Editor – Page 33 – Writers Resist

Upon Recognizing Yesterday’s ‘Well-Meaning’ Poem Was Still as Paternalistic as Ever

By D. R. James

—1/22/17

Outside, still January, but 40 not 15,
gauzy, black-and-white woods
from The Wolf Man. Inside,
a gauzy-gray (un?)consciousness
from This White Man, half-reclined
in buttery, dove-gray leather. It’s envisioning
millions of protesting women, now back
perhaps in their individual towns,
their power proclaimed not awakened,
or still making their way back
from D.C., G.R., L.A., NYC,
Denver, Chicago, Baltimore,
Honolulu, Madison, Wichita,
Reno, Boston, Memphis, Atlanta,
Albuquerque, Gulfport, Asbury Park,
Laramie, Ashville, Orlando, Seattle,
Old Saybrook, Corpus Christie, Erie, Roanoke,
Eugene, New Delhi, Vienna, Minsk,
La Paz, Prague, Strasbourg, Botswana,
EX Village des Jeux Ankorondrano,
Dublin, Athens, San Jose, Sofia,
Copenhagen, Tel Aviv, Geneva, Liverpool,
Cape Town, Moscow, Yellow Knife, Beirut,
Buenos Aires, Belgrade, Bangkok, Boise …
Will it never, ever learn?

D. R. James is the author of the poetry collection Since Everything Is All I’ve Got (March Street Press) and five chapbooks, including most recently Why War and Split-Level (both from Finishing Line Press). Poems have appeared in various journals, such as Caring Magazine, Coe Review, Diner, Dunes Review, Friends of William Stafford Newsletter, HEArt Online, Hotel Amerika, North Dakota Quarterly, Passager, Rattle, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and Sycamore Review, and anthologies, including Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford (Woodley) and Poetry in Michigan / Michigan in Poetry (New Issues). James lives in Saugatuck, Michigan, and has been teaching writing, literature, and peace-making at Hope College for 32 years. Read about D. R. James here.

Photo credit: Daniel Oines via a Creative Commons license.

The Woman Candidate

By Caralyn Davis

“You crave power,” they said.

“Everyone who runs for president craves power. You need power to get things done,” the woman candidate said. “The question is: What will each of us do with that power?”

“Women shouldn’t want that much power. You’re corrupt,” they said. “Look, here’s an article from a website our friends like that proves you’re corrupt. You’re a sleazy thief, an unpatriotic traitor, a murderer, a child molester, a slave owner. You’re also probably dying of a dread disease. You’re any caricature we can think of that justifies the fact that our skin crawls because you are powerful—and you seek more power still.”

“I want to help you, but I won’t make promises that aren’t attainable in the here and now,” the woman candidate said.

“You’re evil,” they said.

“I never claimed to be perfect, but I always did my best for the American people. Could you listen to what I have to say—consider my policy proposals?” the woman candidate said.

“You’re evil,” they said.

“Is it just me? Would you listen to another woman who doesn’t supplicate men?” the woman candidate said.

“Of course,” they said.

“Here’s my daughter. She has two master’s degrees and a doctorate,” the woman candidate said.

“She’s evil too, and that’s nepotism—she’s never worked a day in her life,” they said.

“Here’s the woman minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. She helped millions more Americans get healthcare at great political cost, and she helped pass an interim federal budget that keeps funding key programs when the president and his party wanted them cut,” the woman candidate said.

“She’s Hollywood liberal elite, trying to gut the values of the heartland, or she’s a neoliberal corporate shill. We can’t make up our minds, but either way, we hate her,” they said.

“Here’s a woman senator, a former state attorney general,” the woman candidate said.

“With those tits and that ass, she slept her way into every job she’s had,” they said.

“Here’s a woman senator who worked as a waitress to help pay her way through law school,” the woman candidate said.

“Talking the way she does, she’s unbalanced—hysterical,” they said.

“Here’s a fourteen-term congresswoman who champions the working class, women, and people of color,” the woman candidate said.

“She’s a racist conspiracy theorist, plus her wigs are as manly as your pantsuits,” they said.

“Here’s …” the woman candidate said.

“Not her either,” they said.

Caralyn Davis lives in Asheville, N.C., and works as a freelance writer/editor for trade publications in the healthcare and technology transfer fields. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Word Riot, Eclectica, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Superstition Review, EXPOUND, Monkeybicycle, and other journals. She likes cat acrobatics. She can be found on Twitter @CaralynDavis.

Image credit: DonkeyHotey via a Creative Commons license.

Boy Bye

Boy Bye

By Lauren Marie Scovel

Lauren Marie Scovel is a Boston-based bookseller and editorial assistant. She graduated from Emerson College with degrees in Writing, Literature, Publishing and Theatre Studies. This photograph was taken with a Promaster 2500PK Super film camera at the Women’s March in Washington D.C.

İblis döl salıbdı, Şeytan bələkdə / The devil gave birth, and now Satan is in diapers

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By Mirza Sakit

İblis döl salıbdı, Şeytan bələkdə,
Şərlənən məmləkət yıxılmaqdadı
Altun qolbağılar əyri biləkdə,
Düz bilək qandalda sıxılmaqdadı

Abır da gözləyib çəkdin pərdəni,
Halal buğda əkdin, indi ver dəni
Oğrunun əliylə “Şöhrət” ordeni,
Namərd yaxasına taxılmaqdadı

Dədəsin gizlədən buzda xəlvəti,
Sən də gözləyirsən ondan mürvəti
Tanrının verdiyi Xalqın sərvəti,
Sırtılmış üzlərə yaxılmaqdadı

Mirzə söylədikcə dürüst kəlməsin,
Deyirlər qürbətdən durub gəlməsin
Həqiqət danışan, haqq deyən kəsin,
Başına güllələr çaxılmaqdadı…

Mirza Sakit is an Azerbaijani poet, writer, journalist and satirist. While working for the newspaper Azadliq, he was arrested for his anti-government writing and imprisoned for three years in Azerbaijan. His arrest caused an uproar in the international writers community and among numerous human rights organizations, including PEN America. He was granted asylum by Belgium, and now lives and writes there. He’s the author of four books, critical of the Azerbaijani authoritarian regime.

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English translation by Murad Jalilov and Kevin Rabas

The devil gave birth to Satan, a sign
that this slandered country is about to fall.
Golden bracelets hang from crooked wrists,
and metal handcuffs tighten around righteous wrists.

You closed the curtains to preserve your dignity.
You planted the seeds, and now let us harvest the grain.
But, with the hands of a thief, you hang the medal of “honor”
on the chest of the unkind.

You hide your father in ice, keep him frozen,
wishing his immortality,
while the God-given wealth of our nation
stains bent faces.

Whenever I speak up honestly,
I am told to stay in exile.
Anyone in their right mind
is shot in the head.

Murad Jalilov has recently graduated with BAs in English and Political Science at Emporia State University and is a graduate student in the MA program in Russian and Eastern European Studies at University of Oregon. He has poems published in Quivira and is active in his literary community. He is fluent is Russian, Azerbaijani, Turkish, and English.

Kevin Rabas, Poet Laureate of Kansas (2017-2019), teaches at Emporia State University, where he leads the poetry and playwriting tracks. He has seven books, including Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano, a Kansas Notable Book and Nelson Poetry Book Award winner.

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Photo credit: Segment of the sculpture “Shadows of the Wanderer” by Brazilian artist Ana Maria Pacheco.

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Stand Up

By Linda Parsons

Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down,
sit down, you’re rockin’ the boat.

—Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls

Lo these many years,
I the peacemaker, the walker on eggshells,
the biter of lips, the please pleaser, the clay
not the molder, the stream not the bank,
the moss not the rock, the stern not the bow,
queen of if only I’d said, if only I’d done.
Lo I say unto you, I’m done with sit down,
sit down, done with the broom and its dust,
old love and its rust, the future walking right
out the door. Hear me, I’m here with a voice
from the gloom, the moon-filled room, rise
of wing to beat the band, however long
I must stand is how long I’ll rock,
rock, rock the boat.

Grab this, strike this,
be peace in the deafest of ears, be this,
if you can bear the whole of me holding
up half the sky’s the limit, be aware,
O beware the end is near, the end of silence
of reticence of swallowing it down, choking
on what can’t be told in mixed company.
I’ll be clearing my throat, unbending
my knee, strapping my heart to my sleeve.
The one speaking aloud who sings without
pause, the unturned cheek, the unshut eye,
who digs her heels in this wide-awake
moment and lets the mother tongue fly.

Linda Parsons is a poet, playwright, and an editor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She is the reviews editor for Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel and served as poetry editor of Now & Then magazine for many years. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, One, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Shenandoah, in Ted Kooser’s column American Life in Poetry, and in numerous anthologies. This Shaky Earth is her fourth poetry collection (Texas Review Press). Parsons’s adaptation, Macbeth Is the New Black, co-written with Jayne Morgan, was produced at Maryville College and Western Carolina University, and her play Under the Esso Moon was read as part of the 2016 Tennessee Stage Company’s New Play Festival and received a staged reading in spring 2017.

Photo credit: Shivenis via a Creative Commons license.

How to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich

By Maggie Downs

Gather your ingredients. You’ll need peanut butter, jelly, the bread of your choice, and a clean, sharp knife.
Spread peanut butter evenly onto one side of the bread using your knife. Acknowledge the fact that the winner of our constitutionally legitimate but antiquated electoral process is a person who threatens democracy on a daily basis.
As Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress says on Medium, “To declare him illegitimate is to shake the foundations of the American system, but to fail to do so is to risk leveling those foundations to the ground.”
Our entire system is under assault. We must be clear about that.
Wash your knife before dipping it into the jelly jar. Slow down, pay attention, remain alert. These thoughts pulse through your body so often they have become a mantra, suffusing even the mundanities of everyday life. Accept that resistance is a part of you now, because it has to be.
Spread jelly evenly onto the other slice of bread. Strengthen your resolve. Defend journalists. Subscribe to newspapers and magazines. Do your own research. Read books and literature for valuable historical context. Call your elected officials and use your voice while you still have one. Learn from those in other countries. Defend facts.
“To abandon facts is to abandon freedom,” says Yale history professor Timothy Snyder in his guide to defending democracy. “If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.”
Press the two slices of bread together. Recognize that in order to prevent the next Donald Trump, we must find fierce leaders who are not just willing to reject the damaging policies from the last few decades, but those who will actively pass progressive legislation that furthers equality, strengthens civil liberties, and works to the benefit of every American, particularly those in marginalized groups.
Cut the sandwich diagonally to form triangles. Enjoy! Know that without pushing the lever of justice forward, there is no victory. Without addressing the culture that brought us Trump, we are simply waiting for the next deranged figure to rise to power. Without hacking away at the roots of white supremacy, authoritarianism, and xenophobia, that toxic plant can bloom again.
Hang on to the knife.

Maggie Downs a writer based in Palm Springs, California. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Today.com, and a 2016 Lonely Planet anthology of world’s best travel writing. She was a newspaper reporter for more than fifteen years and has freelanced for such outlets as Smithsonian, Outside, Palm Springs Life, and the BBC. Find her on twitter @downsanddirty.

lavender:

By Lily Moody

Pink or blue

When our daughters are taught to hold their tongues and our sons are taught to hold their tears, when all we want to do is scream and sob.

Pink or blue

When dolls and toy trucks, bows and baseball gloves are used as barriers to separate us,
when femininity and masculinity are shamed from crossing paths.

Pink or blue

When the blood pumps the same through all bodies and these bones cage a fire so much brighter than they will ever begin to understand.

When he paints his lips dark red and finally feels beautiful, when she lets the hair on her body grow into a forest.

Lily Moody is a former yet-to-be-published writing student and an activist, located in Southern New Hampshire and hoping to make a difference through poetry and prose.

Photo credit: Homo Erectus via a Creative Commons license.

Human fatigue

By Eduardo Escalante

1. close into symbols

The city looked full
artery of Santiago choked with cars
a tatted man
was standing in front of a tree
Affirmed to a symbol
in this street
there was no crosswalk
his body jumped
It seemed 3d drawing
We can leave we can look
the tattoo is the sign because he jumps

2. the boy with the gun

The morning opened obscure
The sun had eye closed
I walked for different streets
An old lady looked at me from her window
When the church
men with revolvers assaulting a car
One looked at my head
he was fourteen years old
And with a bullet touched my shoes
While a bus passed

3. winter city

Poor looks poor
Shoes too big
He did have a hat
He lacked affection in his arm
He scratched his head again and again
The city is always indulgent

4. being in the city

it is like swimming in the swamp
it does not walk away
The pain is there
suffering seems a fate
tighter tighter tighter
against an endless swirl of human wind.
the whole world comes to spectacle,
arrive all private woe and
we see the public farce.
Samples of oligarchy even if they are plastic
too much people fill their hearts and lungs with ashes
It is difficult to be a part
of a policy signed and sealed.

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: Javier Vieras via a Creative Commons license.

Standing Rock, 2016

By Marydale Stewart

I sent my heart, that figurative muscle,
that metaphor, that emblem,
to go in my stead to Standing Rock

where my feet have never known the steady earth,
that certain sky, the remembered places the wind has been,
where I’ve never known another living being as my own,
where the people came together
building, feeding, singing, hoping,
where grief and hope called them all together,
where they’re showing a nation how to be a nation.

I’ve been to other places where the land I stood on
spoke to me with a blackbird’s call, a silvered silent creek,
where I sheltered in the humming wind for days, nights,
and the long singing years.

Helpless I am in love and grief,
for the earth is my home, wherever I am.

Marydale Stewart is a retired English teacher and librarian. She received her Ph.D. at Northern Illinois University and taught at NIU and community colleges. She has a chapbook, Inheritance (Puddin’head Press, Chicago, 2008), and two poetry collections, Let the Thunder In (Boxing Day Books, Princeton, IL, 2014) and The Walking Man, forthcoming from Kelsay Books, Hemet, CA, October 2017. A novel, The Wanderers, is forthcoming from Black Rose Writing, Castroville, TX, also in October 2017. She has poems in a number of literary magazines.

“Standing Rock” was published in the 2017 “Refugees and the Displaced” edition of DoveTales, Writing for Peace, Ft. Collins, CO.

Photo credit: Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Mirror Shield Project at the Oceti Sakowin Camp near Standing Rock, ND, 2016

Going to Ground

By Sarah Einstein

Like a good citizen, I call my senators at least once a week these days, but their aides are brusque. They tell me that Alexander and Corker support the president’s education agenda/healthcare reform/immigration order or whatever I’m outraged about on a given day. In the first few weeks, they’d thank me for my call. Now they simply say, “Your objection is noted,” and hang up as quickly as they can. Once, as if caught off guard, one said, “Are you sure you live in Tennessee?”

………………………..Liberty or Tyranny?……………………………..

I carry my passport with me everywhere these days.

I’ve begun to sort that which is precious from that which is not. I make a small pile of the things I’d pack in the night, a larger one of the stuff I would leave. Everyone is insisting we’re just one Reichstag fire away from fascism. On the news, I watch a steady stream of black people murdered by the State for their blackness, and I think it’s more likely that we’ve already had the Anschluss.

When I travel, I wear an inherited diamond I feel silly wearing at home. I remember being told when I was younger that a Jewish woman should always have enough jewelry on her body to bribe her way over a border. At the time it seemed quaint. Now it seems key. For the moment, the diamond ring’s still on my finger. I wonder if there will come a day I’ll need to sew it into the hem of my coat.

Over coffee, my friend Meredith talks about joining the resistance in a way that suggests we’re headed for a war she thinks we can win. I talk about going to ground, about building false walls to hide people waiting for fake passports and safe transport. We scare ourselves and then laugh at ourselves, but after the laughing we are still scared.

Meredith wasn’t always Meredith, and there is a passel of bills in our state legislature designed to make it impossible for her to be Meredith now. I tell her I will hide her in my hidden rooms, if it comes to that. She says she won’t be hidden, but she might move to Atlanta.

My coffee these days is chamomile tea. I’m jittery enough as it is.

If we flee, we will go to my husband’s family in Austria. They assure us that we’ll be safe there, should it come to that, and I believe them. They’ve clearly learned lessons that we have not. The irony of this is not lost on me; there are Nazis in the family albums.

My husband has stopped talking about becoming an American citizen and started talking about being an anchor relative.

My friend Jessica is spending all her vacation time in Israel this year, establishing the Right of Return. I’ve stopped questioning the politics of this; refugees go where they can.

This Hanukah, I will give my niece and nephews passports if they don’t already have them. If they do, I will give them whatever they ask for. I’ve lifted my moratorium on war toys. Maybe they should know how to handle a gun.

My closest disabled friends and I swap lists of medications and start to horde the things one or some of us need against the day we lose access to them. We read up on actual expiration versus labeled expiration dates. We refill prescriptions before we need to, just in case.

I have six boxes of Plan B in my closet, even though I’m long past childbearing years. On campus, I spread rumors about a shadowy network of old women who will help younger women with travel and money for abortions if they can’t get the healthcare they need in their hometowns. I call all my old woman friends and build the network. I keep their names and numbers in handwritten lists and hide them away.

I refuse to let my husband put a “Stop Trump” bumper sticker on our car. “That’s just foolish,” I say. I let him keep the Cthulu fish. For now.

A young woman cries in my office, afraid that if she comes out to her parents they will disown her; she’s still financially dependent on them. I tell her that she doesn’t have to come out to them now, or ever, if she doesn’t feel safe doing so. She looks shocked. It breaks my heart to have been the first to suggest the safety of the closet to her; I wonder what she is coming out of, if it had never occurred to her to remain in.

I’ve stopped going to protests and started going to meetings for which there are no flyers or Facebook event notices. To find them, you have to know someone who already has. We talk there of things I won’t write here. At first, we turned off our phones. Now, we leave them at home.

And yet, still, like a good citizen, I call my senators at least once a week. Their aides are brusque. In the first few weeks, they’d thank me for my call. Now they hang up as quickly as they can. I haven’t yet given up on the dream of America, but I’m making contingency plans.

Sarah Einstein teaches Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The Sun, Ninth Letter, Still, and other journals, and been awarded a Pushcart and a Best of the Net. She is the author of Mot: A Memoir (University of Georgia Press, 2015) and Remnants of Passion (Shebooks, 2014). Visit Sara’s website at www.saraheinstein.com.

“Liberty?” 1903, from the Library of Congress.

This essay was previously published by Full Grown People.

Clarion Reminder

By Laura Grace Weldon

The powerful provoke the powerless
to push against one another.
Their power grows by keeping us
in all kinds of prisons.

Yet we are not powerless.

Remember the black bear
roaming Clarion County, Pennsylvania,
its head trapped a month or more
in a metal-ringed pail.

Remember those who chased it for hours,
grabbed it in a perilous embrace,
carefully sawed loose those tight bonds.
Imagine what they felt as the bear
ran free into the woods.
Imagine, too, the bear.

Laura Grace Weldon is the author of a poetry collection, Tending, and a handbook of alternative education, Free Range Learning. She has a collection of essays due out soon. Laura has written poetry with nursing home residents, used poetry to teach conflict resolution, and painted poems on beehives, although her work appears in more conventional places, such as J Journal, Penman Review, Literary Mama, Christian Science Monitor, Mom Egg Review, Dressing Room Poetry Journal, Shot Glass Journal, and others. Connect with her on Facebook, Twitter or at her site, lauragraceweldon.com.

Photo credit: Tiffany Terry via a Creative Commons license.

White Privilege

By Keith Welch

the U.S. Caucasian has
a marvelous power

invisible, noticed
only by its absence

subtle in action:

the lack of a shadow
following you through a 7-11

or utterly, terribly clear:

the lack of 19 bullet holes
piercing your body

on the news, you may notice
your senior photo
instead of a mug shot

in the city, the absence
of a cop’s hand
in your pockets

in your car, a warning
instead of dying
in a jail cell

there are those who will deny
the power’s very existence

it shouts its presence
to those outside its shield

Keith Welch lives in Bloomington, Indiana. He has had work published in Louisville’s Leo magazine, and online at Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis. Follow him on Twitter: @outraged_poet.

Photo credit: Image of Ti-Rock Moore‘s sculpture “Just Sayin” by Bart Everson via a Creative Commons license.

Hail and Farewell to Editors of Poetry

Writers Resist is delighted to welcome our new poetry editor, Ruth Nolan, MFA, University of California Riverside. Already a contributing writer, Ruth brings to the journal a deep understanding of the power of the written word.

Ruth said of poetry’s role in the resistance, “Poetry is at heart a political entity, one that is both personal and public. Poetry is the most specific and enduring heart-soul language. It crosses and connects cultures seamlessly, and compels us to not only look at—and oppose—what’s around us in difficult and oppressive times, but to act in the name of truth and justice to evoke living models for the continued sustainability of humanity.”

While we welcome Ruth, we’re sad to say farewell to Rae Rose, our founding poetry editor, but she is moving on to fabulous things. She’s now the editor of Kids! San Diego Poetry Annual, a new publication and poetry program from the San Diego Entertainment + Arts Guild. Rae is excited to pass the poetic torch to Ruth, whom she describes as “Amazing!” and for good reason.

Ruth 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. Connect with Ruth via Twitter @ruthnolan.

Best of all, Ruth comes bearing gifts—a poem for our readers. …

Dream Act

By Ruth Nolan

She rinses burnt skin away from green chilis,
her hands stinging from the burn of spicy seeds,
her hands singed from working in the desert sun
so close to where children cry for their parents.

She strips skin from hearts, muscle from stem,
and looks to the sky. Storm clouds, rising high
over Mexico. She slips families of chilis into
ziplock bags, packs them tight as contraband.

Tonight, mute dreams will ache skyward like
towering date palms, fruit sacs tightly bound.
Tonight, fat clouds the shape of sperm whales
will swim across the line with promises of rain.

Photo credit: “Strange Heat” by Georgie Dee via a Creative Commons license.

Oral History of the New Colossus

By Lea Grover

I come from a people of wandering,
of desert paths swept clean of footprints by thousand year gusts of wind,
of vanishing,
of villages abandoned as not only my great-grandmothers but I
carried what mattered across oceans and borders
and the ticking of latitude and longitude beneath tired feet,
soles hardened by lifetimes searching for security in silences.
Safety made only by pillars of hands reaching to pull each other up,
reaching for those left behind.
A Babel towering over each town
teetering, fear and suspicion pulling apart,
toppling,
leaving my people to wander,
wondering if our hands faltered
and what we might have lost.

I come from a people of wandering.
my ancestors’ feet carried traces of soil to Israel from Shushan by way of Palestine,
fleeing Portuguese diaspora and Gestapo,
to know always they tracked the same soil,
black against brown skin faded pale
from Persia to Prussia to Poland and Russia
to Bergen-Belsen
to oblivion.
I come from a people of otherness,
of isolation and exile and inquisition,
a people who carried, clutched to their chests,
hope and compassion,
the need to give, and to find, and to share.
I come from a line of translators and teachers,
scientists and novelists
physicists and activists,
magicians, philosophers, insurance sellers,
holy men and fortunetellers,
and they melded into my bones and my muscles the memories
of the things they carried and the eternal instructions—
“Never forget.”
They carried this call to a land built by slaves,
who picked cotton instead of building pyramids or Volkswagons,
awareness of what is lost when a people are torn from home and tongue,
Kunta Kinte refusing renaming reminded us of
identity replaced by tattoo.

I come from a people of kippot and mitpachat,
forbidden to own land or hold office
but permitted to touch money believed only slightly less filthy than they.
A people who took lemons grown from oppression and made bitter lemonade,
who thrived despite obstruction and accusation and assault.
Kippot and mitpachat could have been kefiyah and hijab,
words that are foreign
for clothing that is foreign
for people who are foreign
with religions that are foreign
when foreign means feared.
Banking could have been
picking tomatoes for pennies a pint,
speaking languages that are foreign
in customs that are foreign
with faces that are foreign
when foreign means abhorred
and hatred is directed toward any people who once explored after exile
and came in hordes to a beacon of welcome proclaiming,
“Give me your tired and your poor,”
any people of wandering.

I come from a people of wandering,
but I look into the shadows of their past and I see what I have,
a history,
my own Tower of Babel built of spaces between silences,
of the hands of immigrants and outsiders.
I see the path behind of violence and vengeance
condemning my descendants to the same fate of remembrance.
When I press into my daughters’ bones and muscles the memories of their mother’s people,
when I scar them with the words, “Never again,”
I speak not only for my grandmothers and their grandmothers and their grandmothers
but I,
for all our children,
with the same dirt on the soles of their feet
of deserts crossed and mountains scaled.
Skin brown or black or pale,
tempest tossed, torn and assailed,
souls yearning to breathe free,
however foreign or familiar,
still mishpachah,
still family.
Still we reach in the security of silence to pull each other up,
reaching for those left behind.
If only to lose no more.
Beside any golden door we must lift our lamps,
we wanderers of generations,
to mourn together in our teetering, tottering towers.
Drink the bitter lemonade of our ancestors.
We carried only what mattered,
the same dirt on our feet,
wandering the same path back and back and back again,
wondering if this time it has led us home.

Lea Grover is a writer and speaker in Chicago. She began studying prose when she was admitted to college at fourteen years of age, five years after her first poetry publication. Her writing can be found in many anthologies, and she contributes to Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and Bustle, among other magazines online and in print. Lea speaks about sex positivity parenting and on behalf of the RAINN Speakers Bureau. Her current projects include a memoir about the similarities between battling brain cancer and mental illness, and a series of children’s books.

Photo credit: Surian Soosay via a Creative Commons license.

The Which In Waiting

By R.W.W. Greene

Joanne’s television remote hit the wall hard, spawning batteries and bits of plastic that chose their own paths to the floor. She flicked the switch on the power strip that governed the media center and picked up the tarnished hourglass she’d readied before tuning into the ceremony.

Four years would likely be enough, but eight years would be safer. She fit the timepiece into the mechanical hourglass turner she’d ginned up from a junked dryer and set the counter to 70,080. The machine wub-wubbed competently, turning the hourglass end over end over end widdershins. The counter changed to 70,079, then 70,078, then 70,077. … The rig wasn’t pretty, but it beat turning the hourglass by hand.

Joanne stifled a yawn. She had time to kill before the spell gelled, and she used it to clean out her refrigerator and haul everything to the compost heap. The rose and blackberry bushes she’d planted around the house were growing fast. Thorns bristled every which way, and the stems were already thicker than a baby’s wrist.

Joanne locked her front gate and went back inside to send an email to her accountant.

“Democracy disappoints again, pal. Dropping out for a while,” she wrote. “Keep the bills paid, will you? – Jo.”

She didn’t wait for a response. Tasha Islam had been her accountant for more than a century, and she trusted her. She’d helped set Tasha up in business, after all, and was still her best source for exotic referrals.

Joanne unplugged all of her appliances and took a shower. She brushed her teeth and gargled with Listerine. She browsed Pinterest while waiting for the readout to blink zero, then moved the hourglass to her bedside table. The sand inside glowed like embers. Outside, the bushes finished their expansion, surrounding Joanne’s home with a dense wall of brambles and thorns. If that proved inadequate, she also had one of the local dragons on retainer. Joanne rolled a sleeping bag out on the bed and zipped herself inside. The spell took hold, and her pulse slowed. Her eyelids fluttered. Her heart stopped. Her last breath dissipated in the air above her bed, and the dust motes resumed their course.

Time passed.

In Cambridge, a scientist announced a cure for cancer and was murdered in his sleep, his research stolen. A passing meteor resulted in a near panic and the formation of three new doomsday cults. A calf was born with two heads, inspiring yet another doomsday cult. Prince’s estate released a new album, “1999 Had Nuthin’ on This Party.” David Bowie’s estate launched his entire catalog—including three never before heard albums—into deep space in search of extraterrestrial musicologists. The polar ice caps melted some more, but no one bothered to measure them. Russia laid claim to East Germany. NASA cancelled the Mars mission: “Too little, too late,” a spokeswoman said. A super storm flooded most of the East Coast. The “Fantastic Four” franchise got a fourth failed relaunch. A Cuban upstart claimed to be Fidel Castro in a cloned body and called for a new revolution.

The sand inside the hourglass faded to darkness. Joanne’s face screwed up, and she sneezed out eight years’ worth of drifting dust motes. Thanks to the Listerine, her mouth tasted fresh, but her body went all pins and needles as it slowly came back to life. When her ability to move returned, she scrubbed at her face with her hands and sat up in bed. Winter light dodged through the bramble wall and trickled through the filthy windows.

When her bedside light failed to switch on, Joanne crooked her fingers to summon a fire imp. The imp darted around the room joyfully, but Joanne halted it with a glare. It settled in the air near the ceiling, flickering sullenly. Joanne got out of bed and tottered on stiff legs to the wall switch. She flicked it up and down several times. Nothing. The imp bobbed, laughing at her. Joanne scowled. Ice on the lines, probably. A storm.

Joanne sent the imp into the fireplace. The dry wood lit with a whoosh, and Joanne fell into the chair beside it to warm her feet. She directed the imp into a lantern on the mantlepiece where it sipped oil and expanded to fill the small bedroom with a warm glow.

Joanne picked the dust boogers out of her nose and threw them on the fire. She’d warm up, eat something, and go back to bed until morning. Prepping the pause was easy enough, but stasis played hell with biological processes. She’d be constipated for a week or better. She rubbed her hands together and pushed them close to the fire. She pulled its warmth into her, using the energy to rejuvenate her groggy cells. She slipped out of the chair and ran through some simple yoga positions before heading into the kitchen for an MRE and a pitcher of water.

In the morning, the electricity was still out so Joanne dressed, grabbed her laptop bag, and went out the front door in hopes of finding an outlet. The brambles creaked away from the door at her touch.

“Hell’s bells!” she said. Her garage was gone, as was the car she’d parked inside it.

She turned to fetch her broom but stalled out when she spotted the ragged tents. There were three of them stomped into the snow in her front yard.

“Are you the witch?” said a young woman in a red winter cap, crawling out of her ratty shelter. She squinted at Joanne. “You don’t look like a witch.”

“I’m no one,” Joanne said. “What are you doing here?”

The woman in the red cap looked back at the other women emerging from their tents. “I’m pregnant. They say sleeping here for three days and nights will take away the baby.”

The other women nodded.

“That’s not true,” Joanne said.

“I know a girl wot done it!” said a teenager wearing a hunter-orange snowsuit and a scally cap. “Demon come in the night and took it clean away!”

Joanne sighed. The woman in the red hat was shivering. “Come inside where it’s warm at least.” She held the door open. “Stomp your feet clean.”

Joanne instructed the women from the tents to pile their coats and boots in the hallway and gather in the living room. She summoned another imp for the teapot and set the water to boil. “How far are you along?”

“Six weeks,” said Amanda, the woman formerly wearing a red hat.

“Seven fortnights,” the teenaged girl said.

“Two months,” the third woman said.

“What are your doctors telling you?”

The women looked at each other.

“I ain’t seen one, guvnor. Reckon how no one has!”

Amanda shook her head. “Seeing a doctor is a sure route to the breeding camps.”

Joanne nearly choked on her tea. “Breeding camps?”

“Aye,” the teenager said. “They keep you in chains so no ’arm will come to the baby, miss.”

“It’s not that bad,” Amanda said. “But they do lock you up and watch you for the duration. No smoking. No drinking. No processed food. If you’re married, you get to come back home with it. If not—.” She shook her head.

“If not what?” Joanne said.

“They take the babe away!” the teenager said. “Send ya home empty!”

“Is this some kind of a joke?” Joanne said. “Did Sonja put you up to this?”

“Sonja, miss?”

Joanne pointed at the teenager, who was warming her scuzzy feet in front of the fire. “Why does she talk like that?”

“Downton Abby,” the third woman said. She was the oldest of the pregnant tenters, maybe twenty-five. “It’s all she’s been allowed to watch.”

“All I’ve known since I were a girl,” the teenager said. “Like family it is.”

“Enough!” Joanne closed her eyes. She extended her senses into the women’s bellies and verified the ages of the fetal tissue inside. “None of you want to be pregnant.”

The three women nodded.

“And Planned Parenthood doesn’t exist, either?”

“We don’t know what that is,” Amanda said.

“You’re all sure about this?”

The women looked at each other for support and nodded.

Joanne concentrated for a moment, whispered a spell, and turned off the fetal-tissues’ ability to replicate and grow. It was a simple variation of the spell she used for curing warts and shrinking tumors. “There. None of you are pregnant anymore. No backsies. Your bodies will reabsorb the tissue. There may be some spotting but—” Joanne dashed into her bedroom and pulled a box of condoms from her drawer. She handed them to Amanda. “Divide these among you. The expiration date has passed, but the stasis spell will have kept them all right.”

The teenager held a wrapped condom up to the light. “D’ya eat them?”

“Oh, hell!” Joanne held out her hand. “Give me one of those, and I’ll show you how to use it.”

“Oooh, blimey,” the teenager said after the demo, “I could never use one o’ them!”

The woman who was going by the name Amanda but whose aura clearly showed she was lying about it nodded. “It’s illegal. My sister had one once. Her husband slapped it right out of her hand.”

Joanne summoned another fire imp and took it to the kitchen where she pounded herbs and made up three baggies of loose tea. “This will keep you going for a couple of months. Drink a cup every morning. It’s not as effective, and it tastes terrible, but,” she shrugged, “it’s the best I can do. Come back when you need more.”

The women looked at the bags uncertainly.

“You know how to make tea?”

Amanda scoffed. “Of course we do. It’s just … we don’t have any money.”

Joanne opened her front door. “On the house. Once I get the garden going again we can plant enough for everyone.”

After the women had packed up their tents and gone home, Joanne headed out again in search of electricity and WiFi. Both were promised at a Dunkin Donuts she found near the highway.

“The sign’s not true,” the teenager behind the counter told Joanne as she walked in. “We’re not hiring.”

“I’m just here for coffee,” Joanne said. “Check my email.”

A pink man in a too-small polo shirt stepped out of the tiny backroom. He pulled the hem of his shirt over his gut. “Who’s here?” he said.

The counter girl snapped her gum. “I already told her we weren’t hiring.”

The man stopped behind the girl and put his hand on her shoulder. “I think you should let me decide that, Jennifer.” His smile faltered as he caught sight of Joanne. “I’m sorry.” He stammered. “We aren’t hiring.”

“Just coffee.” Joanne held up her laptop. “Maybe a couple of doughnuts and a place to sit for a few minutes. You have that, right?”

The pink man turned red. “Of course.” He stepped away from the counter girl. “Jenifer will take care of you.”

Joanne gave the blonde girl a friendly smile. ‘Small coffee. Black. And two of those chocolate frosteds.”

The girl put the doughnuts in the bag, slid the coffee across the counter, and drew her hand away from the $20 Joanne held out. She craned her neck to yell into the backroom. “Do we still take dollars?” she said.

The pink man leaned out of the door without leaving his chair. “What?”

“The old kind of money.”

“Sure.” He disappeared into the small room.

The blonde girl took the twenty and held it near the register. “How do I enter it?”

The pink man’s head appeared in the doorway again. “Convert it to Bitcoin and add four.”

The girl did some math. “That’s going to be $17.75.”

“For a coffee and two doughnuts?” Joanne said.

The girl popped her gum and shrugged.

Joanne took her food and change to a greasy table in the corner of the shop. The coffee was burned and, she soon realized, the doughnuts were stale. She was logging into the Modern Witch discussion board when two overfed cops walked in. Joanne glanced up in time to see the doughnut clerk point her out to them. The biggest one hitched up his belt and strolled over to tower beside her.

“Got a receipt for that computer?” he said.

“This?” She blinked. “It’s at least nine years old.”

“Where’d you get it?” The cop said. He tucked his thumbs in his belt, thick fingers trailing on the pepper spray looped there.

“Best Buy or something.”

The cop shrugged. “If you bought it there, you must have the papers.” He looked over his shoulders at the other cop. “They still give receipts out at Best Buy, Nick?”

The other cop nodded. “Last I checked.”

“I thought so,” the big cop said. “Stand up slow so we can get a good look at you.”

Joanne held her hands away from her body as she stood. She’d dealt with enough racist cops in the past to know what set them off. She held still while the big cop took her picture with his smart phone. “Give me a search,” he told the device. He watched the screen for a few seconds and grunted. “You aren’t even in the system, girly. Must be an Illegal. You just climb over the Wall or something?”

“I’ve lived in this country since before your parents were born,” Joanne said.

The cop laughed. “You hear that. Nick. She said—” The big man flopped bonelessly to the floor, followed quickly by his partner.

Joanne put the doughnut shop’s staff to sleep for good measure. She got back online, downloaded her messages, and filled a paper sack with stale doughnuts to feed her pixies. Her broom wasn’t comfortable for long distances, but it got her home in a couple of minutes. The teenaged girl was huddled on her doorstep.

“What are you doing here?” Joanna said.

The girl shrugged miserably. “Me dad threw me out, miss. Told him I’d lost the babe an’ he dragged me to the door.”

“I would think he’d be happy.”

The girl wiped her nose with her sleeve. “It were his best friend’s babe, miss. Gettin’ me up the tree like that were part of their marriage deal.”

Joanne’s jaw dropped. “Get inside. You are not going back to that house!”

She set the girl up in the spare bedroom.

Joanne returned to her spot in front of the living room fireplace and watched the pixies eat the doughnuts. They’d refilled the wood box while she’d been gone, and the fire roared merrily. Joanne opened her laptop and looked again at the email she’d downloaded. Tasha Islam, fled to Canada and working out of a brownstone in Montreal—she’d moved most of Joanne’s money to an offshore account. Sonja Gomez, her best friend in the witch community, deported without a hearing. Drones fighting World War III over what was left of the Middle East and Northern Africa. Martial law in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit. Texas, starving in wake of its Referendum of Independence.

Joanne stared into the fire. Going back on pause would be the easiest thing for her, probably best for the girl, too. The 1920s were great and the 40s had shown a lot of potential, but Joanne had slept through the 30s and 50s without hesitation. It would be easy to do it again, turn the glass and skip the bad years in hopes of better.

The girl knocked shyly on the door and came in. “Do you have a TV, miss. Downton Abby is on in a few minutes and—”

“No TV, but there’s a full library in the next room.” She pointed.

The girl sighed. “I can’t read, miss. Guess I’ll just try to sleep.”

“Can’t read?”

The girl shook her head. “Never went to school. Me dad said it was for boys, no use for a girl like me.”

Joanne rubbed her forehead. “What’s your name?

“Zoey, miss.”

“Where does your father live, Zoey? Describe it to me carefully.”

Maybe this time, better years needed a little push. There were more witches out there, many of them likely on pause but many more just hidden away and riding it out. She would find them. Organize them. There were, no doubt, plenty of girls like Zoey, too. The witches could swell their ranks in a few years, sharing their arcane knowledge with a new generation of women.

Joanne listened to Zoey’s description of her father’s home and rehearsed her dragon-summoning spell.

R.W.W. Greene is a New Hampshire writer with an MFA that he exorcises/exercises regularly at local bars and coffee shops. He keeps bees, collects typewriters, and Tweets about it all @rwwgreene.

Photo credit: Tom Lee via a Creative Commons license.

On a Theme by Leonard Cohen

By Mark J. Mitchell

I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons.

—”First We Take Manhattan”

I’m battered by the blindness of our weapons.
Boys stare at screens and tickle switches.

Death drops from the sky
onto archaic altars.

Isaac screams. Ishmael burns.
Rachel weeps for her children.

From the empty office, ritual words:
We sincerely regret collateral damage.

Mark J. Mitchell’s latest novel, The Magic War just appeared from Loose Leaves Publishing. He studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver and George Hitchcock. His work has appeared in the several anthologies and hundreds of periodicals. Three of his chapbooks—Three Visitors, Lent, 1999 and Artifacts and Relics—and the novel, Knight Prisoner are available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. He lives with his wife, the activist Joan Juster, and makes a living pointing out pretty things in San Francisco.

Photo credit: Doug Bowman via a Creative Commons license.

Judgment

By Dianne Olsen

Her name is the color of bright yellow sunflowers,
the scent of dusky sage.
Her intense black hair
absorbs the sun.
She stands close, her hand clutching mine,
Flora, my mother, my friend,
my accompaniment to life.
I am a bubble of laughter
from her lips
a note of joy tossed in the air one early morning.
I am a fish swimming
in her holy sea,
a bead on a string that has
no end.
She keeps one chamber in her heart
open just for me.

Today we stand on the Avenida de Colores,
across from the immigration courthouse.
We have walked a long way in the New Mexico sun.
We wait while our breathing settles.
Inside the court, a judge will decide whether we go or stay.
He will say what the law means,
but he cannot see
inside our hearts, our bones.
The judge has not heard our songs.

A thousand years ago,
mothers like mine knew this land.
The cactus flowers remember
our grandmothers.
The sand crystals
and the red rocks
keep our brothers’ secrets.

Our fathers spoke in a music that makes
our bones strong,
songs unknown on Highway 65.
Today we may be forbidden to
call this desert home.

In the courthouse,
the immigration judge will ask us
why we deserve to live here.

I hold tight to my mother’s hand.
She and I wear the sun-stained faces of
this desert.
Our songs, our names,
the dry gardens we created,
our brothers, fathers,
the very scent of the red stones:
These things we will tell him.
These things make this our home.

Dianne Olsen is a garden consultant and a freelance writer and poet living in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. She wrote “The Valley Gardener” column for the Poughkeepsie Journal for almost four years in the early 2000s. She recently retired from a 15-year career as environment and horticulture educator with Cornell Cooperative Extension in Putnam County, NY.

Photo credit: Scrubhiker via a Creative Commons license.

Land of the Free

By Sahar Fathi

You say
we are all equal
Give us your tired
your poor
your huddled freaking masses!
But not if
they are Muslim
brown
persecuted
by governments (we installed)
drug wars (we created)
I say
give them to me
I will pull the stars from the sky
to light their way
o’er the land of the free
and whisper to them
of the America we can be

Sahar Fathi is the Division Director for Leadership Development at the Department of Neighborhoods in the City of Seattle. Sahar graduated from the University of Washington Law School and is a member of the New York bar. She also earned a Masters in International Studies from the University of Washington, and graduated cum laude from the University of Southern California with a dual Bachelor of Arts in French and International Relations. Additionally, Sahar attended the Sorbonne Université in Paris, France from 2003-2004 and received a diploma in International and European Law from the Université Jean-Moulin in Lyon, France in 2008. Sahar has worked on immigrant and refugee issues for over 10 years, both internationally and nationally. She has served as adjunct faculty at both Seattle University and the University of Washington School of Law. Sahar has been published in the Seattle Journal for Social Justice, the Seattle Journal of Environmental Law, and the Gonzaga Law Review. Following President Trump’s Executive Orders banning travel from majority Muslim countries, Sahar volunteered at SeaTac airport to support impacted travelers. In her spare time, she enjoys exploring resistance through Iranian cooking. You can follow her on Instagram at @sfathis.

Photo credit: “America’s Most Famous Immigrant” by Manhhai via a Creative Commons license.

Uncle Sam Doesn’t Want You

By Tara Campbell

On June 29, to little fanfare, the State Department reinstated the approximately sixty Foreign Service job offers it had abruptly rescinded from Pickering and Rangel Fellows earlier in the month. The Pickering and Rangel programs seek to diversify the U.S. Foreign Service by providing undergraduate and graduate scholarships and Foreign Service jobs to women, minorities and low-income students.

For several of my seventeen years as a professional in international education and admissions, I had the pleasure of working with students and administrators of both of these programs. These fellows are some of the most sought-after applicants for an admissions officer, not only because they are intelligent and committed students, but because of the high level of academic and career support they receive from the fellowship programs before, during and after their degree programs. My admissions counterparts from other schools and I would compete for these students because we saw the good in diversifying both our universities and the Foreign Service.

State Department Secretary Rex Tillerson initially revoked the sixty positions offered to this year’s fellowship graduates based on the erroneous assumption that none of the Foreign Service positions had been guaranteed (the positions are in fact guaranteed—indeed, required—by the terms of the fellowship programs). The sixty job offers were reinstated after lobbying by the congressional and diplomatic communities.

Initially, I considered this a victory. But the more I think about it, the more troublesome this whole episode becomes. While the level of investment these students receive is considerable, it is a fraction of the total budget of the State Department. And yet, it was seen as low-hanging fruit in the current administration’s push to slash State’s budget.

I do not struggle to imagine why.

As I read the initial report of the offers being rescinded, I could almost hear the rumble of skeptical questions behind closed office doors.

“Why should they get special treatment?”

“Why shouldn’t they have to apply the same way as everyone else?”

“Why should we invest in these particular students more than others?”

I can easily imagine these questions because I heard similar grumblings about “reverse racism” in education when I was finishing high school in the late 1980s. A few of my fellow students were not pleased that some of the college scholarships I earned were for students of color, and they did not hesitate to share their opinions with me. No matter that I was graduating second in my class and scored in the 99^th percentile in standardized testing; some white colleagues deemed certain investments in my education questionable because they were reserved for students of color.

How quickly we forget our history. But then, this essay isn’t about slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, racial gerrymandering, police brutality, inequity in prison sentencing, or any of those other historical means by which racial and socioeconomic elites have sought to retain their positions.

This is about Rex Tillerson’s counterproductive attempt to throw up a roadblock to the participants’ service after millions of dollars had already been invested in their education. If he or anyone on his staff had given the program an even cursory glance, they would have seen that the fellowships require students to accept employment as Foreign Service Officers after completing their education. Whether this program requirement was overlooked due to insufficient research, or it was intentionally disregarded, Secretary Tillerson’s attempt to renege on contractual obligations to these students is problematic. It is yet another example of how political victories are often sought on the backs of the most historically powerless members of society—women, minorities and the poor.

There could hardly be a more inauspicious message for a young person to hear at the beginning of their career representing the United States of America to the world: If you are a woman, a person of color, or poor, your country will only grudgingly keep its promises to you. Fortunately, these fellows had the benefit of other people with influence to agitate on their behalf. But what if they had had to scrape together the means to hire legal counsel? And what does this augur for the future of the program?

It is exactly because of situations like this that we are still not in a position to forget about slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, racial gerrymandering, police brutality, inequity in prison sentencing, or any of those other historical means by which racial and socioeconomic elites have sought to retain their positions. Indeed, because of the advances we have made, we must guard against the temptation to think that we no longer have to worry about structural inequity in society.

Under the guise of individual liberty through smaller government, the Tillersons of the world hold onto their positions of power by rolling back federally-supported opportunities for women, minorities and low-income citizens. Were it not for federal “interference” of passing and enforcing the 13^th, 14^th, 15^th, 19^th, 24^th and 26^th Amendments, political and economic power in this country would have remained solely in the hands of wealthy white men. The forms of exclusion are subtler today, but the urge of those in power to maintain power by halting progress remains the same.

So yes, the reinstatement of these sixty Foreign Service job offers is a victory, but not one we can rest on. Together we must defend the advances we’ve made and continue to fight for a more just, inclusive world. Some seek to preserve an America built by entrenched power on stolen land, to build a moat of wealth around their castles of privilege, and retain control over access to opportunity in this country. Without federal “interference,” their state government chambers, corner offices and boardrooms would be perennially white, perennially affluent, and perennially male. If anyone needs proof that we are not yet past this stage in history, look no further than the committee of thirteen wealthy white men chosen to hash out the ruinous Senate healthcare bill. The fact that this bill is now languishing at a 17% approval rate shows we as a country want a better, more humane society than any closed committee of elites can envision.

To the Tillersons of the world: you may try to keep us out of your castles of power, and tell us to build our own out of the scraps you leave behind. Let this case show that, while we build our own structures, you cannot keep the drawbridge closed forever. And as our realms of success overlap and blend with yours, we will continue to strive toward a future where your children and grandchildren see there is room for all of us here.

Tara Campbell is a Washington, DC-based writer, assistant fiction editor at Barrelhouse, and volunteer with children’s literacy organization 826DC. Prior to writing, she had a seventeen-year career in international education and admissions in Oregon, Austria and DC. Prior publication credits include Booth, SmokeLong Quarterly, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Establishment, Barrelhouse, Masters Review, and Queen Mob’s Teahouse, among others. Her debut novel, TreeVolution, was released in November 2016, and her collection, Circe’s Bicycle, with be published in fall 2017. Visit her website at www.taracampbell.com.

Rex Tillerson caricature by DonkeyHotey via a Creative Commons license.

No rules to follow, no laws to break—we woke!

By Zigi Lowenberg

’scuse me
’scuse me, don’t know the rules here
but I butt in
across the room, I know
we were once from the same tribe
ancient threads pulling me towards you
float along the oceans that
fool the eye with their expanse

we are salt
we are sand
we are water

no rules to follow, no laws to break
for we have seen this before
raids and pogroms, a border a Wall
my refugee heart
treads across steppes bearing petrified trunks
rails clanging against Kindertransport of another kind,
cold-sweat defying dreams
throwing ICE on the rocks—

no rules to follow, no laws to break
for now we woke and won’t let go, we are the embrace
and to you, your generations I’m tethered
somos unidos
ale eyn mentshn

we are salt
we are sand
we are water,
we are one.

Zigi Lowenberg, performance poet and co-leader of the jazzpoetry ensemble UpSurge!, has appeared at music festivals, rallies, clubs, bookstores and universities from NYC to New Orleans to San Francisco. Zigi’s acting credits include The Lysistrata Project, the Stein-Toklas Project, and John Brown’s Truth. Zigi is a member of the National Writers Union and Radical Poets Collective. Her poetry has appeared in the poetry journal rabbit and rose. Her essay, “Support the Edge!” will be published in a book Creative Lives (spring 2017). Zigi and her husband, Raymond Nat Turner, are executive producers on UpSurge!’s two independent CD recordings, which have garnered critical acclaim. They live in Harlem and Oakland.

Also by Zigi Lowenberg: “Protest Poem in Two Acts.”

Photo credit: Lefteris Heretakis via a Creative Commons license.