Editor – Page 34 – Writers Resist

Patriarchal Palaver and Politics

By Chinyere Onyekwere

Kpotuba sweated profusely as she climbed the ten dilapidated steps to Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission notice board. She looked for her name on the sample ballot, and its absence shocked her, rendered her huge undulating body immobile. She fought back tears of humiliation when a group of certified male contenders snickered as they walked by. Staggering away heartbroken, she flagged down a taxi, wondered what her next line of action could be.

In her bid to vie for political office in her country Nigeria, the chairmanship post of Achara Local Government Area to be exact, she had unleashed the “Beast,” a deceptive, subtle cankerworm that had been allowed to fester and overrun the district. It marginalized her gender in politics, in virtually all spheres of women’s lives. Landmine navigation seemed like child’s play compared with her candidacy validation efforts with the electoral commission. The omission of her name from the ballot attested to the well-oiled machinations of the Beast; a calculated attempt to disenfranchise her from the chairmanship race because some of her country’s menfolk considered politics their exclusive birthright and domain.

Kpotuba heaved a sigh of exasperation and mulled over her first-time candidature woes as the taxi sped toward her abode. A born leader, Kpotuba burned with passion to make a difference within the squalid environs in which she resided. She organized women groups in her neighborhood, empowered long suffering families to alleviate their poverty-stricken state, a calamitous fallout from economic malfeasance by Nigeria’s political class. When the women spurred her to greater heights with a unanimous endorsement for her candidacy, the Beast reared its ugly head.

Unlike her politically savvy male counterparts, she was an unknown quantity, unversed in the art of campaign gamesmanship. When her candidacy was made public, the Beast bared its venomous fangs and sharp talons to bury her long-nurtured garden patch in tons of garbage. Before the effrontery of the assault could be digested, resounding gun blasts erupted in the vicinity of her home—warning shots to scare her out of the race.

They were messing with the wrong woman. The vicious acts had only strengthened Kpotuba’s resolve to defy the bunch of desperate, uncouth, rabble-rousing despots determined to derail her political ambitions. Patriarchal marginalization of the female gender in politics was an age-old, inherent culture passed down from generations of menfolk to keep women in their place. The Beast held sway in Achara district; women who kicked against it literally battled for their lives.

Even her husband’s support was lukewarm. Infuriated, she had rebuffed his salient but ominous “be careful” with her silence. Their once amicable relationship deteriorated to an exchange of monosyllables. Her grown children were indifferent, believing they were ignored by a country of failed promises and dubious future, so what did they care? Her political party contradicted its professed motto of equity, justice and peace to treat her with disguised incivility.

Her opponent, Anene Ibezim, the corrupt incumbent chairman of Achara Local Government Area, belonged to the ruling party. The perks of office lured him to perpetuate himself in power. He ran his campaign by resorting to vitriolic pronouncements with smug certainty of returning to office.

Months earlier, when Kpotuba and Ibezim crossed paths on the campaign trail, he stalked and sized up his adversary with a vow to banish any notions of political exploits harbored by the obese upstart of a woman.

“You’ll lose, fat cow,” he muttered under his breath.

“What did I hear you say?” asked Kpotuba, stopped her in her tracks by his barrage of words.

“What part of my sentence didn’t you understand. Lose or cow?” he asked.

“You belong in the kitchen!” yelled his ragtag entourage before they disappeared into the crowd.

She made an ignominious retreat, but with absolute conviction of his inevitable comeuppance.

When the taxi screeched to a halt, she was jolted back to the present.

The driver demanded his fare, double the standard price. “Why?” she asked, incensed at his belligerent tone. “Because you’re double the standard size,” he replied, eager to take off.

She alighted from the cab, closed the door with calm exactitude, and paused. A lifetime of imagined and real indignities coalesced into something sinister. She saw a blaze of hot fiery red and lost her head.

Her scuffle with the cab driver engendered comic relief for Nigeria’s pent-up populace; a welcome diversion from disillusion and despair. The fracas drew throngs of people, mostly women who cheered her on. The man, thoroughly terrified of being trounced by a woman, extricated himself from her grasp and fled. She let him escape, had no intention of crossing the thin line between mediocrity and madness to ruin her hard-earned political career.

She dusted herself off with an imperious stance and surveyed the crowd of women whose cries of adulation rent the air when they recognized her from posters advantageously positioned throughout the town. Kpotuba, struck by what could only be deemed divine inspiration, seized the moment with righteous anger to expound on the despicable acts of injustice, meted out to her by the electoral commission.

Her eloquent speech roused the bloodthirsty mob to a fever pitch. Her plight with the Beast became their collective outrage. Like a conjurer’s trick, the swelling masses metamorphosed into a full-blown protest march to do battle with the electoral commission’s perfidious lot.

Two weeks into the general elections, a political gladiator chose to bedevil Ibezim with a human trafficking scandal that rocked the nation.

Kpotuba won the election—with a landslide—to become the first woman in history to occupy the chairman seat of Achara Local Government Area of Nigeria.

A month later, hounded by the Crimes Inquiry Tribunal, Ibezim frantically packed up his personal items from the office. Startled by loud laughter, he reeled around to the menacing sight of a huge body blocking the doorway.

“Goodbye loser,” Kpotuba said.

Chinyere Onyekwere is a freelance graphic designer and a self-published author in Nigeria. Her passion for the written word won her Nigeria’s 2006/2007 National Essay Competition Award with her story titled “Motion Picture and The Nigerian Image.” Chinyere holds a Masters degree in Business Administration from the University of Nigeria. When she’s not glued to the computer screen, Chinyere keenly observes human conditions, and the state of the world in general, while trying very hard to not be hoodwinked by her mischievous grand twins. She’s currently working on several short stories for electronic submission. You can reach her at ockbronchi@gmailmail.com.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Bella Naija.

Then There I Was

By Harry Youtt

Then there I was, cold again,
flipping tossed blankets and a moist sheet
back over, and wishing for another,

knowing this time it must be
the fever leaving;
this time it might be finally over,

hearing at last
the caw of the morning crow
that’s made the night worth listening through

in spite of chaos
and Donnie Trump
and now all the ravens in the yard at sunrise

talking, talking,
telling me
today might be the day.

Harry Youtt is a long-time creative writing instructor in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, where he teaches classes and workshops in memoir writing, narrative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. He has authored numerous poetry collections, including, most recently, Getting Through, Outbound for Elsewhere, and Elderverses. All of them are available via Amazon.com. The sentiment behind his title: Getting Through refers directly to our current ongoing predicament. He assembled the poems there as his effort to assist us to shelter in place and gather back our wits for the conflicts that are to come. Harry coordinated the Los Angeles Poets Against the War event back in 2003, which, to him, seems like more than a hundred years ago.

Photo credit: Haley Finn via a Creative Commons license.

Introducing our newest poetry editor, Laura Orem

Writers Resist is delighted—again—to introduce a new poetry editor: Laura Orem is joining Ruth Nolan in our pursuit of resistance poetry.

Laura 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.

Laura’s gift for our readers:

New Year’s Poem for the American Government

Well, things are changing, no
question there, so as a patriot
in the land of the free
I thought it would be nice
to help you when the new admin
istration sends you forth
to save the world from democracy

I’m on the phone a lot
with my poet friends
and you might be confused
by the jargon you hear.
Prosody has its own code,
but not the kind
you’re thinking of.

An anapest is not a gun
A dactyl not a religious war
Synecdoche is not an ancient rite
of setting fire to government buildings
Prose is not the professional cadre
of trained assassins of poetry.

A masculine endstop is not a boy
who slits the throat of the enemy
A villanelle is not
a female suicide bomber
A quatrain isn’t a terrorist cell
A rhyme scheme isn’t jihad

Sestinas and sonnets,
neither are headscarves
Taha Mohammed Ali
was not an imam
Rumi was never a soldier.
A ghazal is not an RPG
A madih is not a mortar.

Scansion is metrics
which is counting
which is not
a sect dedicated
to executing a coup
on the boss.

Take off your earphones.
What he’s told you is lies.
Dear listeners dear spies
remember that, please.

Photo credit: “Private Poetry” by John Jones via a Creative Commons license.

Confederate Monument

By Luke A. Powers

High above
Courthouse square

Atop an impossibly
Tall pillar

He has stood
Sentinel now

A hundred years
Summers, winters,

Facing a South
Always farther away

Waiting for word
Signal, reinforcement

Until he’s gone
Blind in alabaster

In cap and gloves
His buttons smooth

Leaning on a rifle
That like his face

Is losing definition
The vestige of history

He wants to come down
He can’t remember

The high deeds
The sacred cause

The ideas that make
Blood turn to stone

The sky is swept
Clean of martyrs

Clouds fray in bliss
In sweet nothingness

He wants to come down
Laid in cool earth

Like a dark seed that
Will never grow anything

But a deep forgetfulness
Past echoes of rumor

Where none of this
Ever happened

None of this, not
A single minie ball,

Ever was—

But still he stands
At his post

Sun and moon
Unmourned, undead

Waiting only for
This past to be done.

Luke A. Powers teaches English at Tennessee State University, an historically black university in Nashville. He is a singer-songwriter who has worked with Garth Hudson (of The Band) and Sneaky Pete Kleinow (of The Flying Burrito Brothers). He’s also a member of The Spicewood Seven, who have released two protest albums: Kakistocracy (2006) and Still Mad (2016), both of which are musical acts of resistance of the dumbed-down, low-information culture that elected George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

Image credit: Yelp.

Empty Plinths

By Robbie Gamble

That history was cast, it had its time
to patina publically, those grandiose bits:

goatees, greatcoats and spurs all sober
and saddle-erect, hauled down amid

conflicted outcries of righteous mobs, or
unbolted and forklifted away into the night.

Let the sullen air settle. In municipal
plazas, the plinths remain stolid,

their bare cornices uplifting
nothing, explaining away nothing.

Let their marble shoulders relax.
Give some time for the charged space

above them to reassemble, and not
in the chaos of clubs and torches,

cars-as-projectiles. History is messy
enough. Meanwhile, catalogue

the bronze artifacts, arrange for them
a suitable warehouse. Honor instead

the stories of the statueless, the diasporaed,
the not-as-yet-emancipated. Let these

coalesce and flow into awareness beyond
plinths, beyond rancor, beyond dispute.

Robbie Gamble lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, and works as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston. He recently completed an MFA in poetry at Lesley University.

Image credit:Copyright Philip Halling and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Trooper

By Emmett Forrest

Was told I was a trooper
from the time
I was a little girl

Shoulders square
chin raised high
I said
goodbye
my father
stepped onto a plane
and I couldn’t
bear to watch
my eyes downcast
from the window frame

it takes
a strength
to become
a purple heart
to hide horrors under
your pillows
to say goodbyes
that clog in your throat

I lived in
an era of
don’t ask
don’t tells
if there
are no questions
why should you mention

I never stood
about face
but inside
I lost face

broken
rules
were repealed
and shoulders relaxed

at ease soldier

but we marched
one step forward
and two steps back
you weren’t making enough
progress
walling out immigrants
so you took
your fire to the frontlines

and now I hide
behind
masked
masculinities

It was an honor, sir
to be
your honorable sir

Emmett Forrest: I am a student at MIT studying Mechanical Engineering as well as minoring in Writing. I enjoy walking along rivers and working with machines three times my size.

Women in Parking Lots

By Sara Marchant

My hands were full in the post office parking lot. I held out-going bills, my car and postal box keys, my purse, and a heavy manila envelope containing a manuscript destined for greatness (one can always hope, right?). When I heard a loud car horn and a male voice yelling “Votes for Trump!” it was awkward to turn and look over my shoulder.

But we live in times when a male voice yelling and a horn honking in a government building’s parking lot signify danger. This might be Southern California, blue state, home of Kamala Harris and Jerry Brown, but my town is rural, poor, and red with baseball caps and Trump bumper stickers—and my mother always preached situational awareness to her daughters and sons. So, being a Jewish woman of color, I stopped walking and turned to locate the danger.

What I saw was an old, fat, cotton-headed white man hanging out of his truck’s window and gesticulating with one hand as he worked the horn with the other. He was parked illegally, across three spaces, and he continued to lean on the horn as he yelled out the window. “Votes for Trump! Votes for Trump!” Honk, honk, HONK. He seemed pleased that everyone stopped, turned, and stared. He yelled louder.

One woman did not stop. A small woman, not as old as the yelling fat man, but at least twenty years my senior, she was still moving across the hot asphalt. She wore a turquoise blue, Mexican-embroidered shift and sandals. I’d have admired her dress but I was already admiring her stamina. For she kept walking, even as the man continued his harassment, and it was obvious that she was his primary target. The rest of us in the parking lot were standing and staring, but she kept her back to him. She just kept walking.

She was halfway to where I had stopped on the sidewalk when her hand rose over her head. The honking paused for a moment as her fist unclenched. When her fingers folded down and the middle finger shot up, up, and up, the yelling renewed and intensified. Laughing, I headed down the sidewalk to join her, and walked with her to the post office door. I held the door open for her. She nodded thank you regally, turned and entered the building, her hand descending to her side.

“What was that?” I asked.

“My friend’s husband likes to tease me,” she said. “At least, he calls it teasing. I call it something else.”

An older woman was sorting her mail at the counter. Her long gray hair was unkempt, she wore a shabby t-shirt over hot pink spandex pants. The stack of mail at her elbow threatened to slide to the floor. My new heroine in the turquoise dress addressed this bedraggled lady.

“Your husband is harassing me again. This nice lady stopped because she was worried about me,” Turquoise Dress Lady said.

Pink Spandex Lady turned wearily from her task, and peered around her friend’s shoulder to speak directly to me.

“I’d like to put a bag over his head and beat him to death.”

She wasn’t joking. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t making light of her friend’s harassment at the hands—and horn—of her husband. She was obviously tired, hot and too fed up to prevaricate.

We were all women in the post office lobby that afternoon. We were alone with no one to censor us, and she paid us the compliment of speaking her honest truth. She wanted to put a bag over her husband’s head and beat him to death. I paid her the return compliment of accepting what she desired in silence. I bowed my head, nodded, and walked away as the two friends huddled in conversation. Before I left the building, however, Turquoise Dress Lady shook my hand in thanks, and we wished each other luck.

That night, when my husband and I recounted our day as married couples do, I told him about the man in the parking lot harassing Turquoise Dress Lady. I told him about her silent middle finger response. I told him about joining the lady in her walk for safety and solidarity. I told him about the wife who wanted to put a bag over her husband’s head and beat him to death, and then I started to cry.

I had to explain why I was crying over a stranger I’d met in a post office and a type of situational awareness that I couldn’t even imagine. I couldn’t imagine sleeping every night next to a man I wanted to beat to death. I couldn’t imagine being that woman.

I couldn’t have imagined any of what took place in that parking lot, that post office lobby. But it happened. It happened because these are the times we live in.

Sara Marchant received her Masters of Fine Arts 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, East Jasmine Reviewand ROAR. Her nonfiction work is forthcoming in the anthology All the Women in My Family Sing. Her fiction is forthcoming in the anthology Running Wild. She is the prose editor for the literary magazine Writers Resist. She lives in the high desert of Southern California with her husband, two dogs, a goat and five chickens.

This essay was originally published by Roar: Literature and Revolution by Feminist People.

Asphalt

By Suzanne O’Connell

Your arms waved for help.
The policeman bent down, hand on gun.
“No!” you shouted.
He fired.
The sound, an exploding beehive.
I looked at your fragile skull, resting
on the sharp leaves of fall.
Your eyelids blinked.

Helicopters circled, sirens came.
Your blood kept pooling.
It was the color of mine.
I saw the snow catch in your curly hair.

You had something in your hand,
a Black Cow caramel bar.
“It Lasts All Day,” the wrapper said.

Suzanne O’Connell is a poet and clinical social worker living in Los Angeles. Her recently published work can be found in Poet Lore, American Chordata, Alembic, Forge, Juked, Existere, and Crack the Spine. O’Connell was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Her first poetry collection, A Prayer for Torn Stockings, was published by Garden Oak Press in 2016. Visit Suzanne’s website.

Photo credit: Mycatkins via a Creative Commons license.

Prayer

By I.E. Sommsin

God, will you forgive the sins of our times,
this sad era, its soft habits of thought
and the glib assumptions easily taught
that breed the lying slogans worse than crimes?
We cannot help how the words work to cloud
and clog and flood the forums of the mind.
They build the thick high walls that keep us blind
and kill the calm silence with all that’s loud.
Myth, wild tales, and the clever fools come cheap,
and the boldly stupid prompt great cheering,
while the magical, repeated, jeering
accusation makes the shallow look deep.
You in the future will know what I feel
when your nation’s caught on history’s wheel.

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

Photo credit: donaldjtrump.com

Of Gas and Guilt

By Alexander Schuhr

My grandfather farted a lot. Sometimes it took as little as rising from a chair or a slight adjustment of his position and he’d let one fly. In my preadolescent years, I used to burst into laughter. And why not? Among my classmates, a thunderous salute called for proper acknowledgement. Embarrassment was so completely absent that we would occasionally force one out, just to obtain the cheers of adoring fans. But this response to my grandfather’s flatulence was not appreciated. Hushing, hissing, and poisonous gazes would hit me and abruptly end my delight. My grandfather’s farts were no laughing matter.

Much later, after my grandfather had died, I learned that leg prostheses often produce flatulence sounds. Air is trapped between stumps and prosthetic liners, and its release may sound like a fart. My grandfather had lost a leg above the knee. And while I can certainly not exclude that some of the sounds he produced were the real thing, I was shamed by the insight that I had often ridiculed a humiliating side effect of his handicap.

But neither my grandfather nor any other adult ever bothered clarifying this simple misunderstanding. The reason, I believe, wasn’t the poor taste of my reaction. The whole subject of my grandfather’s lost leg was off limits. Only at his funeral did my grandmother, no longer in possession of her full mental faculties, reveal the details.

The end of the Second World War was approaching, and allied troops had landed on the beaches of Normandy.

My grandfather sought shelter in in a trench when he spotted a hostile soldier, a few hundred feet away. “I got him,” he announced, and crawled out of the trench to take aim. Then came the explosion and the shrapnel that hit him. “My leg is gone,” he screamed, as he was dragged back into the trench. “Calm down, it’s still there,” was the response. But my grandfather was right. The impact had severed the bone.

Veterans were wounded, lost limbs, and were mentally scarred by the things they’d seen. But many took comfort in the fact that they’d fought for a good cause: for freedom, for democracy, against tyranny.

There was no such consolation for my grandfather. He had fought for Hitler.

He was only twelve when Hitler came to power. When the Nazis ignited the war, he was old enough to be drafted. Half a century later, I would see his reaction to images on TV, images of the war, images of the genocide committed in the name of German superiority. “We didn’t know that,” he would mumble, and then change the channel or take another sip from the beer bottle.

It wasn’t in him, the extraordinary heroism of resistance that some displayed, often paying the ultimate price. Perhaps he wasn’t aware of the extent of the war crimes and atrocities. Maybe he didn’t fully understand the meaning of war, what it led to, and how it would eventually ravage his own life. He had been deceived, he would claim.

But there was no deception in the politics that made it all possible. There was no deception in the public display of resentment and chauvinism. The incitement of hatred, the scapegoating of the marginalized, the terrorizing of easy victims—they all had happened out in the open, for many years before the killing began. Many Germans of my grandfather’s generation embraced these developments, or, at least, accepted them. And therein lies their guilt.

It was this guilt my grandfather tried to bury, although the guilt stayed, stalking him to his deathbed. It was this guilt that prevented him from mourning, from healing, from finding any meaning in his personal suffering.

Today resentful politics is on the rise again, and many give in to its cathartic temptations. But the price may be awful, and nothing may ever be innocent again. Not even the silly giggling of an immature boy at the supposed passing of gas.

Alexander Schuhr is an author, essayist, and scholar. He was born and raised in Munich (Germany). Before coming to the United States, he lived in various countries in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. He holds an M.A. in political science and a Ph.D. in economics. He writes fiction and creative nonfiction. He has a wife and a three-year-old daughter.

Photo credit: Ninara via a Creative Commons license.

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.