Editor – Page 31 – Writers Resist

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

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.

Pantoum for ‘Real America’

By D.A. Gray

The men we knew have long since passed.
Their bodies still fill the broadest doorways
but something in their eyes, their voice has gone
replaced by a rage that crackles over the radio.

Their bodies still fill the broadest of doorways
and their eyes follow us, from great distances.
There’s only the rage that crackles over the radio
where once warm greetings welcomed us.

The old men’s eyes follow us — from a great distance.
Maybe we just remember our small town wrong
or only think the greetings warm that welcomed us
and not simply suspicion in code.

Maybe we just remember our small town wrong
the way bared teeth appear to be a smile sometimes.
Perhaps it’s simply suspicion in code
or we forgot how far we went to save our way of life.

Bared teeth, from here, looked like smiles sometimes.
Tales across the table — the sum of what we knew.
We never questioned the myth of our way of life.
It was simpler, those images in black and white.

Stories across the table were the sum of what we knew.
Now there’s only rage crackling over the radio.
It was simpler then, reality in black and white —
but the minds we knew have long since passed.

D.A. Gray is the author of the new collection of poems, Contested Terrain (FutureCycle Press, 2017) and one previous collection, Overwatch (Grey Sparrow Press, 2011). His poetry has appeared in The Sewanee Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Appalachian Heritage, Kentucky Review, The Good Men Project, Still: The Journal, War, Literature and the Arts among many other journals. Gray recently completed his graduate work at The Sewanee School of Letters and at Texas A&M-Central Texas. A retired soldier and veteran, the author writes and lives in Central Texas with his wife, Gwendolyn. Visit his website at www.dagray.net.

Image credit: DonkeyHotey via a Creative Commons license.

Two Poems by Laura Orem

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Letter from Guantanamo

Seasons don’t matter except
for the discomfort they bring.
June is just hotter.

The Caribbean thuds against Cuba,
steaming like soup, saltier
than our tears,
if anyone cried here.

Whether we bear it or not,
the pain continues.

The interrogator takes his work
as seriously as Michelangelo
considered the perfect pink
of God’s fingertips.

Once I ate sweet dates and dreamed
of doing something important.

Now the sun, that holy eye,
stares down on the sea and sand,
strikes us blind.

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Radium Girls

We make time luminesce,
our numbers bright as moonglow.

Precise work, oh yes – we lick the brush sharp
after three, after six, then nine, then twelve.

Our quotas absorb us, hunched over the table
ten hours a day, until six o’clock Friday

unlocks us like a key from our benches,
and we are girls again. We splash

giddy magic on our fingertips and hair,
trace brilliant strokes across our eyelids

to dazzle sweet boys on Saturday night.
Such pretty pixies, how we sparkle and dance!

In unseen places, we are cracking and crumbling.
Our bones shatter and burn.

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A note from Laura: If you enjoy knowing that Writers Resist exists, please consider a small contribution, so we can continue to give our writers and artists a little something. Contributions are gratefully accept here. Thanks for reading!

Laura Orem, a poetry editor at Writers Resist, is a poet, essayist and visual artist. She’s the author of Resurrection Biology (Finishing Line Press 2017) and the chapbook Castrata: a Conversation (Finishing Line Press 2014). Laura received an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College and taught writing for many years at Goucher College in Baltimore.

A featured writer at the Best American Poetry blog, Laura’s poetry, essays and art have appeared in many journals, including Nimrod, Zocalo Public Square, DMQ, Everlasting Verses, Blueline, Atticus Review, Barefoot Review, OCHO, and Mipoesias. She lives on a small farm in Red Lion, Pennsylvania with her husband, three dogs, and so many cats she’s afraid to say.

Both poems appear in Resurrection Biology (Finishing Line Press 2017).

Radiolite watches photo credit: Collectors Weekly.

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Civil Discourse in the Trumpocalypse

By Sara Marchant

My brother Marvin is calling me, and, as usual, I debate whether to answer the phone.

My mother claims she never had an affair with Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David, but my brother is so similar to the self-centered, self-absorbed, neurotic nervous maniac David, that I’m not sure I believe her. I don’t watch Curb Your Enthusiasm and I don’t talk to my brother when I’m driving or cooking dinner because vehicular manslaughter and third degree burns are not funny.

Finally, though, as I’m reading on the sofa, I reason it’s safe to be angered by whatever Marvin has to say.

“Marvin.”

“I’m calling for advice.” Marvin prides himself on not going in for a lot of ‘chit-chat,’ and he doesn’t engage in social niceties like hello, how are you, is this a good time?

“Really?” I say. “I doubt that.”

“I’m calling to ask your advice and pay you a compliment.”

I choke on my cinnamon gum as I laugh in disbelief.

“Listen up, I’m talking to you.” Now that sounds more like my brother.

“Two different people have stopped being my friend because they think I’m a Trump supporter.”

“Good for them,” I say and spit out my gum to prevent further choking incidents. I toss it into the trash.

“But I’m not a Trump supporter,” Marvin says incredulously. “I mean, he’s obviously insane.”

“But?”

“But what?” Marvin sounds eager, which makes me wary.

“Have you made comments that led them to believe you’re a Trump supporter?” Of course he has, he’s a giant insensitive punk who thinks only of himself. What’s best for Marvin is all that matters.

“Well, I mean, I am a conservative.”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly, what?” He really is excited by the coming fight. I wish I had more gum.

“Nowadays conservative equals Trump supporter, which equals asshole. I’d kick you to the curb, too, if I were your friend.” I chew the skin off my thumb’s cuticle in lieu of gum.

“You can’t say I’m an asshole just because I am a conservative.”

“I’m not. I don’t think you’re an asshole because you’re a conservative; I think you became a conservative because you’re an asshole.” I say this slowly so he’s sure to follow. “You’re selfish, shallow, and incapable of empathy.”

“I’m going to tell Mom,” my forty-eight-year-old brother says.

“Mom thinks you’re an asshole, too.”

“She does not!”

“She says your unpleasant personality is mitigated only by your handsomeness.”

“I am extremely handsome,” Marvin concedes.

“You look exactly like Mom.” He does, and our mom looked like Lucy Lawless (Xena: Warrior Princess) when she was young. “I’m hanging up now.”

“Wait, wait.” My brother is almost gleeful. I dread when he gets like this. He enjoys inciting me. If I lose control, let him know he’s getting a rise out of me, he wins. “But you’re friends with that conservative lady, the survivalist prepper-lady. That’s the compliment I was going to pay you—you’re not kicking her to the curb.”

“She’s not an asshole,” I respond. My temper is no longer fraying. I’ve temporarily clawed back from the edge, but I’ve also started chewing the skin of my other thumb. “She was raised by conservative Christians—narrow-minded white people from a homogenous state—to fear the other and think of herself as superior because of her blond hair and white skin. But now she’s found Jesus—again!—and she’s trying to do better, to be better. She’s just really annoying with the conservatism. It’s not like you. You were raised better. Your assholery is a character flaw.”

My brother gives the high-pitched giggle that means he’s both nervous and happy that he’s irritated someone to the point that they have to defend born-again Christian survivalists prepping for the coming invasion of ISIS. The cuticle around my middle finger is now bleeding.

“Anyway, you can keep your compliment,” I say. “She isn’t my friend anymore.”

“Since when?” Marvin is way too excited about this. “Because you’re too liberal? Because everyone at your party was gay? When did she break up with you? The party was, like, a week ago.”

I pause. I want to measure time so he understands that his questions are absurd, rude, and invasive. But he won’t ever understand, I know. Probably, he doesn’t even understand why he is so emotionally invested.

“Well?” Marvin asks. “Are you there?”

“She knew everyone was gay beforehand. I told her flat out that if she had a problem with that not to attend. Frankly, I think she came just to prove she isn’t a bigot.”

“You hurt her feelings,” Marvin says. “You offended her.”

“People with Infowars bumper stickers don’t get to be offended when others call them out on their ignorance, bigotry, and hate.” I’ve started chewing the skin from my littlest finger, but remove it from my mouth so that Marvin is sure to understand. “Advertising your hate means you want to be called out.”

“Infowars!” Marvin is rendered mute for two seconds. “Now that shit is awful.”

“Yep.”

“But she still came to the party; she seemed happy to be there. She was nice to me when you wouldn’t come down and open the gate. When did she stop being your friend?” He’s like a tiny fruit fly that you can’t see well enough to swat.

Marvin liking someone because she sympathized with him when I wouldn’t leave the thirty-plus guests in my house, while trying to keep the buffet going and everyone’s glass full, in order to walk half a mile in 112 degree heat to open my front gate so that my brother wouldn’t have to leave the comfort of his air conditioned car for two minutes is so typical I don’t even bother to address it.

“At the party, when Eduardo introduced himself, she told him her name and that she worked with me at the school. Eduardo said, ‘Oh my god! I’ve read about you!’ She hadn’t known about the essay or that I’d used her real name. And I guess that pissed her off. She stopped calling or returning emails—she’s sticking a fork in our friendship.”

Marvin is quiet. Then he starts to laugh. A big belly laugh, not his anxious giggle. He delights in catching me wrong-footed. He is loving evidence of my assholery. Then he quiets again.å

“Maybe you should stop writing essays about people,” he says.

We are both thinking of our sister. We are remembering an essay I wrote that made our sister so angry she stopped speaking to me. She sold her house, moved to Idaho, and we haven’t seen her since. It’s been years. Marvin is giggling again, sniggering really.

My brother was a conservative before the Trumpocalypse, and even though he says Trump is insane and he can’t support him, Marvin is gloating that his team is in power. He doesn’t see how this diminishes me. As a white non-Hispanic, my half brother doesn’t see how this diminishes me as a person of Mexican heritage, as a woman who’d like control of her own body, as a sister who realizes she’ll never be able to make her brother view her as anything other than an addendum to his own life and identity.

“Maybe I’ll write an essay about you, bozo,” I say.

“If you do, I won’t get angry,” he promises. “I’ll send it to all my friends.”

“All your ex-friends,” I interrupt.

“I’ll say, ‘Read this mean essay my mean liberal sister wrote about me.”

“You’re such a pendejo.”

“I’ll brag about the mean essay.”

“I’ll do it, punk.”

“I’ll say, ‘My sister calls me the asshole for being conservative, but she’s the one starting shit with mean liberal essays.’”

“I am hanging up now, jerk face.”

“Tell me you love me before you go write a mean essay about me.”

“I love you, and I am going to write the meanest essay I possibly can so all your friends break up with you.”

Marvin is laughing his loud belly laugh of irritating glee as I end the call. All my cuticles are bleeding. I realize he never asked me for advice, the supposed purpose of his call. I never asked him what advice he wanted or why he wanted to ask it of me. This is so typical of us that I giggle, sigh, and bandage my fingers. The phone rings again and I see it’s my mother. I answer.

“Did you tell your brother that I think he’s an asshole?”

A note from Sara: If you enjoy knowing that Writers Resist exists, please consider a small contribution, so we can continue to give our writers and artists a little something. Contributions are gratefully accept here. Thanks for reading!

Sara Marchant, a founding editor of Writers Resist, received her MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside/Palm Desert. Her work has been published by The Manifest Station, Every Writer’s Resource, Full Grown People, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Coachella Review, Writers Resist, East Jasmine Review, and ROAR. Sara’s nonfiction can be found in the women of color anthology All the Women in My Family Sing, and her novella Let Me Go has been anthologized by Running Wild Press.

Long ago and far away, she worked at The San Diego Natural History Museum in their BiNational Education Department utilizing her BA in Latin American History. In her spare time she teaches Critical Thinking and Writing at Mt. San Jacinto College to the new generation that she hopes will someday save our society from its nihilistic impulses. She lives in the high desert of Southern California with her husband, two dogs, a goat, and five chickens.

Photo courtesy of the author.

Cast

By Ruth Nolan

Many bones have been broken here
in the tricky Mojave River quicksand,
huge Cottonwood trees taken down,
gnawed low to the marrow by beavers.

Behind me, the shadow of a man, his
fishing pole slung across his shoulder.
He tells me he will catch crawdads first,
skin and fry a trout or two for dinner.

He asks me to read a fat brown worm
onto his rusty hook. He is ready to fish.
My hands are strong, my fingers shake.

He casts his lure and waits for the first bite.
I snap fat twigs, break branches, build a fire.

A note from Ruth: If you enjoy knowing that Writers Resist exists, please consider a small contribution, so we can continue to give our writers and artists a little something. Contributions are gratefully accept here. Thanks for reading!

Ruth Nolan, a poetry editor at Writers Resist, is a professor of English and Creative Writing at College of the Desert in Palm Desert, California, and an author, lecturer and editor. She worked with the international, United Nations-sponsored literary program Dialogue Through Poetry / Rattapallax Press, from 2001 through 2004, and is now involved with many desert environment organizations as a writer and advocate for environmental justice. She’s the author of the poetry book Ruby Mountain (Finishing Line Press 2016). Her short story, “Palimpsest,” published in LA Fiction: Southland Writing by Southland Writers (Red Hen Press 2016), received an Honorable Mention in Sequestrum Magazine’s 2016 Editor’s Reprint contest and was also nominated for a 2016 PEN Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.

Ruth’s writing has also been published in James Franco Review; Angels Flight LA/Literary West; Rattling Wall; KCET/Artbound Los Angeles; Lumen; Desert Oracle; Women’s Studies Quarterly; News from Native California; Sierra Club Desert Report, Lumen; The Desert Sun/USA Today and Inlandia Literary Journeys.

Photo credit: Born1945 via a Creative Commons license.

An Old Dog Never Barks at Gunmen

By Bola Opaleke

– Neither should you,

a wise man once said. Even pickaxes
and sledgehammers would do just fine –
like pickaxe-men or sledgehammer-men.

That reminds me of people that left
raising a finger of “revenge my death” up so high

as the bullet-ridden body thuds. What the soldiers
have done to us – young girls –
teaching our heliotropic breasts how to worship the sun,

boys abandoning the fishing rods
for militants’ rifles, men and women

waking up in the morning
to homelessness. A daughter defiled
before the helpless father – his body at twilight,

dangling from a rope hugging a barren tree
his wooden hands never again to cradle a crying child.

I saw a mother rubbing her frail skin with black ash
from her son’s barrow, invoking spirits
of vengeance from that mound. Soldiers

picking our tiniest vein to sew up our lips –
to make us talk in pains – to force us to obey

word count. No soldiers. No! The poor barks
at the Law (that only eavesdrops). These ordinances give
different uniforms to different soldiers

at different levels of our democracy.
These soldiers, wearing different gears –

bath in “constitution of lies.”
But because an old dog never barks at gunmen,
neither do we. “Raise a sword

of rebellion against thieves and murderers,”
wrote a poet,” and watch politics be

white as snow.” Not soaring past
the red line that says: survive or die
because we already fall in love

with “Que Sera Sera” –
that evergreen lyric of consolation

seeping through. Radios and televisions
propagating that wise saying every minute:
“an old dog never barks at gunmen –

neither should you.”

Author’s note: This poem was inspired by the recent incidents surrounding Kenya’s presidential election. And the attack, arrest and imprisonment of the Catalan leaders seeking independence from Spain.

Bola Opaleke is a Nigerian-Canadian poet residing in Winnipeg, MB. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, Cleaver, One, The Nottingham Review, The Puritan, The Literary Review of Canada, Sierra Nevada Review, Dissident Voice, Poetry Quarterly, The Indianapolis Review, Miracle E-Zine, Poetry Pacific, Drunk Monkeys, League of Canadian Poets (Poetry Month 2013), Pastiche Magazine, The Society, Vol. 10, 2013, St. Peter’s College, University of Saskatchewan, and others. He holds a degree in City Planning.

Photo credit: g0d4ather via a Creative Commons license.

Author: Editor