Author: Editor

History

By Rachel Custer


There is only one story a woman says and maybe
she is saying something about the truth, or maybe
not. The history of a place like this is the history
of those who leave it. It’s a great place to be from
they might say, and smile. Pretty men and pretty
women and their easy belief that they are moving
forward through the world. Their necks graceful
in their city clothes. There is only one story and
it is not this story, sweat and grease and the grace
of ritualized days. The pinch of repetition in the
joints. The world would be forgiven for believing
the best of this land is the dust that a hand knocks
from old boots. Maybe there is something of the
truth to what she says, like there is only one way
to live in a place one cannot leave, and that’s to
love it. Take the raw animal of its days by the
throat and throttle the one story from its jaws. Or
maybe not. There is only one way to live in a place
where everybody believes nobody lives. Like
there is only one way to be a fire and that is to burn.

 

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. She is currently completing the Tupelo Press 30/30 Poetry Marathon fundraiser. “History” was previously published by Tupelo Press.

Visit Rachel’s website at www.rachelcuster.wordpress.com.

Photo credit: © 2014 K-B Gressitt.

Not a Strange Grammar

By Eduardo Escalante

nothing to raise Abel
or make a song and dance about

at the extreme of disorder
a hundred-year’s   flood   every   decade

stories   stir   shadows
over our   small   hours

there is no place
principle     or signal
right left center
where to live

no cause, no cause

at the extreme of disorder
the disorder
is the only place.

 

Eduardo Escalante is an author, writer, researcher, living in Valparaíso, Chile. He writes about happiness, love, social justice, and current events. Eduardo’s work appears in several Spanish publications and reviews, including signum Nous, Ariadna, Nagari, Espacio_Luke, and Lakuma Pusaki, and in Spillwords Press.

Photo credit: “Chaos Theory” by Patrick McConahay via a Creative Commons license.

Thoughts & Prayers

By Jane Rosenberg LaForge

 

They are offered in rote
as if the supply is bottomless;
like abstractions, inaction
and aesthetics; they could
be meaningless or mean
anything, so long as they
are not so sustaining as
steak & lobster for the
impoverished; more like
succotash & wilted lettuce.

Maybe they’re a law firm
the kind advertised on television
with a jingle and 1-800 number
children can’t help learning
before their alphabet; so much so
they’ve become a part of the literacy process!
A tentative, baby step toward
discerning cliché from idiom
because language: it’s a young
person’s business now, if they can
survive being a soft target.

Or perhaps it’s becoming part
of the international ergot, like a traffic sign
or the symbol for “no,” or a name
we give to conglomerates selling
mattresses or men’s clothing:
instant recognition for the product
and everyone knows just where to go
to find the best discounts.

For this year, I was thinking
they might make a particularly
poignant salutation for the season,
what with the war on Christmas
always burgeoning, so coming to you
on a greeting card soon, from a raft
of similar partnerships: O.F. Mossberg
& Sons, Heckler & Koch,
and Clint Eastwood’s truly evergreen
friends, Smith & Wesson.

Or they might be best employed
as a broadcast sign-off;
not so much like Walter Cronkite’s
“& that’s the way it is,” if he were
working on a Wednesday, the 14th of February, 2018;
but as his successor attempted
for five days no one remembers
except for the derision and embarrassment:
“Courage,” was all he said
as if looking into the future,
because we’re going to need a lot more of it.

 

Jane Rosenberg LaForge is the author of Daphne and Her Discontents, a full-length collection of poems from Ravenna Press; and the forthcoming novel, The Hawkman: A Fairy Tale of the Great War, from Amberjack Publishing. For more information, visit jane-rosenberg-laforge.com. and follow her on Twitter, @JaneRLaForge.

Image credit: An anonymous internet find.

I Am Not a Person

By Jessie Atkin                                                                                             

 

I do not want children I decide, stretched out beneath the eyes of the late-night newsmen.                   My own eyes ache, but not as much as my ears, as my age, as my soul. Yet this ache, this loss without losing, without losing anything I have but the future stings less. It stings less because I choose, even if it is a choice of deprivation. But we have been deprived so long in this house, in this city, in this country. The face of this country is a man’s face, and the face of this family is a man’s, will be a man’s, in image and in name. Because my name is a man’s, given to me by my mother with only the question of ‘will you take his name,’ not ‘who’s name will you take?’                And they take and we give. They trade us names in exchange for babies so that we can give them more children to take more of their names. These are the names that will be carried into the future to represent them and not me.             But who would want to represent me? Who would want to represent something so secondary? So low? So inhuman? For I am inhuman. On the rug, beneath the TV that tells me so, I am not a person. I am not a whole person. Like my daddy, like my brother, like the walls of Wall Street. All have more rights than me.              Rights, or wrongs as my sister calls them. They have all the wrongs, she says. She says many things. Things to fill the silence and drown out the noise. But it is harder to drown something you feel, not just something you hear.                      I didn’t hear his hand on my back. I felt it. Felt it in stiff stock-still silence. Still, his hand moved beneath my shirt until it was beneath my waistband. The waistband of my jeans, which wasn’t so tight as my dad said because, if it were, no hand would have fit. But it would have fit no matter the size of my jeans. Jeans I was wearing, like everyone wears, all of them wearing and sitting, and oblivious because what was happening was normal. Normal, like what I was wearing.          Normal like what he was wanting, and what the newsmen said he could take. It’s what the movies said he could take. It’s what the law said he could take.      So I take my sister aside and tell her I’m not going to have children. I tell her they can have all the wrongs, but I won’t give them anything else to take from me. She tells me I don’t know, not now, how can I? How can you? You’re fourteen, you’re a baby, she says, as if sixteen is so much less of a baby. As if the babies aren’t the whole point anyway. And anyway, if I’m a baby I should matter more, according to Twitter, and television, and talk radio.                You only lose your personhood with your babyhood. Only when you have opinions and ovaries, boobs and babies of your own do you lose the other things you could have had too. You lose them to history and tradition written down by the very humans who don’t have the things they punish you for having. I can’t have babies, I say. And she says, I know that’s not true. It’s true I can’t have human babies, I correct. I am not a human. I am not a person.          Not a person? Is a woman not a person?         No, I say. I am no mere man with grief and woe connected to the letters. I am more. I am Athena, I am Artemis, I am an Amazon.     The Amazon is a river in Peru and the power of gods on earth is impossible, she replies. But I know impossible is where we already live.

 

Jessie Atkin received her MFA in creative writing from American University in 2015. She has had short work featured in the Young Adult Review Network, The Grief Diaries, Quantum Fairy Tales and The Rumpus. She has also had two plays honored and produced as staged readings through Rochester New York’s Geva Theater Regional Writers Showcase and the Washington University in St. Louis A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Competition and Festival. She published her YA novel, We Are Savages, in 2012. Visit her website at www.jessieatkin.com and follow her on Twitter @JessieA_7.

Photo credit: Maternity ward, 1918, U.S. Library of Congress.

Two Poems by Gary Glauber

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Planet of the (r)Apes

The melancholy rubble
of all that once stood proud
& we went along with the story,
saluting & nodding
when it seemed easy to do.

What did we know & when?

So many who buried knowledge
behind shaky patriarchy,
its false melancholic glory
an inadequate foundation.
Smiles confidently ignored
awkward power inspiring
subordinate duck & cower,
looking akin to turning away,
looking the other way.

Aren’t you enraged?

Day to day to another lost year,
seasons of blind abuses,
making poor excuses &
safely moving on.

Then came the turning,
slowly at first,
a quake barely registering,
a low rumble of complaint
that gathered strength
to surface secrets
needing to be heard,
that one day might
lead to the kind of change
that will topple all.

This failure of gender
in plentiful mad assumptions
& unforgivable sexual plunder
seems a strange fiction,
a fetish-like affliction,
but sheer numbers say otherwise.

The entertainers, politicians,
professors, those in charge,
acting as if this was their due,
their sick advantage exercised
on a league of less fortunate targets
to satisfy predatory urges
and pseudo-supremacy,
an illusion of power
affording privilege,
a false birthright
making skin crawl accordingly.

Slowly, finally,
voices are being heard,
change forthcoming:
a legion of victims
finding expression after ages
of silent acrimony & regret.
So many (far too many)
& therein lies ignominy.

Apologies & feelings of shame
will never be sufficient
to even this brash misconduct.
We are a broken society
in need of new instruction
toward mutual respect
& overdue recognition.

These wrongs have
destroyed this planet
in ways only time
& right actions can heal.

That final scene of realization
on the beach, surrounded by
bikinis (& atolls forming),
epiphany of seismic proportion:
this is our Earth.

“You finally did it, you maniacs.
You blew it up!”

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Sublimation

He enthusiastically supports
the man whose conflated policies
can thwart & negate him
because he is living proof
Willy Loman did not die in vain.
He sells; he is well-liked.
It’s Muslim with a small m,
no Nation of I action here.
His string of successes
is tied tightly to the capitalist
benefits of fossil fuels
& a planet slowly dying.
His carbon footprint
leaves divots the world over.
& yet, invited to become a member
of the prestigious country club,
he jumps at the chance.
Eighteen holes to prove
he is an example, an exception,
paraded around as proof,
a minority friend &
he gladly looks the other way,
focusing instead on the movie star
shaking hands gladly
across the banquet hall.
Every photo op
is his small revenge,
& he who laughs last
lives to laugh another day,
even when things get serious fast.
Life is funny like that
& compromise is the new normal,
alternate facts showing how
bleak is the new black.

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Gary Glauber is a poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. His works have received multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. He champions the underdog to the melodic rhythms of obscure power pop. His two collections, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press) and Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press) are available through Amazon, as is a chapbook, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press). This past summer he read selections from his most recent collection at the 2017 NYC Poetry Festival.

Illustration credit: Osiris, a dying planet, NASA

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Testimony

By Lynne Handy

I smell it—
testosterone bones the very air I breathe,
raping seas and waterways, regulating wombs
and ovaries, paring healthcare to a nub.

I smell it in warlords’ jizzy elbow-rubs,
in stilled dissent and parody;
in decay of human brain cells,
contempt for learning. It is strongest
in the threat of nuclear cinders
and human ash, and truths hidden
in the swamp-clot of lies.

This frazzled world needs correction.
’Til yesterday, we were progressing,
but then a curtain dropped
on science, sanity, and good sense.

It’s time to sanitize,
revitalize the world.
Infuse it with truth,
train youth in humanitarian pursuits,
gather all the terrible bombs,
sink them into a sea-safe,
and melt the key; revere the oceans,
heat the world with only sun,
respect the intellect of women,
read the beatitudes, a really good primer
for the lost. Erect monuments to poets,
inscribe their words in the sky.

Let calm breezes waft
in tropes of humility and good will;
a butterfly propulsion,
a timbre of fragile wings
made momentous by their mission
to save

 

Retired librarian Lynne Handy lives in the Illinois Fox Valley with her terrier, Schatzi, and her beagle mix, BoPeep. She writes poetry and fiction, and participates in poets’ groups and open mikes throughout the area. She has written Spy Car and Other Poems, and three novels, Where the River Runs Deep, The Untold Story of Edwina, and In the Time of Peacocks. Her poems have been published in several literary journals. You can contact her lynnehandy.com and on Instagram.

Photo Credit: “Phillis Wheatley, poet at work,” Boston Women’s Memorial, by Lorianne DiSabato via a Creative Commons license.

Stand Up, Kneel Down

By Israel Francisco Haros Lopez

 

Artist’s statement: “Stand Up, Kneel Down,” digital art, was made to speak to the historical connection of Colin Kaepernick’s act, to speak to the issues that continue to plague our communities. His kneeling and those actions that have followed suit will stand in history as a moment when a peaceful quiet act spoke fiercely, loudly, to the greater political reality that is begging for change.

 

Israel Francisco Haros Lopez was born in East Los Angeles to immigrant parents of Mexican descent. He is a recent recipient of the Kindle Project’s Makers Muse Award for his community work. He brings firsthand knowledge of the realities of migration, U.S. border policies, and life as a Mexican American to his work with families and youth, as a mentor, educator, art instructor, ally, workshop facilitator and activist. Even with a 1.59 high school G.P.A., Israel managed to go back to community college and raise his grades to get accepted into U.C. Berkeley and receive a degree in English Literature and Chicano Studies followed by an MFA in Creative Writing. At formal and informal visual art spaces, Israel creates and collaborates in many interdisciplinary ways including poetry, performance, music, visual art, video making and curriculum creation. His work addresses a multitude of historical and spiritual layered realities of border politics, identity politics, and the re-interpretation of histories. Visit the artist’s website at www.waterhummingbirdhouse.com.

Administration Rumination

By Kathy Douglas

 

I step over the cracks trying
not to break my mother’s back
while news accelerates to sideshow
with Prez T as the bearded lady
and Melania in the wrong place,
wrong time. Time starts to taste like wormwood
and rue, sour herb of grace, and climate change parodies itself
in debates over how and why it is named and who does
the naming. In this aluminum wrapped house
it’s like a can’s about to be recycled—
we are poised on the sharp lip
of a popped top waiting
to be dumped into
the hopper

 

Kathy Douglas’s published work can be found online and in print in Unlost Journal, Calyx, Drunken Boat, The Cafe Review, Noctua, Right Hand Pointing, After The Pause, shufpoetry, and Poetry WTF?! She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College. Recently, she has been focused on cut up and collaged found poems. This interest is rooted in the positive reinforcement in Catholic grammar school of a somewhat above average ability to diagram sentences. During the 45th administration, she almost takes comfort in slashing sentences apart and remixing them into poems. By day, she supports the career development of young professionals in fields related to saving the planet. She tweets @kathydouglas and blogs periodically at medium.com/@kathrynd.

Photo credit: Klearchos Kapoutsis via a Creative Commons license.

Just a Test?

By Rick Blum

 

Rennh rennh rennh rudely interrupted Nora Jones,
causing my stomach to clench like a sprung trap –
something that hadn’t happened since Susan Soloway
and I were sent to her basement while a siren blared
at the fire station a few miles from our otherwise
tranquil neighborhood. [This was the late fifties,
when everyone worried that the Russians would lob
a few nuclear bombs our way. Air-raid tests
like this one were considered prudent then,
as was building home bomb shelters and equipping them
with a few months’ supplies, despite the fact that
radioactive air would filter in in short order anyhow.]

After an interminable moment of excruciating silence,
This was a test of the emergency broadcast system
washed across the room like a tsunami on steroids,
allowing me to breathe again. This is how
a loose-lipped president, dripping with false bravado,
can terrorize his own citizenry: by threatening
total destruction of a small country on the other side
of the globe. Ronald Reagan, who set the Republican Party
on the path to its current state of deviancy, proclaimed:
“government is not the solution to our problem;
government is the problem.” He was almost right.
Turns out, a president is not the solution to our problem,
but surely can be the problem. Hugely!

So, in faraway North Korea, President Fire-and-Fury
thinks he can bend Kim Jong-un to his will as easily as
he sues construction contractors into submission.
I hope he’s right, though chances of that panning out
are slimmer than a runway model. More likely
he’ll ratchet up the bluster until the supreme leader
launches us into that fifties nightmare, or a majority
of the cabinet decides our national delirium must end,
and removes Trump from office.

In the meantime, in case I need to make a dash
for the safety – and sanity – of Canada,
I’m keeping the van gassed-up …
and abundantly stocked with tubs of Tums.

 

Rick Blum has been chronicling life’s vagaries through essays and poetry for more than 25 years. His early works were published in several, now defunct, national magazines, whose fate he takes no credit for. He was a regular columnist for eleven years for the newsweekly The Mosquito, which, surprisingly, is still in print. More recently, his writings have appeared in The Literary Hatchet, The Satirist, and The Moon Magazine, among others. He is also a frequent contributor to the Humor Times, and has been published in numerous poetry anthologies. Mr. Blum is a two-time winner of the annual Carlisle Poetry Contest. His poem, Tomfoolery, received honorable mention in The Boston Globe Deflategate poetry challenge. Currently, he is holed up in his Massachusetts office trying to pen the perfect bio, which he plans to share as soon as he stops laughing at the sheer futility of this effort.

Photo credit: Cliff Dix via a Creative Commons license.

A Shithole Is

By William C. Anderson

 

A shithole is an astronomically wealthy nation that refuses to provide healthcare for all people.

A shithole is an astronomically wealthy nation that refuses to guarantee access to clean drinking water and heating for schools in the winter.

A shithole is a nation that has enough wealth to end poverty, but allows that money to be hoarded by a small few.

A shithole is a nation where school massacres aren’t surprising and neither are mass shootings, because of politics and profit.

A shithole is an astronomically wealthy nation where college education isn’t free or guaranteed, but debt for pursuing higher education is.

A shithole is an astronomically wealthy nation where the military budget is enough to fix crumbling infrastructure, but it’s used to murder people abroad instead.

A shithole is a nation that pollutes the earth so badly that it’s causing the climate to change, putting everyone at risk, but the nation refuses to change because of politics and profit.

A shithole is a nation that pretends capitalism is fair and equitable.

A shithole is a nation that institutionalizes white supremacy and then blames those who aren’t white for the barriers they face trying to live under a racist system.

A shithole is a nation that goes around the world destabilizing other countries, killing and ruining lives so its corporations can exploit resources.

A shithole is an astronomically wealthy nation with plenty of space that refuses to accept migrants, immigrants and refugees from the countries it destabilizes with its foreign policy.

A shithole is an astronomically wealthy nation where the rate of mortality among women giving birth is increasing as it decreases elsewhere, even in the so-called developing world.

A shithole is a nation that doesn’t guarantee the human rights of women, LGBTQI, gender-nonconforming people and more, but goes around the world demanding other nations do so.

A shithole is an astronomically wealthy nation that regularly abandons its own people during natural disasters and leaves communities to fend for themselves.

A shithole is a nation that elects Donald Trump president.

A shithole is a nation that regularly attacks the human rights of disabled people.

A shithole is a nation that continues its genocidal legacy of broken treaties, disregard for sovereignty, and harmful policies that threaten Native people.

A shithole is the United States of America.

 

William C. Anderson is a freelance writer. His work has been published by The Guardian, MTV and Pitchfork among others.

Many of his writings can be found at Truthout or at the Praxis Center for Kalamazoo College, where he is a contributing editor covering race, class and immigration.

He’s co-author of the forthcoming book As Black as Resistance (AK Press 2018). Read more about the book and order it here.

Photo courtesy of the author.

 

Who We Are

By Elisabeth Horan

 

Worrying        scared             ashamed        embarrassed                         angry
sexualized      objectified      demonized
Fat                   disgusting      too thin           too woman
Lesbians         gays                fags                 hags
Sluts                pussies
African American Latinas/os Hispanics Indians Native Americans
Refugees        Syrians           Yemenis         Afghanis         Iraqis              Sudanese
Famine           war                 death
Ignore             /          Ignorance
Bombings       cars on sidewalks                  underground           aboveground             France
UK               USA                 Kabul             Mosul             Mogadishu                 Isis
Boko Haram                           Nigeria            Kenya
Internet                      hate                            trolls
Mother Nature          /          Nurture
Rivers, streams, fish, birds, snakes, bugs, bees, butterflies, bears, coyotes, wolves
Bears Ears                  Arches                        Anasazi Run              Petroglyphs
Clean water              Fracking                    Halliburton                Cheney
Earthquakes              hurricanes                 tornados                     flooding
Self-esteem               respect                       bullying                      suicide
Homeless                    neglected pets           neglected                   people
Pregnant women     abortion clinics         rape survivors          incest survivors
Texas                          intimidation
Hoodies                     guns                           men in Blue              men in Black
Black men
Charlottesville
Sexual assault           police brutality         Emmett Till               Malcolm X
Obama           Oh Lord God, Hast Thou Forsaken Us – ?               Martin Luther King Jr.
Sanders Clinton Warren Leahy                 messy, messy
McConnell Cruz Ryan                                  angry, angry

Elisabeth (Me ) and _____________ (You ).

 

Elisabeth Horan is a poet mother student lover of kind people and animals, homesteading in Vermont with her tolerant partner and two young sons. She hopes the earth can withstand us and that humans may learn to be more kind to each other and to Mother Nature.

She has recently been featured in Quail Bell Magazine and Dying Dahlia Review. She has work forthcoming at The Occulum, Alexander & Brook and at Switchgrass Review.

Elisabeth is a 2018 MFA Candidate at Lindenwood University and teaches at River Valley Community College in New Hampshire. Follow her @ehoranpoet.

Trigger Warning: An Exorcism for Las Vegas

A performance poem by Alexander McCoy

Performed by Alexander McCoy

Cinematography and editing by Adam Jiang

Alexander McCoy is three years out of Clark University where he earned a BFA in theater, and where he got his start as a writer and slam poetry performer. He has since moved to Boston where he makes a living, here and there, as a teacher or—more often than not—a server in some diner or other. Mostly, he writes about his complicated relationship with his Cuban heritage, or else the view from his porch.

Donald Trump Probably Doesn’t Know What a Pantoum Is

By Eve Lyons

Yes we can
HOPE
Love trumps hate
We are all immigrants.

HOPE
Arab translators risk their lives for our soldiers
We are all immigrants
Promised visas, then denied.

Arab translators risk their lives
Muslims demonized
Promises made, then broken
Transgender women demonized

Muslims are most at risk under the Islamic State
We are our own worst enemy
Transgender women are most at risk in bathrooms
We are making up enemies

We are our own worst enemy
Yes, we can overcome
Love trumps hate
We must not turn each other into enemies.

Yes, we can overcome
Yes we can
We must not turn each other into enemies
Love trumps hate.

 

Eve Lyons is a poet and fiction writer living in the Boston area. Her work has appeared in Lilith, New Vilna Review, Word Riot, Literary Mama, Hip Mama, Mutha magazine, and several anthologies.

Photo credit: Women’s March San Diego 2018 by K-B Gressitt.

Breakfast with Santa

By Abby E. Murray

Santa arrives at the chemical bay
on Joint Base Lewis McChord
in a Stryker, 8AM sharp on Saturday,
Colonel’s orders, free of charge.
Santa has an Alabama twang.
Santa says he’d like to make
a quick announcement, his voice
ringing in rented speakers
that broadcast Christmas carols
as well as the pale whistle
of some far off interference.
Santa wants to say he’s thankful
not just for the men who took time
from their training schedules to eat
pancakes with us this morning,
but the families too, who go through
what they go through and I imagine,
for Santa, sacrifice is something like
climbing through a keyhole or
bursting from a busted radiator.
It takes time, it takes practice,
it takes and takes and takes.
Horror and bitterness are naughty spirits
within us. Acceptance is nice.
The children wear paper crowns
with antlers shaped like their own hands
until a sergeant distributes
gas masks by the bouncy house.
The wives aren’t hungry,
they’re never hungry.
There are enough pancakes
to feed a landfill, enough coffee
to thaw a block of sidewalks.
I have crept so far into myself
I can hardly see my own front line
but I am certain both hemispheres
of my brain are begging for peace.
Santa wants us to form a line.
We do. Friends, I can still be saved.
My heart is open as a coal mine.

 

Abby E. Murray teaches creative writing at the University of Washington Tacoma, where she offers free poetry workshops to soldiers and military families, serves as editor in chief for Collateral, a journal that publishes work focused on the impact of military service, and teaches poetry workshops at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Her poems can be found in recent or forthcoming issues of Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Stone Canoe, and the Rise Up Review. She lives near Tacoma and writes often about what it means to resist when your spouse is a soldier.

 

The Wall

A Poster by Tomaso Marcolla

Trump's wall

 

Tomaso Marcolla was born in 1964, in Trento, Italy, where he currently lives and creates. Graduated from the Art Institute of Trento, he began work as a graphic designer in 1985.

He began to experiment his passion for art with watercolors, “applying them on non-traditional backgrounds, from Japanese paper to chalk.”

Later, his works became a fusion of graphic, pictorial, digital art and illustration, creating an interesting relationship, a technical and communicative interchange between the professional and artistic activity.

Marcolla finds digital art is well suited to the frenzy of the current times: “I choose it for its immediacy and the speed of realization. In addition, of course, for the effect. However, I don’t neglect other techniques such as pen, acrylic, figurative.The effect of the digital art is immediate, including the possibility to post it instantly on the web.”

The right to employment, the economic crisis, solidarity, nonviolence, the preservation of the environment: the subjects and inspirations of Marcolla’s cartoons come from the current news. “Watching television, talking to people, listening to a joke” this is how the artist from Trento finds an opportunity to grab the pen (and the mouse) and represent the reality “in a way that makes people think, and also smile, although sometimes I deal with very serious issues.”

His posters, created by assembling graphic techniques, photography and computer graphics, have received international awards. He’s a member of the AIAP (Italian Association for the Planning of Visual Communication) and the BEDA (Bureau of European Designers Associations).

Read more about Marcolla and “The Wall” here and visit his website here.

 

Evidence-Based

A Poem Against Tyranny

 

By Margarita Engle

When words are banned by a president
who imagines that limiting language
is his entitlement, all poets must use
our vulnerable freedom of speech
before we lose it the way transgender people
can lose rights, the White House has lost
diversity, and any fetus might lose hope for
a healthy future, simply because
medicine is only for the rich,
and science-based facts
are prohibited—but only UNTIL
the deceptive election is investigated,
and truth once again
sets us free.

 

Margarita Engle is the national Young People’s Poet Laureate and the first Latino to receive that honor. She is the Cuban-American author of many verse novels, including The Surrender Tree, a Newbery Honor winner, and The Lightning Dreamer, a PEN USA Award winner. Her verse memoir, Enchanted Air, received the Pura Belpré Award, Golden Kite Award, Walter Dean Myers Honor, and Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, among others. Drum Dream Girl received the Charlotte Zolotow Award for best picture book text.

Her newest verse novel about the Cuba is Forest World, and her newest picture books are All the Way to Havana and Miguel’s Brave Knight, Young Cervantes and His Dream of Don Quixote.

Books forthcoming in 2018 include The Flying Girl, How Aida de Acosta Learned to Soar and Jazz Owls, a Novel of the Zoot Suit Riots.

Margarita was born in Los Angeles, but developed a deep attachment to her mother’s homeland during childhood summers with relatives. She was trained as an agronomist and botanist as well as a poet and novelist. She lives in central California with her husband. Visit her website at www.margaritaengle.com.

Photo credit: Amparo Torres O. via a Creative Commons license.

A Modest Proposal

By Dina Honour

 

From Business Day:

A big name greeting card company today announced a launch date for its highly anticipated new range of greeting cards. The Second to None cards were designed in response to the increase of gun-related casualties, and specifically targets consumers looking for a way to reach out to friends or relatives affected by gun-violence.

The range differentiates itself from normal sympathy cards, the company said, by addressing the tragic unavoidability of gun-violence rather than focusing on grief or loss.

“We noticed the words ‘tragic’ and ‘unavoidable’ had reached a saturation point in the media, particularly among politicians and media outlets,” said the company’s spokesperson S. Wesson. “Our thinking was there was enough of a gap in the market to warrant some research into how such a range would go over.”

“Our research showed that a large percentage of Americans view gun violence as an unavoidable fact of life in the United States. We wanted to give the public a way to express their feelings about gun-violence in a non-confrontational, non-denominational, non-threatening way,” Wesson continued.

A limited test run of a card featuring a tasteful black and white copy of Second Amendment text, with the message “Our thoughts and prayers go out to you,” proved to be successful enough that the company expanded the concept into a full-blown collection, including a number of original designs.

“It’s a uniquely American problem which deserves a uniquely American solution,” Wesson said.

The company is quick to point out its goal was not to make a statement about gun-violence, but merely to offer an alternative.

“We don’t hesitate to send a birthday card as a way to acknowledge an important day. This is no different really. With victims of gun violence on the rise,” Wesson added, “it’s important for our customers to feel like they have a way of reaching out.”

Wesson is most proud of the company’s More Guns is the Answer line. The creators worked closely with designers to develop a collection of high quality cards, each featuring red, white and blue drawings of eagles and American flags. The cards open to reveal messages such as “May you find peace in knowing that, had your loved one been armed, he would surely have saved lives.”

Other sentiments, rendered in Comic Sans font, include “Guns don’t kill people, Planned Parenthood does” and “This wouldn’t have happened in a concealed carry zone” and “I hope your loved one’s death isn’t politicized. It’s too soon,” a personal favorite of Wesson’s.

The company is exploring plans for a lighter assortment of cards with such lines as the Right To Bear Arms, which features a heavily armed grizzly defending his front porch against a government militia and Stuff Happens, featuring cartoon drawings.

“Those cards,” Wesson said, “are obviously aimed at consumers who have had a more light-hearted experience or accident with guns. Think destruction of property rather than death or disfigurement.”

The most controversial of the company’s planned range includes what Wesson refers to as Victim Blaming cards. “The market research we’ve done has shown us there is a significant portion of our customer base who find it difficult to blame guns under any circumstance. For many, death by shooting has become an acceptable consequence for actions we used to take for granted. Talking or texting too loudly. Driving. Going to the movies. We’re simply giving our customers a way to express those feelings.”

The company has critics who have raised concerns that the card collection is capitalizing on the misfortune of others.

“America is a capitalist country,” Wesson responded. “For over 200 years we have rewarded those who have profited on the backs of others. This is no different. We are proud to be an American owned corporation.”

Wesson added, “A greeting card has always been a safe and acceptable way to express your feelings to another human being. Right now posting or delivering a greeting card doesn’t often result in getting shot. Though as recent events show, we can’t rule that eventuality out. If and when that time comes, we’ll revisit the products.”

The company is partnering with big-box retailers who have open carry policies in place. Cards will cost from .99 to 3.95 and will be available as of October 1 in time for the holidays.

 

Dina Honour is an American writer living in Copenhagen, Denmark. She writes about feminism, politics, relationships, and life abroad. Her work has appeared in Bust, Paste, Hippocampus, among others, and on popular parenting and expat sites. You can find her serious author persona at DinaHonour.com and her more profane blogger persona at Wine and Cheese (Doodles). Or if you prefer morsels, follow along in statuses and characters on Facebook or Twitter.

Image credit: Donkey Hotey via a Creative Commons license.

On Learning the Department of Justice, Using an Artistic Expression Argument, Will Side With the Colorado Baker Who Refused to Sell a Wedding Cake to a Same-Sex Couple

By Joni Mayer

 

The baker is open to the public,
may have asked his other couples
how and where they met—eHarmony,
blind date, a Boulder bar, but never Grindr—
may have been inspired by those data to use
apricot filling in place of peach mousse,
to stack four tiers instead of three,
may have lied under oath to veil his hate
when he said he’d sold gay folks birthday cakes
and retirement cakes. Artistic expression, this reason
will melt in a higher court like buttercream frosting
in the afternoon heat.
A cake is not a poem.

 

 

Joni Mayer grew up in Birmingham, Alabama and has lived in San Diego, California since 1986. After a 30-year career in academia focusing on health behavior research, she retired early to return full time to the world of poetry. Her poems have appeared in AURA Literary Arts Review, Eckerd Review, San Diego Poetry Annual, and Acorn Review.

Photo credit: Victoria Pickering via a Creative Commons license.

Rage Vow

By Cesca Janece Waterfield

 

Hang a wreath on my maiden door, pubic-black and furled,
a bough to say someone has passed over. Bury her pleats
and sweet sestinas among spring narcissus, and if you recall
the flush, soft breast that slipped free in primeval joy,

do not depend on the moon of her aureole now.
There are idiots here, whirling under Mother Ginger’s skirt.
They affirm life on a pedestal proportionately placed
between an embowelment station and a crematory. They stomp

down marbled halls with whirligigs and gee-haws scrawled Freedom,
but their whirring gadgets bear no discernible resemblance
to values their buyers hold up in skidding headlights
of their cognitive discord. I too wear the tag, Idiot, which translates

into French as d’Idiot, but still means you either pump your fist
and squawk, Sin! when the queer cashier gets shit-canned
or you scoop up your piddly change and hurry home
to a lukewarm drip of plans to stand up tomorrow, afraid

of being branded angry woman, pushed from her place
in the rank and file with tickets for tyranny and all-you-can-eat.
Lose that lottery and no more triple axle, 9 miles a gallon.
So I kept writing down forgive and om and sweet Jesus,

can I just get a Pap smear? But I swear, when I meet the proselyte
who stands at the ash heap of books and ideals to witness
there’s nothing left to burn and nothing fit for life, I will strike
a match for the animal, ignitable soul.

 

Cesca Janece Waterfield received an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from McNeese State University. Her fiction and poetry have been published or are forthcoming in journals including Foliate Oak, Blue Collar Review, Deep South Magazine, Inkt|art and more.

Photo credit: Keith Ellwood via a Creative Commons license.