They continue in their nightlong forensic investigations,
to search, hopelessly,
amid the odor of carbide and conspiracy,
for any hint,
any flickering shard
of the dismal wreckage of a soul.

Michael Henson is author of six books of fiction and four collections of poetry. His most recent is the satirical novella, The Triumphal Descent of Donald J. Trump into Hell by Donald J. Trump as recounted to The Archangel Gabriel, from a Manuscript Discovered, Edited, and Translated from the Original Aramaic into Modern English by Michael Henson. He is a member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative and sings lead for the Carter Bridge, a Cincinnati-based bluegrass band.

Photo credit: Douglas Graham via the U.S. Library of Congress.

Suffrage or Suffer

By Kristin Fouquet

Artist’s Statement
In a world seduced by artificial intelligence, I assemble my collages more traditionally. I use my original printed photographs on archival paper with pigment ink, cut them, glue them on foam board, and embellish them with gold paint.

Kristin Fouquet is a photographer, collage maker, and writer in lovely New Orleans. Her photography appears in online journals and magazines, on chapbook and book covers, on album artwork, and in galleries. When not behind the camera, Kristin writes literary fiction. She is the author of seven books. One of her collages was included in a recent New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery exhibit. Visit Le Salon.

Welcome to Writers Resist the Summer 2024 Issue

It’s summer and all kinds of things are in bloom—beautiful and ugly—but we’re happy you’re here.

We’re moved by the courage of those who give voice to their righteous struggles.

We’re determined to continue to be able to challenge the inequitable and untenable.

We’re hopeful climate leaders will be followed.

We’re particularly grateful to Dorothy and Rebecca for their extraordinary, generous support—thank you!

And, we’re delighted to give thanks to this issue’s contributing authors and artists:

Kayla Blau, “God in Hiding“

Anna Lucia Deloia, “In Florida“

Dameien Nathaniel, “Trans Joy: A Selfie in Five Parts“

Ell Cee, “Make a Splash“

Laura Grace Weldon, “Miss Suzie Had a Baby, She Named Him Tiny Tim“

Zhihua Wang, “2020“

Myna Change, “Suburban Survival“

Elizabeth Birch, “Come Mourn with Me“

Eduardo Ramos, “Shukran“

Micaela Kaibni Raen, “Death Equals Silence“

Michal Rubin, “Numbers“

Shieva Salehnia, “Baptism“

Dick Westheimer, “Inside the Serotonin Industrial Complex“

If you’d like to join them for our virtual Writers Resist Reads, on Saturday 27 July at 5:00 p.m. PACIFIC, please request the Zoom link via WritersResist@gmail.com.

A note from Writers Resist

You, too, can join the Dorothy and Rebecca donor club: Make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist on our Give a Sawbuck page.

Photo credit: K-B Gressitt

Share this via your favorite social media.

God in Hiding

By Kayla Blau

Our five-year-old fingers plucked mancala beads,
wove white flower crowns,
blew dandelion seed wishes.
Our Barbies knew no god.
Our families spoke nothing of politics.
Sleepovers at hers were cardamom and allspice,
steaming lamb nestled under mounds of rice, fried eggplant, labneh and cucumber.
Sleepovers at mine, sustained by cardboard box macaroni and cheese,
spoons slick with I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter.
In middle school, her AIM screen name read jordanianprincess91.
Later, she told me her parents fibbed, spun stories of Jordanian roots
rather than risk the reclamation of “Palestinian” in our majority-white suburb.
My ancestors hid the same, cut the “stein” from our last name,
the trade-offs the hunted make for survival, for safety.
Later still, ICE agents forced Leila’s parents’ hand,
plucked her family from U.S suburbia back to East Jerusalem.
When I visited her,
Holy Land revealed
metal cages, Jews-only streets,
protestors spouting “Death to Arabs” in the same language my ancestors prayed in.
What of apartheid is holy?
What god reigns here?

Kayla Blau (she/her) is a queer writer and facilitator based in Seattle, WA. Her work can be found in The Seventh Wave, The Stranger, Crosscut, and South Seattle Emerald, among others. Her poetry and personal essays are included in anthologies such as Emerald Reflections, Writing for Peace: Resistance Issue, and Wanderlust. More of her work can be found at www.keepgoing.press.

Photo credit: Kashfi Halford via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

In Florida

By Anna Lucia Deloia

a school principal confiscates
the dictionary. When a student tries to look up
the meaning of ontology (n.), she is informed
that she doesn’t exist. In Massachusetts,
the police storm a classroom to apprehend
a graphic novel. They bury it in it the woods
behind the station, because ideas aren’t allowed
in prison either – but that’s a different poem.
Every time a book is banned, a child falls
down an elevator shaft in their dream
of a future universe. Every time
a book is banned, we blow up a word
that could have meant conceivable,
if not attainable. In the United States,
we define sexual content (n.) as whatever is generative,
whatever makes us squirm, makes us learn,
makes us all. So, maybe it isn’t a different poem.
Maybe it’s a shovel. Maybe somewhere, there’s a big, hot pit of boiling
knowledge we have criminalized, and maybe a dictionary is being formed
in the core of the earth, the entry for disposable (adj.) reading
nothing, nothing, nothing,
no one, ever again.

Anna Lucia Deloia (she/her) is a queer, Italian-American social science researcher, educator, and writer based in Massachusetts. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Rattle, Midway Journal, and Paterson Literary Review. Learn more at annaluciakirby.com.

Photo credit: Timothy Neesam via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Trans Joy: A Selfie in Five Parts

By Dameien Nathaniel

1.
2007 and I have gotten my first flip phone.
We are hanging out after the after school
art club, and Alyssa has just informed me
that this cell phone can take photos.
You just have to open it, access the camera,
hold the phone at arm’s length, and do your best,
since you can’t see yourself on the screen.
My hair is dirty blond, my clothes
are ripped hand-me-downs from my sisters,
and my arms are covered by sleeves that cover
wristbands so no one can see the Band-Aids.

2.
2011 and I’m a little late to the smartphone game.
I bought it just so I could talk to my new crush.
I haven’t yet figured out how to send him photos,
but taking them is the same as before,
it’s just made a little easier with mirrors.
So bathroom selfie, posed and using
the reflection to see if I look good. Just enough
clothing to hide my thighs, arms still needing
to be covered for the same reason, a little bit
of cleavage, and the currently popular duck face.

3.
2013 and my new phone has a forward-facing camera.
My hair is the shortest it has ever been,
but that doesn’t scare boys away, somehow it interests
the girls though. I have just downloaded SnapChat
and I appreciate that no one gets to see
these photos for more than three seconds. Pose
in front of the dorm bathroom mirror, pose at the
dorm welcome desk while working, pose lying
in my dorm bed, every one with a peace sign
blocking my face. My friends ask me for wya photos.
Strangers find me and ask for nudes.

4.
2018 and this phone has hit the ground so many times,
I’m amazed it still works with all the cracks.
One photo in the hotel room, smiling, hiding
that I’m shaking. The second in hospital gown
with an IV in my arm, sent to SnapChat with the caption
see you all in a few hours. The third taken
in my mother’s car on the drive home.
I’m posing in sunglasses, an exaggerated pout,
and using my free hand to pull my shirt down
just enough to show off the surgical binder. I caption this
Well, that’s a huge weight off my chest.

5.
2023 and I don’t know why this phone needs
four cameras, but it was the cheapest option.
I haven’t been blond since 2008, and I haven’t
covered cuts with Band-Aids since 2013. I tried
the selfie-a-day challenge and never stopped,
but most of them stay in my private albums.
A smile at the zoo with friends, a cute outfit
in the mirror before work, a bubble bath with
wine and music, a funny hat on a Tuesday,
a picture of myself standing in front of a cliff–
and a memory where I no longer want to jump.

Poet’s note: An accompaniment to this piece, titled “Unalive Yourself” was published by Mobius: The Journal of Social Change in May of 2024.

Dameien Nathaniel is a queer, trans, autistic poet from the Northeast United States. They are currently pursuing their MFA in poetry from Arcadia University, with their work centering around themes of trauma, loss, mental health, and queer identity. Dameien can be found performing at open mics and slams throughout New England.

Photo courtesy of Dameien Nathaniel.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Make a Splash

By Ell Cee

Artist statement

As a queer person and artist, I’ve been struggling with the constant legislative attacks against the queer community echoing across America. So what’s at the heart of my piece, Make A Splash? Honestly? This is me looking into the eyes of homophobic politicians, homophobic people, and those who just sit neutrally on the fence and let it happen, and licking my sapphic lips at them. This is me bending over and spanking my ass in their general direction, while winking mischievously. With Make a Splash I wanted to celebrate and relish queer joy. I wanted vibrant colors, rainbow vibes, womxn intentionally and joyously existing as sexual beings. I wanted to celebrate the bodies of womxn. I wanted to be very open about what this piece was. I loved the image of a blue jeans model from the 80s bending over and looking at the camera. I put the kicking legs of cabaret dancers around the edges. I put a cut open, ripe, luscious strawberry surrounded by lips. I put winking-eye photos that almost look like Polaroids everywhere, echoing through the piece. I included lush greenery at her feet and last but not least, tickets to ride placed between her legs. And of course, the cherry on top of it all: the caption I created in the top right corner that reads, “Great Lady WITH HER OWN AGENDA.”

Ell Cee (They/She) is a lifelong artist as well as a member of the LGBTQIA2S, genderqueer, and disabled communities. They create one-of-a-kind pieces whose vibrancy and glow inspire joy. Ell uses recycled materials in much of their art, such as cardboard boxes, packaging materials, repurposed labels, and even discarded library books. Her art ranges across mediums: from watercolor markers, highlighting elements, paints, pencil, photography, mixed-media, hand lettering, to pen & ink, and high resolution image conversion processes. Find Ell’s art online at https://linktr.ee/EllCeeTheArtist and @EllCeeTheArtist on Instagram.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Miss Suzie Had a Baby, She Named Him Tiny Tim

By Laura Grace Weldon

Outrage drives me outside,
a choice a woman can still make.
I clamber close to our muddy creek
collecting trash caught in fallen branches.
I empty water from a Stroh’s bottle
and battered jug of Cheer detergent.
Pull out blue plastic bags and
an honest-to-God wire hanger.
Untangle a multicolored jump rope
with red wooden handles,
the kind we jumped with during
recess at Pine Elementary School
chanting K.I.S.S.I.N.G., and Cinderella.
Some girls were such good skippers
they didn’t miss a jump till a whistle’s
shrill made us head back in,
line up at the drinking fountain, then
sit every minute of three more hours.
I hear singsong rhymes in my mind
as I walk back with this trash
still feeling our legs leap,
our hair fly in synch,
drumbeat of feet on the ground
the way girls and women
from the beginning
have worked together
while singing in unison.

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, and maxes out her library card. Laura served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. lauragraceweldon.com

Photo credit: ErstwhileHuman via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

2020

By Zhihua Wang

It’s October now,
I am still listening to the song
“Beautiful Springtime.”
It seems the spring
of 2020 never came.

The moon must love
my daughter’s window
more as it often has songs
flying out of it.

I am in love with my bed now.
Every time I lie on my pillow,
wrapped in my comforter,
I think of him.

Poems are flowers
I pick on my road.
I pack them well to send out –
when they open them, I hope
the fragrance is still there.

I used to believe the majority
of the world thinks the same
as me. Now I know it’s only
half. But I should still cheer
even if the win is by a hair.

Zhihua Wang received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Arkansas and is currently a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. Her poems have appeared in Aji, Last Leaves, Across the Margin, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere.

Photo credit: Alessandro Giangiulio via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Suburban Survival

By Myna Chang

My sleeping bag’s nestled in the drainage ditch where I used to play hide and seek. The new people living in our house don’t have any kids, so they don’t know the neighborhood’s good hiding places like I do.

I see them in our kitchen. Mom’s curtains are gone. The walls are blue now. They’ve painted over my height chart, too. Mom stood me against that door frame every birthday so she could mark my progress. She’d scratch the pencil into the soft wood and say, “Look how much you’ve grown, Timothy!”

– Age 6, 3 ½ feet

– Age 9, 4 ¼ feet

– Age 12, 5 feet

The door frame is clean white now.

I find my old foam football wedged in the holly bushes. Sun-bleached and ratty, it smells like mildew. I tuck it under my arm and saunter down Boxwood Lane like a kid who’s never had to sleep in an abandoned car. I toss the ball up, catch it, pretend to pass it downfield. I could be on the team, I could be the quarterback, I could be any boy heading to the park on a crackle-leafed fall afternoon.

“Timothy? Is that you?”

Mrs. Johnson sounds the same, all growly and sweet at the same time. My eyes blur.

The football was a birthday present, before Dad lost his job, before the bank took our house. Before I got lost in the crowd at the shelter.

Mrs. Johnson calls my name again. I hug the ball tight and run. Just like Dad taught me.

Our mailbox is filled with letters addressed to the new people. I take the envelopes, drop the boring ones in the gutter. I find one addressed to Mom, a form from my school asking if I’d be coming back this semester, if we had a forwarding address. I fold the paper with my name, keep it in my pocket.

A few days ago, I swiped a package from the mailbox. It had a wool scarf in it. Mom always tucked my old scarf into the collar of my coat, telling me, “Stay warm, sweetheart.” The new people’s scarf kinda itches, but it’s mine now.

• • •

The new man sits on the back porch tapping a laptop and scribbling on a pad of paper. His computer looks like the one I used to play games on. The woman calls for him. He sets his stuff by a computer bag and goes inside.

I duck under the loose board in the fence, race to the porch, shove his computer and pencil in the bag. I sling it over my shoulder and am about to run . . . but the door is open. There’s the kitchen. My kitchen.

I slip inside. Voices drift from upstairs. For a heartbeat, I imagine it’s Mom and Dad, that we’re still together, that we’re normal again.

I take the man’s pencil, step up to the door frame. Stand straight. Mark my height on the clean paint:

– TIMOTHY, AGE 14.

I can’t do the whole thing because I don’t know how tall I am now. “Happy birthday, anyway,” I whisper.

Then I run.

Myna Chang (she/her) is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain (CutBank Books, 2023). Her writing has been selected for the Locus Recommended Reading List, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction America, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. She has won the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the New Millennium Award in Flash Fiction. She hosts the Electric Sheep speculative fiction reading series. Find her at MynaChang.com, and on Twitter & Bluesky at @MynaChang.

Photo credit: Michael Coghlan via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Come Mourn with Me

By Elizabeth Birch

Come mourn with me. Pour
your aching hearts into the endless
hole we dug to house
Mother Nature’s empty self.
Come throw
your smashed cans, stretched plastic, burnt oil, and dung
on her hollow body below. Come
cry for all the ifs, buts, and whys
we should’ve asked ourselves
decades ago and rejoice
in memories of cooler days. Come
hold my helpless hand and keep
me as close as you wish you kept her. Read
me your regrets but know
no eulogy
will wake her.

Elizabeth Birch lives in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Her poetry has been featured in previous or forthcoming issues of Yellow Arrow Journal, The Tiger Moth Review, and “For the Love of Words” of Easton Community Access Television.

Photo credit. M. Appelman via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Shukran

By Eduardo Ramos

Thank you for sharing your world
and helping me connect with mine.
For speaking words unfamiliar to my ears
stirring memories in my tongue.
Usted reacquainted me with Al-Andalus
and the road across Africa to Al-Mashriq,
reaffirmed that my barrio is a rich mix of cultures,
where we eat arroz and kipe with our plantains.
Ojalá that others from my island
can find the root you helped me trace,
and that we find more roots,
hasta que we recover
the voices empires sought to silence.

Eduardo Ramos is a Dominican poet from New York. His poetry has appeared in Fahmidan Journal and Lit. 202. Follow him on X at @EduardoRamosii.

Photo credit: Jochen Wolters via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.