Author: Editor

First 100 Days: Protest Poem in Two Acts

By Zigi Lowenberg

 

I.

saturday, january 21, 2017

she’s got the whole world…
holding Mom’s hand, their fists raised in West Palm breeze
while her stepdaughter and grandsons march in Hawai’i
her cousins throng Fifth Avenue
as her Oakland tribe rings Lake Merritt.

only later she learns,
another big lie floats, his number bloats
for Langley his facts are phooey
he signals, he gloats.

II.

street alchemy

making poems with her hopeful feet
gutter balls of fire, the heat—the heat
burning railing throats, running sore
we’re chanting sparks that bite and fuel
crowdsourcing for that asphalt elixir “Justice!”
surely it must come
on our hot sweaty insistent heels
of THIS. 

 

 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.

Photo credit: Dennis Hill via a Creative Commons license.

First 100 Days: Sanctuary

By Jennifer Hernandez

Border fence
divides
barbs catch
rip
prevent
free range
prevent
migration
of wildlife
of many lives
gaps
allow glimpses
of el otro lado
amber waves
blue blue skies
gauzy clouds
floating elusive
storms brew
on the horizon

 

Jennifer Hernandez lives in Minnesota, where she works with immigrant youth and writes poetry, flash, and creative nonfiction. Much of her recent writing has been colored by her distress at the dangerous nonsense that appears in her daily news feed. She is marching with her pen. Recent work appears in Anti-Heroin Chic, Dying Dahlia, New Verse News and Yellow Chair Review, as well as Bird Float, Tree Song (Silverton Books) and Write Like You’re Alive (Zoetic Press).

 

First 100 Days: Power by Adrienne Rich

By Tarra Stevenson

Living in a white fog of patriarchy/phallocentrism/misogyny

Today a class of teenage girls
radiant
discussed the power
of Marie Curie
her sacrifice to birth knowledge
even in the face of her own death. A radio-
active superwoman.

Today a vice-president eliminated
possibility
potential
denying their rights
denying her fights

and the teenage girls understand this
toxicity.

But they are tired
of sacrificing,
of seeing
(ElizabethWarrenMaxineWatersHillaryClintonHenriettaLacksZeldaFitzgeraldMarinaAbramovicMothersSistersDaughtersJaneDoeUnnamed)
themselves
Sacrificed.

They refuse this half-life.

 

Tarra Stevenson teaches at an all-girls school, where she is an agitator, educator and feminist. She has fiction in Shirley Magazine and poetry in Vinyl Poetry and Prose. She earned her BA from UC Davis, her MA from Loyola Marymount University, and is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction from UC Riverside’s low-residency program.

Photo credit: Loran via a Creative Commons license.

First 100 Days: March of the Millennials and Grandmas

By Candy Schulman

Editor’s note: Trump’s inauguration initiated a series of public demonstrations that have continued throughout his first 100 days—including, challenging his refusal to release his taxes, in support of science and the environment, in defiance of his bigoted attempts to limit immigration and, as this essay reminds us, to make clear the power of women inspired to action by racism, misogyny, xenophobia, Islamophobia and injustice. 

“Does this bring you back to your protesting days of the sixties?” my 22-year-old daughter asked me.

We were gathered with a group of writers in my friend’s apartment to assemble for the Women’s March the day after the inauguration, a short walk from our larger group’s meeting place. Even more importantly, she had two bathrooms where we could eliminate our bladders one last time before chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!”

“I never thought I’d be marching again,” a friend remarked after her final bathroom run. She was a grandmother, her thoughts reflecting signs we’d later see: I CAN’T BELIEVE I HAVE TO PROTEST THIS CRAP.

My daughter’s friends gave our posse diversity. I was thrilled to share this event with her, the way we’d voted last November, posting a Facebook photo saying, “We’re voting for the first woman president of the U.S.!”

Now my daughter wanted to know if today was like the past.

“Yes,” I told her, “but the drugs are different.”

My comrades discussed how much Xanax they’d ingested. I tended to reduce anxiety through meditation and swimming laps. Today, I wanted to fully feel the vibrations of sharing my daughter’s first protest march.

She wasn’t sure how many friends would come until the last minute, texting her social circle.

My host had sent out official invitations and instructions for weeks, and we’d RSVP’d to meet at her place as though responding to a wedding invitation. She snapped a photo before we left: three generations ranging from 14 to she-who-has-never-revealed-her-age. We dressed according to assorted maladies and hormonal spikes. A mix of original knees and replacements, we were a rowdy arthritic bunch: eager, hopeful, filling our pockets with tissues in case we found ourselves someplace without toilet paper.

It was unseasonably warm, temperatures approaching 50. A cool breeze whipped up. Noticing my daughter’s friend in a gray turtleneck and thin hat, I refrained from saying, “Are you dressed warmly enough?” I didn’t want to sound like her mother. Besides, she was from Maine.

Arriving at our designated starting corner, we found peaceful chaos. Crowds had grown so thick, we were gridlocked on East 48th Street. Occasionally the crowd roared, as if we were starting to move, but it was the kind of cheer you’d see at a baseball game when the stands erupt in an impromptu wave.

My daughter and her friends posed for a selfie. They looked so innocent and fresh, yet I worried that the rights they’d always expected might now be eroding. And I realized that those rights would mean much more to them once they had to fight for them.

A friend photographed the two of us, holding the sign she had crafted: WE HAVE TO START TALKING ABOUT THE ELEPHANT IN THE WOMB.

“Look at that adorable little girl,” my daughter said, pointing to a three-year-old on her father’s shoulders, holding a sign: NEXT POTUS.

Ninety minutes passed and we still hadn’t moved. “We’re going to push ahead,” my daughter said with the impatience of youth. “Do you want to come or stay?”

I wanted to march with her, but I was supposed to remain with my group. The organizers urged us to follow the rules for crowd control. I was no longer that sixties antiwar protestor, unafraid to be tear gassed, bailing friends out of jail. I’d turned into an adherer of the rules, a college writing professor who taught students to abide by attending classes and meeting assignment deadlines.

I told my daughter to go and kissed her cheek, hiding my disappointment.

An hour later we were still stuck in place. I worried about my daughter being trampled if the crowd grew impatient. Life without Xanax.

“Let’s reverse direction,” my group suggested.

That’s when we splintered into three subgroups. And I ended up alone. I began to feel claustrophobic the way I do in airplanes. I pushed my way through throngs of shoulder-to-shoulder people, all remarkably calm, waiting their turn. All 400,000 of us. The mall in D.C. is spacious. New York streets are narrow and dark.

“I’m having a panic attack,” I explained, forcing my way through bodies, signs and babies. When I reached Grand Central, thousands were spewing from subways and trains, and I went the opposite direction, downtown toward home.

Landing in Union Square in the sunshine, I felt my blood pressure lower. I ended up sharing the march with my daughter the way Millennials communicate all the time:

“We reversed direction and found our way to the march,” she texted. “We’re on Fifth Avenue!”

“Store employees keep waving at us!”

“I think I just saw Senator Schumer!”

She kept the texts and photos coming. This wasn’t how I’d expected to share my daughter’s first protest march, but technology allowed us to do it together after all.

That night we cooked lasagna, craving comfort food. We formed a group message, sharing photos of protest messages from one edge of our country to the other. One of our favorites: NOW YOU’VE PISSED OFF GRANDMA. That was how I felt, a bit old to be protesting this crap anymore, but doing my part as much as I could. I was passing the protest torch onto my daughter, but I’d always be there to cheer her on.

 

Candy Schulman is an award-winning essayist who has published personal essays and political Op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine, Salon, and elsewhere. She is a creative writing professor at The New School. As an anti-war protestor at Ohio State University in 1970, she published an essay about the four students who were killed at Kent State, illuminating how peaceful student protests were combatted with tear gas and guns, whereas post-football game drunken brawls were overlooked by police.

Photo credit: Thomas Altfather Good via a Creative Commons license.

First 100 Days: Wiretap Tweets—Defined

By Charles W. Brice

 

Terrible (tĕr′ə-bəl): n. A salutation. Syn.: dear, my dear, hi, hello

Just (jŭst): n. & v. A statement of absolute truth. Ex: Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped.”

Found Out (found out): tr.v. To receive an incontrovertible revelation of indisputable fact from a minor entertainment personage on Fox News.

Wire (wīr): n. A force aimed at crushing narcissism.

Tap also Tapp (tăp): n. A euphemism for the shattered fantasies of a tyrant.

Lawyer  (loi′yər): n. Someone who will teach everyone a lesson.

Sacred (sā′krĭd): adj. A term used to depict something as being religious when one is wholly ignorant of religion or spirituality. Ex: sacred toothpicks, sacred cornflakes, “sacred election process.”

“Wiretap” (wīr′tăp′): tr.v. To watch, surveil, or look at. Ex: “Wiretap that girl, Billy, and pass me a Tic Tac.”

Bad  (băd): adj. A dyspeptic global emotion experienced upon waking in the early hours and relieved only through tweeting before breakfast or by experiencing a huge, laxative induced, bowel movement.

Sick Guy (sĭk gī): n. Any member of the entire world who disagrees with the tyrant.

Sad (săd): adj. 1. Whatever inhibits grandiosity. 2. n. The present state of affairs in the United States of America.

 

Charlie Brice a retired psychoanalyst living in Pittsburgh. His full length poetry collection, Flashcuts Out of Chaos, is published by WordTech Editions (2016) and his second collection, Mnemosyne’s Hand (WordTech Editions), will appear in 2018. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Hawaii Review, Chiron Review, The Dunes Review, SLAB, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and elsewhere. Read about Charlie’s collection Flashcuts Out of Chaos at The Borfski Press.

Note: Wiretap Tweets-Defined was previously published in Tuck Magazine.

Going Limp

By Ruth Nolan

It was your favorite story, the one you most loved
to tell me, from the days when you were the star
of your high school football team, MVP, you’d say:

It’s important to go limp after throwing a pass
because you know you’re going to get hit
and that way you’re less likely to get hurt

It was the story you loved to share, long before
I’d left the game. We’d drink beer after beer after
a day on the fire crew, over and over you’d tell

the winning story that became the best advice
I’ve ever heard, although I turned it around
to work for me, it became the rules for how to

receive the pass when you threw the ball, hard.
It became more and more important, each time
that you slugged me and cracked open my lip,

when you snuck up behind me and put me in a
chokehold, just to see how I would react, when
you threw me against a wall, our baby in my arms.

I got so good at going limp that for all these years,
I just knew I would deliver that ball all the way to
touchdown, never getting hurt, never going down.

 

Ruth Nolan, a former wildland firefighter in the Western U.S., is a writer and professor based in Palm Springs, CA. 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. Ruth holds her M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside. She may be reached at ruthnolan13@gmail.com and via Twitter @ruthnolan.

Photo credit: Foxcroft Academy via a Creative Commons license.

And Then He Moved On

By William Aime

 

On his first day, his boss gave him a pair of t-shirts. She asked his size, which was extra-large, but she only had large or medium. She gave him two larges and told him that she’d give him the right size when more shirts came in. He wore the shirts once or twice until he realized that no one else wore them. They were not a uniform. They were just a pair of fairly ugly shirts, with some joke about gluten intolerance on the back that he wasn’t entirely sure wasn’t offensive. Either way, he never wore the shirts again, nor did he ever think about them.

That is, until he got his first pay-stub two weeks later. This was not his first job, so the deduction for taxes came as no surprise. Still, he idly scanned the stub, looking at all the places his money was going—federal taxes, Social Security, state taxes—the usual. But there was one more line, one he wasn’t expecting. “T-shirts: -$24.00.” It took him a moment to remember, and then he experienced the peculiar feeling of anger and shame occurring at once. Why hadn’t his boss told him about the charge? Would it have mattered? Could he have turned down the shirts? And if he ever did get the extra-larges, would he be charged for those?

As he contemplated this, he took stock of his situation. What had he lost? Twenty-four dollars off an already small paycheck. What had he gained? Two bad t-shirts that were already balled up in his bottom drawer and a new job. And then he moved on.

The first few weeks were hard on him. The food service industry has always been a constantly moving enterprise—people need to eat and food needs to be cooked, but many people don’t like to do it for themselves. He was expected to learn on the job, quickly. The more experienced prep-cooks showed him how to do something once, watched him do it to make sure he had it, then moved on. He needed to focus on what he was doing until his muscles memorized it, and he needed to watch the other cooks work on other projects at the same time. If he could learn from them without asking, then they wouldn’t need to waste time specifically showing him, and the kitchen gained some efficiency. He was a moving part in a large, difficult to control machine that was only useful when running at peak efficiency. He was a prep-cook, and he was making food for well over five hundred people a day. He sliced meat, he mixed toppings, he built salads so that customers could see all the ingredients at the top. At the end of the day, he collapsed into bed, his feet burning.

Slowly, day-by-day, he improved. He didn’t have to watch the other cooks work. He found shortcuts that no one had shown him. He learned how to slice ham as thin as paper, how to mix berry schmear perfectly. He learned how to peel a hard-boiled egg in two seconds while it was still hot, the vinyl of his gloves softly melting into the grooves of his fingertips. He worked and he worked and he worked, a part of him dripping into the food he made like sweat from his brow.

The more he worked, the more he began to think he wasn’t making enough. Those paychecks always seemed to be just a little too small, just a little too lean. At first, he thought nothing of it, hoping that with diligence and hard work, he’d eventually earn a raise. But then he was talking to one of the older prep cooks—one of those cooks who was so old his wrinkles looked like they were carved by knives, who looked like he salted his grievances so they’d store better—and he had a great many things to say.

I put lemons in with the eggs, makes them peel easier.

I once had a girl that looked just like that waitress, you know. It’d be good to stick my dick in something like that again.

You don’t need those oven mitts, just grab a towel and move quickly.

Don’t let that pretzel get dark like TJ over there. You’re aiming more for Diego.

Slice that melon down the sides, and don’t worry about leaving a little rind. We can take that off later.

Those bastards used to cut me short on my paychecks all the time. Still do, when they think I’m not looking.

And it was that last one that stuck out to him. It wormed its way into his mind and found a quaint little corner to snuggle up in, rearing its head every time he looked at his paycheck. Only then did it strike.

He devised a plan. He spent two weeks counting his hours, noting exactly when he clocked in and out. He added it up each day, noting with pride when he passed thirty, then fifty, then sixty hours. When the pay period came to an end, he had worked a total of eighty-two hours, and he felt proud. That’s a respectable amount of work, after all. He fed a lot of people working those hours. He should feel proud.

He waited the five days from the period ending to payday. He might have even forgotten about his scheme for a moment, caught up in fantasizing about what he could do with his especially big paycheck. He forgot that he ever doubted his employer.

But then he examined his next paystub—extremely carefully—and it was right there, out in the open. “Time worked: 79 hours.” The maximum amount that didn’t push him into overtime.

Like any sensible person, he went straight to the manager. Not his manager. The manager, the one who runs the whole shebang, reporting only to the owner. He pointed out the discrepancy, that he was sure he worked eighty-two hours. He did his best to not say, “wage theft,” but they both knew it was there. The manager was apologetic and extremely embarrassed and then let him in on a little secret.

“We’re too small a company,” she said. “We can’t afford to give everyone health insurance, and we always try to avoid overtime, because it might make problems for us. We’ll put the hours back on your next paycheck though, I promise.”

And she was so charming and so friendly that he forgot his outrage. He made the concession, and she thanked him for being so understanding. Sure enough, on his next paycheck, there were three more hours than there should have been.

It took him a while to see the problems. He remembered that thirty hours is considered full-time and therefore worthy of health insurance, not forty. And even though they gave him the hours back, he still missed out on time-and-a-half pay. He had been duped, plain and simple. But by then, it was too late. The manager had already dealt with it, the way she’d been dealing with the same problem for twenty years. So then he moved on.

Part of his complacency, he had to admit, was fear. He’d been on the job long enough to see some people get fired. That old coworker with salted grievances had finally gotten fired for saying something racist or sexist—nobody was actually sure which—a little too loudly. Another got fired for showing up late once, even though his manager had also been late that day. He learned that taking food is fine up until the sorority girl took the wrong apple and was fired on the spot. He heard about the co-manager being fired for refusing to cut a corner that could have broken a health code. Then the next week, the manager who fired the co-manager was fired and the co-manager rehired. In some sense, he knew that all these firings were “justified”—as in there was a stated reason that was legal. But he also knew that there were less savory reasons underneath, reasons that couldn’t be proven. The prep-cook who was fired for being late had been a good worker, smart, keenly aware of health codes, but he also had Asperger’s, and something about that had always rubbed the manager the wrong way. The sorority girl, a week before being fired, had refused to slice meat because the slicer was broken in a way that made it unsafe to use, something that everyone knew but had tried to ignore. And the manager had never seemed to mind the old racist and sexist cook’s many faults, until the old racist and sexist cook talked about his wages with the other cooks. But of course, none of these were the stated reasons.

Sometimes, he would wonder what happened to these people. He wondered if they ever found other jobs, if they managed to hold onto that one. He wondered if that one baker was able to get her daughter the toy she wanted, or if that dishwasher ever saved up enough to go to college. He wondered if it could happen to him. And then he moved on.

He can’t deny that the work did him some good, that it gave him experiences he’d never forget. His skin turned brown in the face of a roaring oven. He ate a pretzel that had been drenched just a second too long and cooked just a second too short, so that the leftover lye tingled on his tongue and his gums bled for a week. He collected knife scars up and down his hands. He made something truly delicious, and then he repeated it. The work, though hard and mindless and grueling, never crushed his soul.

Inevitably, one day, he got sick. It started as a cough—a plain old cough. But slowly it grew. Eventually, he had a full-blown fever, was coughing his lungs out, and was throwing up in between. There was no way in hell he was able to work. So, he called in and let his manager know. Even then, though, he was given another task.

“Find someone to cover you,” his manager said, “or bring a doctor’s note.”

The second task was particularly unfair. The company didn’t give him any kind of health insurance and his state insurance covered jack shit. His manager herself had complained to him about how she couldn’t go to a doctor to look at her jaw because it cost too much. Now, on top of having to miss work—for which he’d get no sick pay—he also had to get a doctor’s note? Instead, he called people.

The first person he called had class. The second was out of town. The third was working a second job, as was the fourth. And so on. There were only so many replacements he could call, and all of them were busy. So he called his manager back.

“I can’t come in,” he repeated, “and nobody else can cover me.”

“Get a doctor’s note,” his manager said.

He held his head in his hands. “I can’t afford a doctor,” he said. There was a moment of silence from the other side. “Look, I’m throwing up,” he continued, “I’m coughing, I have a fever. It’s the flu. You don’t want me anywhere near the food. I’d come in if I could. Trust me.”

“If you can’t get a doctor’s note,” his manager said, “then don’t bother coming in tomorrow either.”

“What?” he asked.

“You heard me. I have to let you go. You’re not reliable anymore.”

No amount of pleading could save him. He told his manager that this was bullshit. He told her he was just sick, that it happens to everyone. He promised to work just as hard as always in the future, that he’d get well as soon as he could. Nothing. He tried the restaurant manager too, with the same result. He begged. He pleaded. He bargained. No matter what, he could not get his job back. He tried to tell himself it wasn’t his fault, but believed himself less and less each time.

And then, just as everyone always does, he moved on.

 

William Aime is an American writer whose work premiered in November of 2016. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist in the 2016 Fiction Vortex Contest. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with his partner, Rachel.

Photo credit: Paul Sableman via a Creative Commons license.

Uprising

By Janey Skinner

 

Pink pointed ears popped up everywhere. Skeins in pocket, women knit as they marched, constructing together the greatest pussy hat of all, its oval opening frilled in coral, cinnamon and crimson yarns, too soft and too strong to tear.

Some say the Golem emerged from that hat, a bud of damp clay and fury that shot to full size in a flash, but I suspect it had long slept among us.

Was it us it pulled in its wake, or we who propelled it? Trouncing toward Washington with the pussy hat on its head, a confection of our relentless resistance.

 

Janey Skinner is a writer, teacher and activist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her story “Carnivores” appeared in Best Small Fictions 2016, edited by Stuart Dybek and Tara Masih. She is at work on a novel about resistance to the war in Colombia, when she isn’t fighting for public education or fuming about encroaching fascism. Check her out at writer.janeyskinner.com.

Der Golem movie poster, 1920, in the public domain.

American Signs

By R.M. Engelhardt

Dead crow in the middle of the road,
Black as death and dark

In the cold November air
When all the trees all sigh

“Remember”

Where there is a change in the scenery
Something different
Like God has suddenly left
The building

A winter without snow
Where a part of your soul

Has departed
From the light

R.M. Engelhardt is a author, poet and writer whose work over the years has appeared in many journals and magazines in print and online, including, Rusty Truck, Thunder Sandwich, The Boston Literary Review, Full of Crow, Fashion For Collapse, Dryland Lit, The Outlaw Poetry Network, and many others. He currently lives in Upstate NY and is the creator of such groups as The Troy Poetry Mission and Poets And Writers Stand Against Trump. Visit the poet’s website.

Photo credit: “Fallen” by Rob Nunn via a Creative Commons license.

Impressions of the USA

By Cong Tran

Editor’s note: Cong Tran, or Tran Quoc Cong in Vietnamese naming convention, paid his first visit to the United States in 2007, an invited guest at the memorial service for author and Pulitzer Prize winning Vietnam War correspondent David Halberstam. Mr. Tran had guided and ultimately befriended the journalist during a return visit to Vietnam by the author some years before his death. Mr. Tran was so moved by his invitation to the memorial from Mr. Halberstam’s widow, and so honored to be among the literati in attendance, he saved the printed program (see below). Recently, Mr. Tran shared the messages he sent home from his 2007 visit and gave us permission to share them with our readers, which we are delighted to do. His observations of U.S. culture in contrast to that of Vietnam are insightful and entertaining—at reminder of our national character beyond the context of the Trump regime.
Mr. Tran suspects his first visit to the U.S. was also his last.

Dear Friends,

Good morning, America!

SEAT BELT makes me feel clumsy like spaceman in the spaceship. Trying to remember. It takes some time.

Crossing the streets here is a skill, not an art, like in Viet Nam. Press the button. Magical!

I borrowed a digital camera, but my mind still analog.

In Viet Nam, eat to live. Here, live to eat.

I have a dream. My dream comes true.

Thanks for all your help,
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Dear America,

Descartes in America: “I DRIVE therefore I am.”

You have driving license, you are somebody. You have wings like angels. I feel disabled because I cannot drive. In Heaven, the angels fly, not walk. My mind, eyes, body in Heaven, but I cannot fly, just borrow the wings.

Mr. Don Giggs offers me a car. Just looking, not driving. How can I change lanes? In Viet Nam, the lanes are built-in and invisible. Very happy to see the sign “Drive Less, Live More.”

House/home is really a castle, fortress. Cars are moving castles, fortresses on freeway.

Best,
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Dear America,

You are the XXXL country; your meal is, too. A cheeseburger is so BIG, it swallows me, not I it. If I keep on eating like this, I do not think I can walk through the door at the customs counter with the slogan “Keep American’s Door Open and Our Nation Secure” on the day I leave the paradise.

Things are expensive.

In the announcement for the memorial service for Mr. David Halberstam in NYT: “In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Teach for America in the Mississippi Delta.” Flowers for David, food for me. Teach for America, Teach for my children. Mississippi Delta, Me Kong Delta.

This is an open eyes and mind trip for me.

Thanks for all your help,
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Dear America,

Memorial Day, Sunday 27 May. Riding bike in Westminster Cemetery, I agree with Thomas Jefferson that “All men are created equal” and buried, cremated equal.

“Flat” means equal in some way, in many ways. In Viet Nam, the graves are not equal at all. In Viet Nam, the hill is for the tombs, death, resting place. Turning your head to the mountain means “pass away.” Flat, low land is for villages, life. In U.S., in reverse.

Now, I know why you are “The Quiet American.” You do not blow the horns when you drive.

I sleep with the sound of click in my dream. “Click It or Ticket.” Seatbelt, please.

See you,
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Dear America, Good morning, Sun Valley!

Vietnamese local bus from Little Sai Gon to Phoenix, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Heaven to Hell. Just hot, not humid, like home. No sticky. Anyway, 5-star Hell. Just compare, not complain.

The pages of my high school textbook, Practice Your English, McGraw Hill, appeared along the road. The first time in life I saw desert, cactus, sand, small bushes, hot and dry. Before, I only see dessert, fruits, ice cream, sweets, caramel, after meals. I felt thorny, like cactus when coming to Arizona. Cowboy films 1965 to 67 replayed.

CARPOOL LANE = Mahayana Buddhism. You live, pray, do whatever to become Buddha, and help the others to become Buddha, too. The other lanes on freeway = Theravada Buddhism. One vehicle, one driver.

In the U.S., I live to be delivered. I cannot drive. Thanks for all help. I come to the U.S. with JFK Inaugural Speech, MLKing’s “I Have A Dream,” the image of Apollo 11, and all my high school textbook in mind.

It is my America.
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Dear Phoenix, Arizona,

Wooh! Grand Canyon, Great Wonder of Nature, so grand.

“No one should die before they see Angkor,” Somerset Maugham wrote somewhere. To me, “No one should die before they see Grand Canyon.” Coming to Angkor, we stretch our necks UP to see how high. To Grand Canyon, we crane our necks DOWN to see how deep. Angkor, the hand of Man. Grand Canyon, the hand of the Creator.

Riding bike in and around Phoenix in June, I know why the Phoenix puts its head in the ash. To hide from the HEAT.

Buying something, I have to pay tax. I feel itchy. You don’t, do you? Just the system.

See you,
CONG

 

Dear Old Town Scottsdale, the West’s Most Western Town,

I rode my Iron Horse—bicycle—to the frontier town 113 years after the first settlers came. I met again my boyhood with the cowboy films in my mind, Arizona Colt, Bonanza, The Wild Wild West.

I clicked my camera as fast as the sheriff shot his Colt to stop the bandit coming to town.

I pumped air into my bike tyre in front of the Cavalliere’s Blacksmith Shop, like the cowboys changed horseshoes.

I locked my Iron Horse at the rusty ring once used for horses and mules.

I sent two postcards home from Scottsdale’s first Post Office, where every founding father gathered at mail time, twice a day.

And, I had an ice cream in Sugar Bowl Ice Cream Parlor, to cool down the notorious Arizona dry heat. I am the Man from Nowhere. A really good day.

Bye bye, from Where the Old West Comes Alive,
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Dear South California and Arizona,

Walking in Mission San Juan Capistrano, I saw Silent Night, so quiet.

Standing in front of Crystal Cathedral, I heard Jingle Bells, so loud.

The bronze sculpture of a woman caught in adultery, “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.” They mean tons, tons of glass of the cathedral, neither Magdalene nor adultery.

Thy kingdom comes. Maybe. Looking at all stuff in the U.S. so far, I have felt the Middle Kingdom comes. Everything made in China, except the Cowboys in Rawhide Steakhouse and Saloon.

How come? Hey, folks!
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Good morning, New York,

You are Grand Canyon turned downside up.

MANHATTAN, I dropped my HAT 3 times while looking at your skyscrapers, you made my neck painful. I became a MAN without HAT or sunTAN, you are my sunblock buildings.

I saw 3D New York vertically, on Top of the Rock and in subway. First time in my life subway, like guerrilla Củ Chi Tunnels. New York, you made my provincial heart choke.

Early morning walk in Central Park, the lung of NY. At home, when getting angry at somebody, we shout madly, “You are a dog!” Watching people dog-walking here, from now on, I will not shout like that. It is so nice. Will find something else, worse.

Oh, my God! I said, Oh, my Dog! I heard the echo from the bench behind. You made me confused.

CONG

 

Dear 13 Original States,

Promenade in and around Brooklyn (Broken Land), Greenwich, East Hampton, New Canaan. I wonder how many Gods you have. Only one, right? So, why you have so, so many different churches? It doesn’t mean that you are more religious than us. Maybe less. You make God lose his identity. Holding the banknote, I read “In God We Trust.” Singular? Walking around here, I see plurality.

Riding bike around East Hampton and Connecticut is like in the Anderson fairytales. Nice landscape, golden sunshine like honey, green forest, the weather just perfect. I wonder if we need paradise in the next life. God is unfair. Now, I know why you often end your speech, “God bless America.” You bribe Him?

Since coming here, I have had the feeling I am spewed out of the Horn of Plenty together with food. How can I control the temptation?

Forgive me,
CONG

 

Dear New York,

Welcome to Paradise. We know that even Paradise is not perfect. Spewing out of the subway, woo! Times Square, the Crossroads of the World, not easy to cross due to the crowd. Your five senses are raped by the Most Crowded on Earth, the Call of the Wild.

NEW York is new to me, but OLD to the immigrants in the Lower East Side tenements.

GRAND Central Station engulfs you.

GREAT Depression still in some corners I walked through.

BROADway is really broad.

LONG Island is a long drive, just like your common question in Viet Nam: “How
long to Ha Long?” So long to Ha Long, so long to Long Island.

Burger KING swallows you like King Kong does.

CENTRAL Park right in the center you never miss.

TOP of the ROCK is top of tops.

SUBways like submarines.

WALL Street is only WALLs and GLASS, which makes the TRINITY church so TINY, so PITY.

TIMES SQUARE is not square, but like the hands of octopus.

HOTline 1-888-NYC-SAFE is extremely HOT at Times Square to fight terrorism.

DEAR New York, you are very DEAR, not cheap to live.

Looking at Lady LIBERTY, I think of Lady Buddha. This with FIRE, that with WATER. Two basic things for life. (Lady Buddha with the flask in her hand pouring water down to extinguish the inferno of our life).

New York, you are XXXL. Forgive me, the frog, for the first time, leaving the pond for the ocean. How can I see you all, let alone understand you?

Take care,
CONG

 

Good Morning, Washington DC,

The bright sunny day: All the monuments, domes, spires, statues rise up to the sky, soar to the heaven, except Viet Nam War Memorial. Black, like the pin, goes deep to the soil. The White House is white. The Black Marble is black.

In the morning, coming to National Cathedral on the hill, I do not see God nor congregation. Emptiness.

In the evening, sitting in the baseball stadium, I see the holy congregation. Their religion is Baseball, singing like church choir. Eating and drinking like sharing the Communion. The 12 Apostles down there bring their spirits up to Heaven with Bats and Balls. When a ball flying to the seats, many people rise up trying to get it like holy blessing. At the back, food and drinks are their “daily bread” they pray for. Some people concentrate on the pamphlet of statistics like Psalms. Baseball caps everywhere like halos. Red and white T-shirts for sale like angel robes. Everyone is happy as they are in Heaven. The first time in my life I watch a baseball game right in the Baseball Cathedral.

I have some books on Baseball Saints by David Halberstam, whose death is the Visa for me to be here. Both Baseball Bible and Baseball Service in Baseball Cathedral are completely dark to me. But I enjoy the Touch of America.

Baseball Bless You, America. Baseball is with you, and you with Baseball.
CONG

 

Dear Philly, good day Atlantic City.

Woo! The Cathedral of Gambling with the double-ten commandments advised by American Gaming Association. Oh, my God. GAMING looks like GAMBLING. This is that. I wonder if caSINo has SIN within itself. Hope not. But I doubt. And I didn’t see any SAINT here.

Looking at the stream of people coming, focusing their eyes to the slot machines, I heard the words “free to pursuit of happiness” echoing. Losing, return to win back your losses. A win, return to win more. E-Z Pass. Go faster. Go ahead. No clock. Neither day nor night in casino. No-Times Square.

You are in Heaven with thousands of colorful neon lights, make everything DOUBLE, TRIPLE, One four Four. Ecstasy. Drinks are free and welcome to lure you to the dream of winner. Gambling is GAME and BLIND. Knowing when to stop?

Responsible Gaming means Irresponsible Gambling, doesn’t it?

A mime tried to be machine-like. Robot tried to be human-like. Foot Massage and Palm Reading next to each other.

SIN City Mt. Holy Town. The young smile, the old napping.

White, Black, Yellow, Brown skin, the Sun makes all shadows the same on the white sand.

Atlantic City always turned on.

On the drive back to Philly, I saw the sign STAY AWAKE! STAY ALIVE! Otherwise you die. You intend to gamble your life? BOARDWALK is life.

Horn of Plenty.

Food, Fun and Friendliness.

We the People, Pursuit of Happiness.

CONG

 

Dear Atlantic Ocean,

The first time in life, I dipped my hand into Atlantic Ocean. Just over there is Nantucket, where the ashes of David Halberstam will rest. May my soul hitchhike the ferry across. Should I take some ash and drop it into Me Kong Delta, so he can meet his youth again?

One Very Hot Day. I stopped by the house of Home Sweet Home in East Hampton, and the
birthplace of the author, America the Beautiful in Falmouth.

I walked step-by-step on Boston’s Freedom Trail, not crazy rush like on the Freeway.

In Boston, I slept in the bed of a Marine who was moving from Kuwait to Iraq. I saw all his high school and college pictures, books, souvenirs on the shelves.

In Falmouth, I sent a letter to SPC. Johnson Stephen, who was now somewhere in Iraq, telling him about his beautiful Falmouth village, lighthouse, fishing, swimming and wishing for his safe return, not mentioned the bullshit war at all.

During Viet Nam War, at 15, I found many Xmas cards handmade by primary students in the States, in the Rear, sent to the GIs in the Front. Those were my boyhood toys, which I found in the garbage dump near my school.

Goodbye, Boston. Farewell to the navel of American Revolution. My body is in Jacksonville, Oregon, now, digging gold, but my soul still somewhere in New England with golden memories.

Many American-Vietnamese here never touch the navel of U.S. history and Revolution. They just do nails, run barbershops, and mow the lawns, trying to make $$$. Gold Rush no longer rushes. Hair, nails, and grass keep growing. We cannot stop them. The longer they grow, the more $$$ my friends make. Their American Dream fulfilled. The streets are paved with gold.

Up near Crater Lake , the first time in my life, I touched snow. Two little girls threw snowballs to me. I sat and lay on it. I walked, doubting my feet like Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon.

Goodbye, Boston. 4 July. I left the Cradle of Liberty, Birthplace of American Independence right on her 231st birthday. I ate hot dogs, potatoes salad, baked beans on the East Coast, and watched fireworks in the West, Oregon.

I am in Arcata, CA now.
CONG

 

Dear friends,

Good evening America. I set foot in LAX at 6:25 PM 21 May. Like Neil Armstrong stepped out of the spaceship walking on the Moon, like the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, I stood in line at Visitors Counter, Customs, at Tom Bradley Int’l Terminal in high spirit of Apollo and Mayflower. I giggled like the angels had the new wings ready to fly in Paradise.

My wife feels proud and happy back home in Viet Nam. At long last, at least once in life, her husband goes to America. The Promised Land, Paradise, Heaven, Something Number One.

She boastly told all the villagers, “My husband saw a pumpkin as large as a house in America.” All the villagers listened, mouths and eyes wide open.

Another lady said, “My husband also saw a cooking pot as big as the Village Commune.”

How come! What for?

The answer: “My husband’s pot is used to cook your husband’s pumpkin.”

Best,
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Dear America,

My soul and mind are untidy like NASA in Florida the day Apollo 11 returned from the Moon.

My visit to the U.S. Paradise is the reincarnation to me. I still have East-West jetlag. Climatically, Paradise. Purgatory, jet lag. It is The 0001 Place (not 1000) to see before you die. 101 Things to Do in life. Not many people have their dreams come true in this lifetime. I am one of the few. Out of more than 3000 photos taken during 90 days in the New World, the Dreamy Land, I had to choose the best, iconic 10. And if only 3 chosen, which ones should I pick out? I told my family, friends, neighbors, colleagues what I have seen:

  • the button to cross the streets
  • the subway in NY and Washington DC.
  • the snow in July at Crater Lake
  • the Atlantic Ocean
  • the Central Park in NY, desert in Arizona, Redwood Forest …

What I have tasted:

  • the biggest burger
  • the brownie and trail mix
  • the blueberry and yoghurt
  • the corn and salmon

What in USA scared me:

  • I almost burned my finger with the hot water tap in the kitchen.
  • the alarm at my classmate’s house. He gave me his house key, but his wife set the alarm as usual. I opened the door, and the siren barked fiercely. So scared, I just stood at the door holding my passport, just in case the police came. … Goose bumps. “Ask not what American will do for you, but what together we can do.” But, I am alone then.

Yesterday, my daughter asked me if I had any dream, dream to go visit somewhere, somewhere else.

No, I have no dream now. It takes time to have another dream. I feel full, my five senses.

Many thanks, USA,
C O N G

Porn Government

By Eliza Mimski

One

He undressed the country and grabbed it in his sweaty palms. As the zipper came down, the country split in two. He inserted his finger into the wrath. He inserted his finger into his following but they didn’t notice. He peeled open the law and banged it into the first half. He abraded the tissue. He promised beautiful garments to the second half. He sweet-talked. The country grew grotesque. It took on an absurd shape. It bulged in strange places. His jack-o-lantern smile assured all that everything was just as it was supposed to be.

Two

A cabinet of little boys who hate women.
They dropped my rights down a well.
Men talking about my body. A frat club making rules about my eggs.
He’s an orange glow – radioactive – and I don’t like him.
A long flight of stairs leads to the past you thought you left behind

Three

The men are nails.
They hold locks in their hands.
They are telling us to go to sleep.
But we are awake.
We rise up.
We are healthier than them.

 

 

Eliza Mimski is a retired teacher who lives in San Francisco and writes poetry to help her deal with the election. Right now, it’s her sanity. Her work has appeared in Quiet Lightning’s Sparkle and Blink, Fiction 365, Enclave, Anti-Heroin Chic, Poets Reading the News, New Verse News, and other publications. Visit her website at ElizaMimski.wordpress.com.

Photo credit: “Radioactive Geranium” by Garry Knight via a Creative Commons license.

Scent of Mock Orange

A cento by Marcia Meier

 

The serpent, that mocker, woke up and pressed against me

In the west the falling light still glows

but here on earth we’ve got a fair supply of everything

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter

crooning black lullabies in the kitchen,

And now, it is easy to forget

At night, the murmuring calls of chuck-will’s-widows

The moon is a sow

comes home; like he is the Last Emperor

with him in flying collar slim-jim orange

but cops blow him away

Again, brutish necessity wipes its hands

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries

men drawing lines in the dust.

He called her good and girl. Then she was dead,

I hate them

And the scent of mock orange

 

(“From the Death of the Fathers” Anne Sexton; “Why is this Age Worse…?” Anna Akhmatova; “Here” Wislawa Szymborska; “At the Fishhouses” Elizabeth Bishop; “Meridian” Amy Clampitt; “Diving into the Wreck” Adrienne Rich; “The Odyssey” Rick Bass; “Song for Ishtar” Denise Levertov; “Spoon River Sadie Louise” Anne Lamott; “The Reception” June Jordan; “DeLiza Spend the Day in the City” June Jordan; “A Far Cry from Africa” Derek Walcott; “At the Fishhouses” Elizabeth Bishop; “Metaphors” Sylvia Plath; “Corsons Inlet” A.R. Ammons; “Tu Do Street” Yusef Yomunyakaa; “Clearances” Seamus Heaney; “Mock Orange” Louise Gluck; “Mock Orange” Louise Gluck)

 

Marcia Meier is an award-winning writer, developmental book editor and writing coach. Her books include Heart on a Fence (Weeping Willow Books, 2016); Navigating the Rough Waters of Today’s Publishing World, Critical Advice for Writers from Industry Insiders (Quill Driver Books, 2010); and Santa Barbara, Paradise on the Pacific (Longstreet Press, 1996). Her memoir, Face, is forthcoming, as is an anthology, Unmasked, Women Write About Sex and Intimacy After Fifty, co-edited with Kathleen Barry. She is also at work on another book of poetry and photography, titled Ireland, Place Out of Time. Marcia is a member of the Author’s Guild and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Visit Marcia’s website at MarciaMeier.com.

A Brief History

A sonnet by I.E. Sommsin

Into the toilet endlessly flushing

leap the great state and vast empire,

fat and swollen, on schedule to expire,

onward toward oblivion rushing.

They got the loud proud words that prove them strong,

and the firm resolve that works on teevee

and the raw courage made for a moovee—

if you look tough enough, you can’t be wrong!

So fade the golden years of aggression,

as all glory molders to regression.

Led by old children—mean, demanding, shrill,

prone to stumble and forget and to kill—

they never know how they are afflicted

by deep and bloody wounds self-inflicted.

 

I.E. Sommsin, a writer and artist from Kentucky, lives in San Francisco. He describes this piece as a “hard-hitting sonnet,” written some time ago, “whilst in the grip of a creative fit that turned out to be prophetic.” Indeed.

Photo Credit: Golden toilet image by La Ira Graffx via a Creative Commons license.

The Big Top Comes Down: A Consciousness Poem

By Deborah Kahan Kolb

 

once the elephants left the crowds stopped coming to the circus but look do my eyes deceive me the elephants are back they are blustering along on Capitol Hill with old white-man creases leathering their skin leaving yuge piles of shit in their wake for the humane rights activists to shovel and yes the crowds are back to see the gilded circus with their very own eyes especially the trumpeting elephants imported from Russia but the parks department submits based on alternative facts that it’s not truly a crowd it’s really fake news it’s a scattered gathering of empty bleachers lining the parade mall of the grand old circus the greatest show on earth headlined by the triumphant return of the elephants their legendary memories faulty somehow remember last year how they snorted and swore and yet oh my god here’s the winning new ringleader just promoted and he’s tripping over the ludicrous length of his tie he used to be an ordinary clown y’know all he did was comb-over the orange wig and shift his makeup from white to perma-tan but some clowns are scary and this one likes water for his next trick he wants to pour gallons of it down Ahmed’s gagging gullet oh yes he’s a self-styled high inquisitor turned into a meme this big league circus ringleader oh look there he’s cracking his golden pen now to tame the donkeys braying out of control in an obstinate corner of the congressional ring ladies and gentlemen hell is empty and all the losers are here the circus is not shuttered it’s terrific it’s tremendous just look at those asses their portfolios prancing ringing round the oval kicking up their heels amidst piles of rubles they imagine they’re stallions able to vault a fantastic wall and see up there the amazing gymnastics of the aerialist acrobats wow they can twist themselves into anything huh the people on the pavement ooh and aah and scratch their heads as they witness hope and change swing upside down from filmy vows of lightweight silk and in the center of the platform can you see the monkeys tilting at that crumbling Mexican windmill or maybe it’s Syrian who really knows and guess what my friend the great cats are back the pink pussyhats no more jumping through hoops or performance on demand hear those fierce felines roar they’re swarming the parade route and chasing this circus act right out of town watch the ringleader ex-clown snatch a bellicose bow amid the hue and cry believe it or not a Ripley themed spectacle is playing itself out on the splendid stage of our nation’s capital

 

Deborah Kahan Kolb was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY and currently lives in the Bronx. Much of her poetry reflects the unique experiences and challenges of growing up in, and ultimately leaving, the insular world of Hasidic Judaism. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetica, Voices Israel, Veils, Halos & Shackles, New Verse News, Tuck, Literary Mama, 3Elements Review, and Rise Up Review, and her work has been selected as a finalist for the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award. Her debut collection, Windows and a Looking Glass, is forthcoming in April 2017 from Finishing Line Press, as a finalist for their 2016 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition. You can read more of the author’s work at www.deborahkahankolb.com.

Photo credit: “Circus elephants and performers parade on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol,” U.S. Library of Congress.

Previously published by Poets Reading the News.

The Return of History

By Easton Smith

 

I was born in 1989, the same year that Francis Fukuyama published his essay, “The End of History?” The Berlin Wall fell that year, collapsing history (such a delicate thing, after all) underneath it. It was final: Liberal democracy and global capitalism were the inevitable tide to raise all boats. My whole life was to be post-historical.

As a young boy, adults talked to me daylong about my future, but never my past. Past was irrelevant at the end of history, and I was a child anyway. I had not lived long enough to have past, it was assumed. I began in the present moment and just osmosed into my long, uncomplicated life to come.

But still, I had these odd memories. I remembered finding my mother sad, head-cocked, staring at the wall with her nasty, ice-cubed orange juice in hand. I remembered bullies saying big words that didn’t feel safe. I remembered hearing about Kosovo. Bomb sounded historical to me. I had learned of the atom bomb that ended World War II. Old history, Grandpa’s dad old, so old that it seemed too far away to touch me at all.

But then, bombs were back one day after those planes hit the towers and everyone somberly adult-agreed that history was here again. “This is history,” they said, and I believed it. War, climate change, oil, dictators, democracy, I counted the history on my fingers. The world was suddenly soiled with history. By the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attack, I was thirteen and firmly historical.

When I was fourteen, my dad sat me down, read me some of the lyrics from the booklet of a punk CD that he had found in my bedroom (“Hey, Dad, fuck you! Hey, Dad, fuck you!” he read in deadpan), and asked me why I was depressed. I wasn’t depressed, I told him, just angry and not sure that anything mattered, especially school. “But what about your future?” he asked. I retorted, “Look at the world!”

Now, 27 years to the day from the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hillary Clinton conceded the presidency to Donald Trump: “This is painful, and it will be for a long time. … I still believe in America, and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future.” But the people have spoken, those who voted and the many more who stayed home. They are tired of having some parent tell them to just believe, to always look ahead. History is here. They are hungry for it, even if it means the death of the future.

•

In Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson introduces the Greek poet Stesichoros (630-555 BC). According to Carson, before Stesichoros, certain adjectives were innately stuck to their subjects, like periodic numbers to minerals. Oxygen is always 8, just as to the Greek poets blood was always black, kidneys were always white. But Stesichoros wrote to “undo the latches.” For him, “there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved. Or a river being root silver. Or a child bruiseless.” Stesichoros, Carson writes, “released being. All the substances in the world went floating up.”

Our president-elect is a pre-Stesichorosian poet. He whips up digressive tales of Crooked Hillary and Lyin’ Ted Cruz, flat characters that are shackled to their adjectives. His narrative arcs follow familiar paths: us/them, big/small, winner/loser. He is a storyteller of the oral tradition, meandering, playing to his audience, but always returning to our favorite myth, where the villain’s name can be screamed out in unison by the audience with the adjectival cue, and the good guys (our guys) always win huge. The substances of the world fall back down.

George Lakoff, linguist, suggests that Trump repeats his adjectives to strengthen word association for his audience. If he always puts radical in front of Islam, people will associate the two subconsciously, without evidence. Trump creates a common mythology with his supporters, so that thoughts can go unfinished, even unsaid, and the implication still sits ripe for the taking. If Crooked Hillary “gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.” He doesn’t know, but everyone else does. They know what happens to the Crooked one in this story.

Bruce Lincoln, historian, writes that, “myth [is] that small class of stories that posses both credibility and authority.” Myths aren’t fables, which we enjoy but know to be fantastical. Neither are they history, which we know to be objectively true, but find unmotivating. Myths are nostalgia made actionable.

•

Trump deals in myths and has become one himself. Trump is Phaethon, Icarus, Tereus (I’m sick of the Greek myths, too, but where else can I find such hubris?). So as not to repeat the most repeated stories, I will summarize the moral of them all: Those mortals who think that they are gods lose. Every time.

“Make America Great Again.” It’s precisely the type of slogan about which the Greek poets wrote their moralizing tales. In Hesiod’s (8th century BC) long poem, “The Works and the Days,” the poet tells of five ages of humans. Hesiod’s era was the human era, the fifth, the Age of Iron, a time of stress and labor, full of hateful people destined to be destroyed by a vengeful Zeus. This Iron Age starkly contrasts with its predecessor, the Heroic Age, the “fourth generation on the noble earth … the generation of hero-men, who are also called half gods, the generation before our own on this vast earth.” The present is bad, but the past was great. It sounds familiar.

But Hesiod does not give us a strongman to strong-arm his way back to the fourth age and make the fifth one great (again). The realm of the past is inaccessible to base humans; it’s a place for the gods and spirits. To try to reach back is to step out of place, to attempt the impossible and the sinful. The poets knew well that nostalgia for a simpler time, when humans were gods, is a tempting and dangerous fire.

When the early Greeks of Hesiod’s time, the pre-Acropolis and pre-dēmokratia Greeks, looked out at the ruins of the great Mycenaean civilization, the collapsed palaces at Tiryns and Pylos, what must they have thought? What could create such structures, and what could kill such giants? These are the questions underneath their mythology.

What fireside myths will we create among the ruins of the American Empire? How will we explain the fields of dead oil rigs and carcassed pipelines, the trash islands, the air thick with smut, the eyes of a wolf, the flight of a California condor, a governmental agency, a climate accord, an electoral college, a Facebook fight? This country was founded upon too proud a mythology, blood too sure. May we find humility in our ruined palaces. May we be creative in our adjectives. What might the word great mean to us in the future?

•

Mythology withers, and we begin to see it fraying where our remembered past too cleanly contradicts the myth. “Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead.” Hillary’s myths cannot console anymore. It’s in our bellies: We owe him nothing.

In my belly: We can’t think piece our way out of this one; the rules have changed; I want to hold my people close; we need the stories of the body and the spirit; we need to “release being.”

Stesichoros took risks by deviating from the standard adjectives. The unexpected adjective is a sudden world. Blood can be red rather than the traditional black. A thing that was once huge can become irrelevant, puny, insecure. A president can go from strong to child taunted, disgraced, and even forgotten. The new adjective shakes us from myth, gives the story to the malleable present.

Many who thought our country was diverse and open are awed to find it angry, white, afraid. A myth has been upended. Shocked, people scream and plead for a re-assertion of their mythology of liberal tolerance and compassionate capitalism, for history to end again. But history is our seedy uncle, the underbelly of the myth, and it shows up whether we like it or not. He coughs, snarls into his plate, and tells us slur-ridden stories from a world far beyond the reaches of our Facebook feed that we would rather ignore. It’s a family feud now, the smug against the repulsive, comfortable family myths against the uncomfortable ones.

May I be excused from the table, please?

•

The day after the election I saw a woman walking her child home from school. In her stern movements I saw a depth of twirling currents underneath her skin, like under mine. Our outer surfaces, unable to express our large fears. Her child, adult-quiet, pulled his weight behind him in heavy little arms. We didn’t speak to each other, just walked our tired walk past each other’s sad eyes. In that moment, I felt alone in a collectively secreted pain, and for the first time since the results came in, I cried. It felt important to cry. I walked down the street in tears to announce to the world that things are not okay and that I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know how to affix an adjective to myself these days (hopeless, motivated, angry, anxious are all insufficient). The stages of grief are all out of order and moving too fast. My relationships strain from out-of-sync mourning. It’s a funeral for the future, and we all grieve the specific death we have individually imagined. I fear that Trump has already inserted a wall between our bodies, as we police each other’s ideas, move past each other’s woe like ships in the night.

Still, a moment of hope: I watch my friend Yaya’s exposed, muscle-shining, black body dance with two others in a choreography of anguish and healing, each movement a desperate push and a constraint at once. They weave through the audience, meeting our eyes, radiating stage from their bodies. Taking up space. I feel their love of self, and it is uncompromising. I feel their love for the rest of us, for my white and masculine body, and it’s more than I deserve. Such gifts, in the wake of these national declarations of scarcity. Amid empty placations and fearful declarations, here dances the past and the future at once.

Church music plays, some choir of old power, and Yaya moves to the red-cushioned throne in the room. Sits in it, a mythology not meant for their body. They perform pain, vulnerability, deconstruction. They walk amongst us, drawing our witnessing inwards, giving us in-sight. This is what’s at stake, I think. The opposite of a wall.

 

Easton Smith lives in Salt Lake City, land stolen from the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute and Northern Ute people. He likes to camp, try to play the banjo, sing with his friends, talk about his feelings, and run up big hills. Sometimes Easton organizes with Wasatch Rising Tide and Showing Up for Racial Justice SLC. Sometimes he labors for wages by writing things.

Previously published by Brine Waves.

Art credit: “Fallen Angel No.2” by Michael J Bowman via a Creative Commons license.

Typing Class

By Susan Elliott Brown

A black, rectangular shield covers the keyboard and my hands
like a censor hides nipples on TV. I type sample sentences,
hundreds more words to go before the bell. When will
the auditor perform the city audit? The fox and the bear
jumped over the logs. The mayor mailed a letter to his aunt
in Pennsylvania. The TV kicks on at a quarter till and a girl
named Tangela sits in front of a makeshift studio, red
high-school letters emblazoned behind her head. She reads
in a monotone, President Bush and war on terror and a sea
of keyboard clicks swallows it up. The clumsy cow stepped
into the chicken coop. Iraq. Baghdad. Saddam. The state
auditor will return on Tuesday. I look to the keyboard
for a sense of place and the black box stops me. Eyes on
the screen. We think they have weapons of mass destruction.
People still wear “I Heart NY” shirts to school. I think
Tangela said we are at war. War with terror. The crafty
attorneys requested a long recess. The black box hides
the delete key. The quick sprinter—no—the quiet sprinkler.
Delete. When will the judge be back in the building?
Planned, authorized, committed, or aided. In order to
prevent any future acts. All necessary and appropriate force.

Susan Elliott Brown is the author of the chapbook The Singing Is My Favorite Part. Her poetry appears in The Best American Poetry blog, Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, and Reunion: The Dallas Review, among others. She received her PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Mississippi, and she lives in Birmingham, Ala. and works in advertising.

Photo credit: Typists in training at the War Production Board, 1942, U.S. Library of Congress

When the Clock Was Smashed

By Julia Stein

Color Juarez White

I was twenty, alone in Juarez and afraid
in a white-walled clinic wearing a white paper gown.
The illegal abortionist took from the drawer
his metal rods, metal knife, metal spoon.
I laid back on the hard, white table.
The gas mask was put over my head.

It was over. They wanted me. To stand up. Walk.
I wanted to fall asleep on the floor.
Stood up. Walked. Got into the taxi.
Collapsed against the taxi’s back seat.
White street lights. The taxi stopped.
The driver’s voice, “Walk across the street
and catch another taxi back to El Paso.”
At the corner, the other side
looked miles away.
I wanted to fall down.
One foot off the curb.
Both feet.
White headlights.
Cars screeched.
I walked slowly,
step by step.
At the corner
I stood
alone in Juarez.

Hemorrhaging

You’re OK,” the doctor said
in the Los Angeles office.
Three days later I bled out blood clots.
Pain exploded in my stomach.
I called the doctor.
“I don’t remember you,” he said.
I was a boat cracking down the middle.
“Take pills,” he said.
All day, the pain, the pills.
I was a boat going down, down, down
in a storm.

The next morning I woke up
to waves of pain,
one after another after another.
I dragged myself to the phone.
I didn’t understand.
The doctor said I was fine.
“Meet me in the hospital,” he said.
My boyfriend drove me down the freeway.
I moaned, “My stomach hurts.”

At the hospital I’m torn away from him
to lie on a table where I float adrift
in a sea-white room.

The doctor loomed overhead,
“You’re twenty.
We need your parents’ consent.
Money down.”
Later he told my mother
I was running out of blood.

The Hall of Mirrors

Eleven years I have carried that summer on my back
and lived like a cripple, curling in on my myself.
I always wanted to take a chalk eraser,
wipe off the whole summer when time stopped,
the clock smashed, the hands wrenched apart.

Down the years I run through
an endless Hall of Mirrors.
I look for my boyfriend down one tunnel,
up another. I never find him.
All I see in the mirrors is the doctors.
Blood is on the floor.
My dress is smeared with blood.

 

Julia Stein has published five books of poetry and has also edited two, Walking Through a River of Fire: 100 Years of Triangle Factory Fire Poetry and Every Day Is an Act of Resistance: Selected Poems of Carol Tarlen. Stein’s poetry ranges from love lyrics to explorations of war, peace, women’s lives, and work. She is also co-author of the prose work Shooting Women: Behind the Camera, Around the World (Intellect Press, 2015), and she has been an arts journalist and literary critic for years.

This is sections III, IV, and V of Stein’s poem, “When the Clock Was Smashed,” from her first collection, Under the Ladder to Heaven (1984).

Photo credit: Craig Leontowicz via a Creative Commons license.

Just a Short Note to Say Something You Already Know

By Lawrence Matsuda  

For Donald’s Daughter, Ivanka Trump

 

Ivanka, in a different time and place,
you and your children are squeezed into
cattle cars destined for Nazi death camps.
Stars pinned to your coats
and numbers tattooed on your arm.
Religion is your crime, something like
the 120,000 Japanese Americans whose race
incarcerates them during World War II.

If you dodge head shaving,
and starvation, maybe a country
would welcome you.

Angel of death is difficult to slip,
unfortunates are turned away,
chased by verbal brickbats and pitchforks.
You smell freedom’s scent
but only glimpse porthole views
of Lady Liberty’s tantalizing torch.

Doors slam and hands
of kindness withdraw.
You are not among privileged
huddled masses.

Today, as a 1% American demographic,
you are safe by an accident of birth.
Others less fortunate, however,
stand on precipices knowing,
“History does not repeat
itself but it rhymes.”*

When Donald promises
a magnificent Great Wall
and spews religious
hatred to cheering crowds,
you must feel a guilty twinge,
knowing if this were 1943 Germany,
a chorus of incendiary voices
would echo and push innocents
off slippery cliffs into eternal darkness.
Black hole so forbidding victims
would never see their children again,
while self-serving politicians levitate
on bandwagons swerving on and off
a broken highway of eight million bones.

 

* Quote attributed to Mark Twain.

Lawrence Matsuda was born in the Minidoka War Relocation Center, a concentration camp for Japanese and Japanese Americans during WWII. He is a regional Emmy Award-winning writer and an author of two books of poetry, A Cold Wind from Idaho and Glimpses of a Forever Foreigner. Recently, he and Tess Gallagher collaborated on a book of poetry entitled Boogie-Woogie Crisscross, and chapter one of his graphic novel, Fighting for America: Nisei Soldiers, was animated and won a 2016 regional Emmy.

This poem was previously published in Raven Chronicles.

Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Completely Imaginary Trump/Russia Theory that May or May Not Prove To Be True or False

By Amy Porterfield Levy

 

1987 – The Art of the Deal: Nukes Edition

Trump decides that Moscow needs a Trump hotel and, like every good realtor, he thinks about how good he would be at solving nuclear proliferation issues.

Trump: I have a great idea because real estate deals are just like nuclear arms treaties. The Soviet Union and I should work together and bomb France.

Soviet Union: We’ve never heard of you. Also, dial it down, freak.

1996 – Trump hearts Moscow

Trump: I heart Moscow so much that I want to put an exact copy of Trump Tower there. Also, I am broke.

Russians: *sigh* Fine. We heart you too, weirdo. Why don’t we buy a bunch of condos from you so you won’t be so broke?

2007 – Trump Vodka

Trump: I love Russia so much that I made gold Vodka.

Russia: You are gross. Here is some more money though.

2008 – Donald Trump, Jr. visits Moscow a bunch

Junior: Dad has piles of money pouring in from Russia so maybe he will finally remember which son I am.

Also in 2008 – Russia Rolls on into Georgia (the country)

Georgia: Maybe we should, like, join NATO or the EU?

Russia: Nope.

American People: *yawn*

Press: Something, something. … Here are pictures of tanks.

American People: Cool tanks, bro. Hey, wonder if taking out a home equity loan to buy a Mercedes was a bad move?

2013 – Trump’s Miss Universe Pageant Goes to Moscow

Trump: Oligarchs are everywhere! I love oligarchs! Hey, what does oligarch mean?

Prostitute: It’s where a guy is part of a little group that has all the money and all of the political power in a country

Trump: *jumps up and sings* I wanna be an oligarch!

Prostitute: *yawns* Smile for the camera, dipshit.

That’s an overview of Trump’s little case of Russophilia. It could be perfectly innocent; people do get crushes on countries. He could be like one of those women who drink tea instead of coffee because they’ve read too much Jane Austen.

As for Russia, we all know the Soviet Union collapsed and we sort of thought we were friends and everything was fine. Unfortunately, some things went down in Russia while we were busy worrying about sleeper cells and Adam Lambert. It got a little dictatorish and Putin didn’t appreciate having NATO nearby or that whole European Union thing. He was also afraid Hillary Clinton might push democracy down everyone’s throats, which would be super inconvenient.

2014 – Russia invades Ukraine

Russia: *whistles and looks around* Rolling on into Georgia was pretty cool so we’re just gonna go ahead and take Crimea, okay-thanks-bye!

American People: *yawn*

Press: Something, something. …Putin, natural gas, pipelines.

American Government and the EU: *handwringing* How about some sanctions?

Putin: Your dumb sanctions are fucking with my gazillion-dollar deal with Exxon. That is a problem.

Exxon: Yeah, sanctions are harshing our gazillion-dollar buzz about drilling the shit out of the Black Sea.

American People: Ice Bucket Challenge!

Putin’s New To-Do List

  • Break up NATO
  • Break up the EU
  • Fuck with the Americans
  • Make a gazillion dollars
  • Make the ol’ empire big again

July 2015 – Putin meets with top aides (the ones he hasn’t poisoned yet)

Putin: Where are we on breaking up NATO and the EU?

Aides: Just propping up the anti-globalization whiners. The usual.

Putin: Boring. How’s our ‘Fucking with the Americans’ thing going?

Aides: Terrific! Donald Trump just said he’s going to run for president.

Putin: Who?

Aides: That fat American we filmed doing gross stuff with hookers.

Putin: Yeah, that narrows it down. …

Aides: You know, the broke one with the weird hair. Says you’re buddies.

Putin: Oh, him. What a douchebag.

Aides: He’s the douchiest.

Putin: Welp. I’ve got a gazillion dollars on the line and an empire to build so go make life suck for Hillary.

This turned out to be a pretty easy project. Sean Hannity and the rest of White Power radio had become extra-deranged after years of Obama so they happily worked alongside the Macedonian trolls and Internet bots on Facebook and Twitter to amplify the irrational Hillary hate that they’d been fomenting for over two decades.

Pop Quiz: Why do you hate Hillary Clinton

Americans: We don’t. Most of us voted for her.

Trump Voters: Because … pant suits? Emails? WE DON’T KNOW WHY SHUT UP.

Stirring up animosity toward Hillary Clinton and taking advantage of Trump’s natural tendency to be an authoritarian asshole didn’t take much effort and it was also probably a breeze to gain access to the Trump inner circle in order to plant pro-Russian sentiments. After all, who doesn’t have associates who work for Russian mobsters and moonlight as FBI informants? Trump buildings are infested with that kind of sleaze. Just kidding. This is a parody.

July 2016 – Putin meets with top aides (the ones who are still alive)

Aides: Sir, Republicans actually nominated that idiot. Now what?

Putin: *mouth twitches*

Aides: *scared* Did your face muscles move?

Putin: That was me laughing. Go shoot yourself in the back of the head, but call Assange and Kislyak first.

The Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, was evidently skulking around Trump world, probably working some silver-tongued magic on these guys. He’s probably one of those people who gets you to confide in him because he makes you feel like you’re his best friend and possibly the most interesting person he’s ever met. He’s like your sweet, drunk Grandpa except that sweet, drunk Grandpa is a badass motherfucking spy. Trump and his friends probably didn’t even notice they were getting involved in high crimes and whatnot. They’re like those pot smokers who don’t notice they’ve become drug dealers.

Pot Smoker: Hi dude. Just here to buy my weekly dime bag.

Dealer: Hey, man. Buy a little more and I’ll knock down the price.

Pot Smoker: I’ll sell the extra pot to my buddies and that will cover the cost of my weed habit!

Dealer: You are a genius.

Years later…

Pot Smoker: Man, I am very lucky to have lots of buddies and extra cash.

Cops: You are under arrest for possession with intent to sell.

Pot Smoker: *genuine shock* I am not a dealer! I just have hundreds of friends and nice electronics. *cries*

That is Trump’s little gang of genocidal knuckleheads. They probably didn’t mean to collude with a hostile foreign country—it was all so friendly and well-meaning and it made complete sense at the time. Plus, Drunk Grandpa is their bff and he would never dick them over.

Kislyak: You are an American hero. You are also quite handsome. I bet you will beat ISIS and be a world hero one day.

Mike Flynn: *teary eyed* Brown people scare me. Can I have a hug?

Kislyak: *snuggles* I love you. Will you do me a teensy favor as my best friend and suggest chilling out on the sanctions a bit? That would be amazeballs!

(By the way, Drunk Grandpa is darling but he snaps into badass spy mode when he’s dealing with clowns like Carter Page and Roger Stone.)

Kislyak: Hey, Ferret Faces. I will pull out your fingernails if these sanctions aren’t lifted.

Page and Stone: *whining* Why does everyone want to pull out our fingernails?

Kislyak: Shut up and deliver these messages, Ferrets.

While wiretaps, moles, and kompromat would make a great movie, it’s probably more boring than that. Trump may have genuinely thought he was practicing “The Art of the Deal: Sanctions Edition.” A guy with no moral compass, a huge ego, and a complete lack of intellectual curiosity can be easily manipulated by charming, Drunk Grandpas.

Kislyak: You are a tremendously great man who should rule the world. I’m going to stroke your ego like a high-budget porn fluffer.

Trump: I love you. We are best friends.

Kislyak: Totally. Lift those sanctions, you brilliant hunk of smoking hot man meat. I’m going to help you beat mean ol’ Hillary and rule the world.

Trump: I can’t wait to lift sanctions and rule the world. Will you curl up on the couch with me and watch cable news?

Things are unraveling now and these guys are getting stressed and acting stupid so we may see how this ends soon. Putin and Trump could be wallowing around in gold bars and billion dollar bills while Europe is screwed and the United States looks the same but stands for something our kids will be ashamed of one day. This could also end with us sitting on a pile of radioactive dust and eating our dogs, while Paul Ryan crawls through the ruins, bleating about tax cuts.

Or maybe most of us will get our happy ending and live long enough to see handsome FBI agents in windbreakers, gently guiding that fuzzy yellow head into the back of a black Crown Vic where he’ll be whisked out of our lives forever into that far-off place where convicted, humiliated ex-Presidents are stashed. The Ferrets will cut deals and live in constant fear of stairs and tea. As for the bloated, old racists who tried to destroy this country, that’s too fun to think about so we’ll save them for another completely imaginary theory that may or may not prove to be true or false.

Previously published on Huffington Post.

 

Amy Porterfield Levy is a Florida-based freelance writer and science advocate. She is a contributor to Huffington Post, The Science Post, American Council on Science and Health, and The Genetic Literacy Project.

A Poem and Translation

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” enable_mobile=”no” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ layout=”1_1″ spacing=”” center_content=”no” hover_type=”none” link=”” min_height=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”left top” background_repeat=”no-repeat” border_size=”0″ border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” padding=”” dimension_margin=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=”” last=”no”][fusion_text]

By Sima Rabinowitz

[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container][fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” enable_mobile=”no” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_2″ spacing=”” center_content=”no” hover_type=”none” link=”” min_height=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”left top” background_repeat=”no-repeat” border_size=”0″ border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” padding=”” dimension_margin=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=”” last=”no”][fusion_text]

Nuestra Música

Hay silencios sagrados
las pausas frágiles entre palabras

Hay silencios desgraciados
quedarnos mudos cuando hay tanto que exige expresión

Hay silencios inesperados
ya no recuerdo el timbre de tu voz

Hay silencios desanimados
tener que repetir una vez más nuestra petición

Hay silencios que insisten
que resisten
que saben salvarse

Hay silencios que son como museos
archivos de almas desvanecidos

Hay silencios que sueñan
con una noche—una sola noche—sin tiros

Hay silencios que inventan su propia historia
para no dejarnos sin narrativa

Hay silencios que inspiran
una íntima benedición tentativa

Hay silencios que hacen una tregua con la noche
ocultando sus motivos

Hay silencios que nos dan la fuerza
de seguir siendo testigos

Hay silencios robados, fallados, falsificados

Hay silencios engañados, lastimados, dañados

Y hay silencios que ruegan ser llenados
de un canto humilde de amor

[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_2″ spacing=”” center_content=”no” hover_type=”none” link=”” min_height=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”left top” background_repeat=”no-repeat” border_size=”0″ border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” padding=”” dimension_margin=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=”” last=”no”][fusion_text]

Our Music

Some silences are sacred
the fragile pauses between words

Some silences are disgraceful
we are mute when there is so much to say

Some silences are unexpected
I no longer remember the sound of your voice

Some silences are weary
having to repeat our request, once again

Some silences insist
some resist
some know how to save themselves

Some silences are like museums
archives of vanished souls

Some silences dream
of one night—just one single night—empty of the sound of gunfire

Some silences invent their own history
so we won’t be left without a story

Some silences inspire
a tentative, intimate prayer

Some silences call a truce with the night
hiding their motives

Some silences give us the strength
to carry on serving as witnesses

Some silences are stolen, mistaken, false

Some silences are deceptive, damaged, injured

And some silences beg to be filled
with a humble song of love

[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container][fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” enable_mobile=”no” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ layout=”1_1″ spacing=”” center_content=”no” hover_type=”none” link=”” min_height=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”left top” background_repeat=”no-repeat” border_size=”0″ border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” padding=”” dimension_margin=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=”” last=”no”][fusion_text]

Sima Rabinowitz is the author of The Jewish Fake Book (Elixir Press) and Murmuration (New Michigan Press). Her prose and poetry have appeared recently in The Saint Ann’s Review, Amp, Hamilton Arts & Letters, and Trivia: Voices of Feminism. She wrote “Nuestra Música” for her dearest friends and her community in the Bronx.

Photo credit: K. Kendall via a Creative Commons license.

[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]