Editor – Page 4 – Writers Resist

Death Equals Silence

By Micaela Kaibni Raen

Artist statement

I am my grandmothers’ dream, and she is mine. We exist together through Tatreez, Indigenous Palestinian textiles and embroidery. We share cultural memory and wisdom traditionally handed down, Palestinian female to Palestinian female. As a Palestinian lesbian artist, I feel Tatreez patterns hold a deep connectivity to ancestral Indigenous femininities that can be accessed through creating art based on the patterns, repetitions, and mathematical matriarchal matrices inherent in Tatreez stitching sequences. My goal is to take these intuitive insights and formulaic computations to create a new visual artform, Queer Tatreez. A style of art focused on ancestral wisdom that embraces inclusivity, diversity, and the land that gives us life.

My mission, with this artwork, Death Equals Silence, is to educate others in order to bring an end to the military occupation, and ongoing Nakba, in Palestine. I am living in exile in North America, and my artwork strives to bring our sacred teachings, rooted in spirit and land, fully into the present moment. Two keffiyeh scarves are shown, one is black and white, while the other is pink and white. To me, the keffiyeh is a symbol of cultural identity and sumud/steadfastness. Two color variations are shown to represent both the Palestinian men and women killed since October 2024. The kite image symbolizes the children of Gaza who currently have the Guiness World Record for the most kites flying at once. With little documentation and no headstones, the black kite flies as our death marker, re/telling the stories of the thousands of children that have been targeted and killed during the current genocide.

The Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP!) has used the slogan Silence = Death to mark many social justice movements from the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Queer and Trans human rights, the Palestinian genocide, and more. At the top, I have flipped the words to read, “Death = Silence.” This is not a general statement of truth. This is in direct reference to…whole families (and their genetic line of familial relatives) that were targeted and killed since October 2024. Especially targeted were teachers, leaders, doctors, activists, journalists, authors, humanitarian workers, social workers, etc. Statistics show that death disproportionately silences children and those working toward justice. The words in the artwork combined with the lips sewn together represent the current global climate of racism, ethnic-cultural-erasure, shadow-bans, and censorship of Palestinian voices.

For this artwork, I researched ancient and modern patterns of Palestinian embroidery and keffiyeh scarf patterns. I used two keffiyeh scarves to design textile/images through high resolution scans and graphic art. Through art layering, I placed the images onto a graphic art layer and then designed the text and other graphical elements. My work incorporates multimedia modalities and is an ever-evolving journey. Contemplating Tatreez patterns, and the act of Tatreez creation, become a bridge into deep space time where I sit with my grandmothers in a sacred Tatreez Circle, embraced, and listen.

Micaela Kaibni Raen is a Palestinian-American creator, cultural worker, queer femme-dyke, mother, and global Queer/Trans human rights activist. She is most known for Queer Tatreez, a style of visual art and visual poetics based on Indigenous Palestinian Tatreez embroidery. Her work appears in Mizna; Qafiyah Review; Rowayat; Yellow Medicine Review; The Poetry of Arab Women; and El Ghourabaa: A Queer and Trans Arab and Arabophone Anthology. For more information, visit her website and Instagram.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Numbers

By Michal Rubin

Mohammed, Wadia,
two brothers
Ala Asous, Hazaa, Rami, Ahmed,
four brothers
six cousins
Rizkallah,
seventh cousin,

one missile,
hundred shards of glass,
one ambulance,
one mass funeral,
one village,
one sleepless night
at Muthalath al-Shuhada

I wish my body moved,
shook the numbers off,
22452600
my passport number,

two,
Yehoshua and Rivka, my grandparents,
two,
Rachel and Mimi, my aunts,
they did not get a number,
no ink wasted on their arms
four
bullets outside one small town
in Poland

five
o’clock,
a huge explosion
two
social workers come to help
six
lost parents
a sleepless night at Muthalath al-Shuhada

Stop reading the news,
I am told

counting
countless
counts,
the many zeroes,
trailing digits,
I am lost
with the numbers

Michal Rubin is an Israeli, living in Columbia, SC. The impetus for her writing came from the years-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a psychotherapist, a Cantor and a poet, she brings forth the challenge of distinguishing truths from myths, awareness vs. denial, conformity vs. individuation. Her work was published in Psychotic Education, The Art and Science of Psychotherapy, Wrath Bearing Tree journal, Rise Up Journal, Topical Poetry, Fall-Lines, The Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Waxing & Waning: A Literary Journal, South Carolina Bards Poetry Anthology 2023, Palestine-Israel Journal, and a chapbook published by Cathexis Northwest Press.

Photo credit: Abacus courtesy of the British Museum.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Baptism

By Shieva Salehnia

The fountain in the middle of Washington Square Park has not always been there, just as I have not always been here standing next to it.

In the middle of the park, I climb inside the edge of the fountain’s lips. I lean back against them, cool slick stone. The bubbling center spray spurts, streams, arcs, rushing into the filthy city sky, plumes so massive, they bring the smell of the ocean.

The water washes off the weight of people’s attention, the unrelenting mess of the city off my ankles, swollen and ashen from the heat and sticky grime of each sidewalk I pressed my soul against to get here.

100 years ago, the star magnolias didn’t grow on the trees at the parks’ edge. But now the flower beds bloom with bluebells and red and yellow lipped tulips.

We are transplants, the bluebells, the fountain and I. Yet, we are each a perfect manifestation here. Nature never gives up. I remind myself I am part of nature.

April 2023

Raised in South Dakota by my Iranian-immigrant parents, I was brought up to deeply appreciate poetry, especially in the lyrical traditions of the Southwest Asia and North Africa region. I write poetry to define and redefine myself, as a means of liberation, and to allow others to feel less alone in their own uncommon and mundane experiences. I currently live in Los Angeles, where I publish and co-edit a literary zine called Embryo Concepts, and am writing an upcoming comic series called Girl Crazy about the adventures of two queer women living in New York City.

Photo credit: Rich Herrmann via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Inside the Serotonin Industrial Complex

By Dick Westheimer

“The only winning move is not to play.”
—from the movie War Games

“You can’t call it anything else. It’s just slavery.”
—Calvin Thomas, who spent more than 17 years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana, working the fields and cattle processing facilities as part of his terms of incarceration.

When I shop these days, especially
online, it feels so much like playing
inside a video game. There, my avatar
only dies when it runs out of coin,

and to level up all I need is ISP speed
and free delivery for stuff I didn’t know about
until it came up in my feed. This
is first-person-shooter shit. Point and click

on new Bluetooth earbuds and a child miner
in the DRC falls in a pit. Need some chicken
wings? An inmate at Angola State Pen,
gets crushed in the gears

of a feather plucking machine. A sack
of flour in my cart? Or Frosted Flakes? Outside
an Arkansas lock-up, a pennies-per-day guy
in an orange jump suit has his skull cracked

by a truncheon. Everyone is in the game.
Some hands are on PCs, some on business
plans, some on guns, some bloody and raw
pulling rocks from the ground. This is the age

where my shopping cart is filled
by clicks—of leg-iron shackles
and handcuff hasps, of cell door locks
and a rifle’s trigger lifting.

This is the age of tantalum and tin,
of Archer Daniels Midland enslaving
someone’s kin, of Tony the Tiger
and Androids and the Mac laptop

I’m typing on—which leaks the tears
of some boy or girl or man who will
never be paroled. It’s the double
chocolate cookies I’ve made

from flour ground from the nightmares
of an old guy working the fields
of Parchman. It’s the cotton sheets

I sleep on woven out of inmates’ dreams.
It’s hope weeded from the red-clay fields
near Angola’s gates. Point & Click:
Same-minute shipment of serotonin—

squeezed from every human animal
chained inside my video game.
Point. Click. Drop in another coin,
keep playing the game

until I’ve won. Keep playing
the game until I’ve won. Point.
Click. Keep playing the game.

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist, and Pushcart and Best of the Net nominees. His poems have appeared or upcoming in Whale Road Review, Rattle, OneArt, Abandon Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Minyan. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, was published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com.

Photo credit: Sarah Starkweather via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Welcome to Amplified Voices, a Special Issue of Writers Resist

Since the Vietnam War, violent conflict has been made visible to even the least likely victims—on televisions, then phones, now raging across social media—and its representations are laden with passionate opinions, well-informed and not. From politicians and universities around the globe to PEN America to Oscar Awards speeches, emotionally bloody conflict about conflict reigns over solutions, while innocent civilians suffer.

Hence our enthusiasm, and a bit of trepidation, when former Writers Resist editor DW McKinney suggested this special issue. DW wrote, “I really want to help create an archive so to speak of writers who represent countries and regions that are actively being destroyed right now.” Would we be open to this, DW asked?

“Of course” was the obvious response, and so it is that we celebrate the launch of “Amplified Voices.”

We are grateful to all those who bared their trauma to the submission process; to guest editor DW McKinney; to Writers Resist editors Debbie Hall, Sara Marchant and René Marzuk; and to the brave and generous writers whose work is published herein.

Our profound thanks,
K-B Gressitt, publisher

Amplified Voices Contents

“From the Editor of Amplified Voices” by DW McKinney

“They Are All Terrorists” by Lori Yeghiayan Friedman

Two Poems by Saheed Sunday

“Caught in the Crossfire of a Madding Crowd” by J.D. Harlock

“Gauze” by Lisa Suhair Majaj

“Ofrenda for Resistance” by Jordan Alejandro Rivera

“In Pillars, the Prized City” by Maira Faisal

“Zoo” by N. de Vera

Two Poems by Lonav Ojha

“18 Jennas” by Jenna Mayzouni

“Jannah is a single strand. My father is the complementary prognosticator strand.” by Abdulrazaq Salihu

Map credit: International Crisis Group, Crisis Watch Map.

From the Editor of Amplified Voices

By DW McKinney

These words—the ones in this note and the ones in this issue—are difficult to write. Do not look away from them. Let them sink into you.

I am writing this editor’s note after I have seen a father carry his son, blown to pieces, in a yellow bag, and I fought (and failed) to keep my obsessive compulsive disorder from replacing the man and his son with me and my daughters in my mind. I am writing this editor’s note after I’ve watched a mother wipe her son’s blood off the tile floor, which I watch again after poet Maira Faisal mentions it in her poem “In Pillars, the Prized City” with a link to the video as reference, as proof, that this atrocity has been done. But Faisal didn’t need to show me proof because she has seen it and I have seen it and we won’t forget the mother’s grief.

I am writing this editor’s note after white phosphorus has clogged Gazan skies. After I have listened to videos of people wailing in panic and fear and anticipation of their own deaths. And when jets from the nearby air force base shook my house while I watched these videos—which ones, I couldn’t tell you, there were so many—I trembled in fear and tried not to be sick. I am writing after I have seen too many murdered babies lying in dust-covered streets, after too many orphans have wandered through obliterated cities in search of murdered family members they will never find, after I have seen a man half-buried in rubble resting his bloodied head against a stack of paper, and I prayed he was alive.

As I watched news reports and recordings from Gaza, one thing that consistently struck me was the way that Israeli soldiers aggressively erased Palestinian history. Bombed libraries, universities, and cemeteries. Erased entire lineages, cultural traditions, and mythologies. The thing is it wasn’t—isn’t—just happening in Gaza. It is (still) happening in Haiti and Sudan and Lebanon and Myanmar and Ukraine and and and. . . . The endlessness of this, its global reach, is why Saheed Sunday laments, “. . . to the heated flame of this hell i call a country” in his poem “In which a country becomes a song that dies on your skin,” and why Lori Yeghiayan Friedman’s mother proclaims that all political leaders are terrorists, in Friedman’s essay “They Are All Terrorists.”

“Amplified Voices,” Writers Resist’s special issue, is an attempt to be an archive for what has been lost and must be remembered. This special issue is an elegy. It is a whispered prayer for those never to be forgotten. It shines a spotlight on horrors occurring in the past, in the present, and likely in the future.

The countries razed and barraged by artillery fire are many. The complicity in terror is grand and far-reaching. Sometimes it seems like we are trying to scoop a flood into a barrel with a spoon.

If you find yourself wondering how to move forward in a world that’s shifting toward silence in the face of ongoing genocide and tragedy, I’d like to share a few recent words from folks on social media that have given me much to consider:

“How must I disrupt my own life to counter the disruptive violence of the world?” – Black American poet Danez Smith (@Danez_Smif) on X/Twitter

“its not as easy as simply believing in decolonization or in a free Palestine. if you live in the west you have to kill the part of you that is western in reflexes, that believes your joy and comfort come before that of those in the global south” – @cutemuslimgrl13 on X/Twitter

“The arts are supposed to lay bare the atrocities of the world, not distract from it.” – South African author Terry-Ann Adams (@TA_4Short) on X/Twitter

I am writing this editor’s note with a lot of grief in my heart, but also a lot of gratitude for those who thought us fit to amplify their voices in the midst of chaos.

Wishing you all peace,
DWM
Guest Editor, Amplifying Voices

DW McKinney is a writer and interviewer who resides in Las Vegas, Nevada. She is a 2024 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow and has received fellowships from PERIPLUS Collective, Shenandoah, The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, and Voodoonauts. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Oxford American, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ecotone, TriQuarterly, and Narratively, among others.

Photo credit: Zaur Ibrahimov on Unsplash.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

They Are All Terrorists

By Lori Yeghiayan Friedman

is what my (now long-dead) mother used to say to the TV news reports of the bombings, beheadings, settlements, kidnappings, hijackings, imprisonments, killings―the latest eruptions of violence in a region far away, part of a war my mother fled with her family decades earlier.

She said it while sitting in the Barcalounger, relieved to be off her feet (finally!) after a Sunday dinner at my medzmama’s house in East Hollywood, vaguely gazing at the glowing screen of the massive Magnavox wedged into a corner between the behemoth built-in china cabinet and the sizable stone fireplace—that monstrous TV, an immovable object that had no chance of being carried away if, say, the family had to leave in a hurry. It said: Whatever wars, genocides, upheavals or forced evacuations may come, I’m not going anywhere and neither are you.

On screen, the war raged on like a TV show that could never be canceled.

She said it quietly to herself about the leaders on screen while we waited to pick up our party pack of kebab at a restaurant in my medzmama’s neighborhood, in a sad, L-shaped corner mini-mall on Hollywood Blvd., the small TV hanging in an upper corner like in a hospital room. On screen, the powerful nation’s sweet-faced leader (who was a killer) shook hands with the powerless people’s soft-spoken one (a killer), while the rosy-cheeked American president (killer) looked on.

She said it through clenched teeth, face red with effort in the kitchen of our apartment in West Los Angeles, standing on the scuffed linoleum, scrubbing the pans, sticky with burnt bits of roast beef, while the mushrooms sprouting out of the ratty carpet in the dining room silently grew another quarter millimeter. Oof, she added before it, sounding irritated, They are all terrorists, sounding irritated at the terrorists who were responsible for her refugee status, the moldy carpet, the congealed greasy meat clumps that wouldn’t come off no matter how hard she scrubbed with the Brillo.

Whatever, is what I said. Well, I thought it loudly, placing it like a billboard onto my careless face, while I sat somewhere not paying attention to her or the TV, or while I leaned in the kitchen doorway waiting for her to finish so I could ask her for money or the car keys, because I was a young shithead who understood nothing other than what I wanted, which was to go thrifting with my friends to find the most perfectly-ripped-at-the-knees-jeans, about which my mother would later comment, You look like a homeless person.

She said not a word about how it felt to be without a home, or a country, when they packed up for a two-week trip until things cooled down, only to have their land seized, house and business gone; “home” a place she would never know again. She never talked about her parents’ terror at losing everything, the future they’d worked so hard to build, after the same thing had happened to both of their parents in another land decades earlier. She didn’t say a thing about what it was like to move to another country where they were dependent on relatives, a country she hated, where she became sickly, asthmatic, where everything went wrong. She never talked about what it was like to then leave the continent, a refugee tucked into the hold of ship, a charity case allowed in by another country she never wanted to live in, or what it was like to live in a room above a church when she and her family first arrived in Manhattan just as winter set in, and she went to school in the thick of adolescence, crushed by the need to belong, a damn foreigner, when she did belong somewhere, just not here, because the terrorists stole everything and made her this little girl lost, adrift forever on the other side of what might have been.

Maybe those four words were all she had: They are all terrorists,

is what my mother said, but not to me. To me she said, I want you to grow up in one place, have a home and friends you never have to leave. She said, I want you to get an education, have the chance I never had. She wanted me to write.

The war has not changed much and neither has the news. But, I have. I am still that careless shithead, but I know a few things and watch from the safety of my living room in the country where I was born and where I live, the one where we tell ourselves we are free. On my TV, the grim-faced powerful nation’s leader (a killer) looks dead-eyed at the camera with a message for the powerless people’s leaders who are faceless (killers) and live underground, the war newly erupted, renewed for yet another season.

Terror is a tactic used by every leader, from mayors to kings, to attain and maintain power, but the word “terrorist” is reserved for the powerless, the ones who wage war, maim, bomb, steal, blow up, stab, behead, kidnap and imprison in the name of God, of righteousness, of safety, of fairness, of revenge, of greed, but not the powerful who do the same things for the same reasons.

My wise and traumatized mother never got to see what she did right when she made sure I knew all the words. But I want her to know, I want you to know, that when I watch the news I can only think of four of them, set in a neat little row like a passed-down pair of silver candlesticks or an heirloom string of yellowing pearls: They are all terrorists.

Lori Yeghiayan Friedman’s creative nonfiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her writing has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Mizna, Stanchion Zine, Pithead Chapel, Hippocampus Magazine, Emerge Literary Journal, Bending Genres, Autofocus Lit, Memoir Land and the Los Angeles Times. Her flash piece, “In the wings, no one can hear you scream,” is included in Already Gone, an anthology edited by Hannah Grieco and published by Alan Squire Publishing. She earned an MFA in Theatre from UC San Diego. Follow her on X and Bluesky: @loriyeg

Photo credit: doodle dubz via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Two Poems by Saheed Sunday

a daggerpoint

& what is salvation
if not how we give our body to beauty
to the memory of what does not rust
—Othuke Umukoro

the Sunday before this one, the catechist
warned about hellfire and its odor of smoky taste.
he said it would come unto us like the clouds,
breaking off whatever remains of our clear sky.
the next Sunday, i hear the flowers in my head wilt.
i smell the aftershave of smokes and i bury my
head into my brown palms, begging to be virused out
of all my sins. apparently, what the catechist didn’t
warn us about is that it isn’t only hell that breaks
the bond between a father and his son. the heavy
artillery fire of war can do the same.

in my mother tongue, a poem is a battlefield.
here: every stanza of this poem is an equivalent
of the demarcation line between who survived the last
war and who didn’t. here: every line in this poem
is an equivalent of the rows of my brothers and sisters’
bodies buried by their own homes. here: every word
in this poem is a noose around we survivors’ necks:
a prayer translated into a gun or a death toll.

this stanza is intentionally left blank for all the bodies
we lost to the soil and gun wounds.

something in my head is whispering. it says
in Darfur, every civilian is a moving bait slowed
by thorns in front of a cocked gun. it says in Merowe,
tears are the new ways to know you haven’t been
claimed yet by the fighter jets roaring in the sky above.
for now, ignore the dead butterflies falling off your
chest and supplicate to god. hell is not a thing
you want to witness twice.

In which a country becomes a song that dies on your skin

in this war of a country,
flames die and are reborn as hell,
songs die and are reborn as bullets.

this is a way to say
that everything cool, here,
becomes balls of fire raining

our heads into confusion.
once as a boy, i sat and watched
how a home can turn into the mouth

of a tiger that eats men alive;
how a home can become the mouth
of a grave that swallows its own sons,

& dead bodies, & dead roses.
growth didn’t come with seasonings.
i do know now why my father heaves

a large breath every night before
he shuts his eyes.
that must have been the weight

of his grief leaving his body
till the next day. today i brought out
a palette, and painted quranic verses

on every part of my body that hasn’t burned
to the heated flame of this hell i call a country.

i know what it means to be born
in the middle of a war. i know what it
means to become mouths slashed into songs

of peace & harmony. fa inna maha-l-usri yusrah.
this darkness that illumes the sky will soon
be chased by light. & the breath i hold

will be ridden of every scent of the war
i’ve fought. lord, let victory songs find
a space between my jaws tomorrow.

lord, right this story till there is no space left.

Saheed Sunday, NGP V, a Nigerian writer, is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Best of the Net nominee, a Star Prize awardee, and a Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation member. He has his work published in Lolwe, Strange Horizons, Trampset, The Deadlands, North Dakota Quarterly, Shrapnel Magazine, and others.

Photo credit: Bruno Alcantara via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Caught in the Crossfire of a Madding Crowd

By J.D. Harlock

caught in the crossfire of a madding crowd,
the child runs
into the arms of her mother
and nestles herself
‘neath a limp arm
drenched in blood, dreading
the glare of the machine
that scans the corpses
of the agitators
that dared to disturb
the order
it was programmed to maintain, and
as the child cries out for
the security her mother had promised her
here, on the streets of the city
she has spent her entire life in,
the machine stares her right in the eye
with its recalibrating sensors
and offers to return her home safely

J.D. Harlock is an Lebanese American writer, editor, researcher, and academic, currently pursuing a doctorate at the University of St. Andrews. In addition to their work at Solarpunk Magazine as a poetry editor, and at Android Press as an editor, J. D. Harlock’s writing has been featured in Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, New York University’s Library of Arabic Literature, and the SFWA Blog. You can find them on LinkedIn, Twitter, Threads, and Instagram.

Photo credit: Photo by Brett Wharton on Unsplash.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Gauze

By Lisa Suhair Majaj

when you learn that “gauze” comes from Gaza
you will begin to understand how light
passing through translucent fabric illuminates
the delicate porous openings between threads
that interweave to allow molecules of air
and light to flow from one place to another
without blockade or border, and you will learn
how gauze allows us to see, though dimly,
through the haze of grief shrouding
what is soft and vulnerable, like the length
of fabric a child steals from her mother
to drape across a table for a hideaway,
peering out without understanding
what is happening, too young to know,
yet, that there is no hiding in Gaza,
and through this haze you may be able
to glimpse the ones still alive this morning
before the bombs found them, murmuring
about hunger and the absence of bread,
the softness within them reverberating
like an echo past their now-crushed bodies,
and as you turn away in anguish or despair
or shame perhaps you will remember
that gauze is also used to cover wounds,
layering gently over the bleeding place,
of which Gaza has so many we cannot
stop counting, and perhaps you too
will begin to see through the haze
of denial and scream STOP

Lisa Suhair Majaj, a Palestinian American, is the author of Geographies of Light (2008 Del Sol Press Poetry Prize), poems and essays in many journals and anthologies across the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and two children’s books. She is also a scholar of Arab American literature, and co-editor of three volumes of critical essays on Arab, Arab American, and other international women of color writers. Her poetry has been translated into a number of languages, including Arabic, and was displayed as part of the 2016 exhibition “Aftermath: The Fallout of War—America and the Middle East” (Harn Museum of Art). Her grandmother came from Jaffa and her father, born in Birzeit, grew up in Jerusalem. Majaj was born in the US, grew up in Jordan, studied in Lebanon during the war years, evacuated on a refugee boat during the 1982 Israeli invasion and was abducted to Israel for interrogation, and then spent 20 years in the US. Since 2001, she has lived in Cyprus, as close to Palestine as she can get.

Photo credit: Liz West via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Ofrenda for Resistance

By Jordan Alejandro Rivera

Tier I: Inframundo

Poppy and cempasúchil petals
Intermingled as our destinies
Blood, bones, and stems
Obsidian spearheads
And shattered sugar skulls

Tier II: Tierra

Tomatoes, white sapotes, and olives
Laid out on a lattice-patterned scarf
Ten thousand and forty-three
Candles flicker in harmony
Guiding us here together
Wax binds our food

Tier III: Cielo

A black-and-white photo of us
Before our disappearances
And now, finally,
We found our way back home.

Jordan Alejandro Rivera is a 23-year-old queer Chicano writer living in Boston. Jordan is passionate about mutual aid and is involved with the Prison Book Program. Having studied Biology at NYU, he now works as a medical researcher. He has poetry forthcoming in Metachrosis, partially shy, and Acedia Journal. Find him on X/Twitter @jordinowrites.

Photo credit: Miguel Angel Ruiz via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

In Pillars, the Prized City

By Maira Faisal

“You ask: What is the meaning of ‘homeland’?

“They will say: The house, the mulberry tree, the chicken coop, the beehive, the smell of bread, and the first sky.

“You ask: Can a word of eight letters be big enough for all of these, yet too small for us?”

— from In the Presence of Absence by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish

V. Hajj (pilgrimage)
Stare.

Lock your eyes with mine,
my irises your kaleidoscope

to seek the fractal of Palestine,
absorb the reflection of rubble
staining a land of holy sites,

as apathy-plagued publics
state politics aren’t their forte
while forts, any flickers of shelter,
are licked by the blister of flames,

as the meek, soothed, enchanted
by time’s beguiling hands, (too
often) reject martyrs for monsters:
why run from dark, little things
when one can become a reaper?

IV. Sawm (fasting)
Gaze upon Gaza—

setting sun, a crimson cast
on a mother wiping blood off tile
delicately, lovingly, whispering it
is her Muhammad’s, her son’s last

scrubs clinging to a physician
saying postpartum equals
a hysterectomy, not recovery,
axing branches to save trees

small hearts clattering in small rib cages,
pumping—tick-tick-tick-tick-tick
till they still and stop, slumped bodies
exceeding 5,000 in forty days

children, his flesh and soul,
sealed in grocery bags as severed
limbs, sans warmth and dreams,
visit their Papa in his

carpet bomb flashes and
white phosphorus clouds and
climbing death tolls and

hospital attacks and
church bell chimes and

pets sunk in soot and

and

Israeli officials cheer,
soldiers dance,
civilians chant, “Who has no
electricity, food, water?”

because both sides are
blackened, empty-stomached,
longing for civility

but one thinks the other savages
and ravages, yes, one thirsts for water,

the other hungers for blood.

III. Zakat (charity)
The ummah is one:

“When any limb aches,
the whole body reacts
with sleeplessness and fever.”

Boycotts and banners,
we will not mind manners,

and are marching in streets

Warsaw, Ottawa, Rome,
Lahore, Dublin, Washington,
Istanbul, Doha, Eindhoven

posting for peace

#freepalestine
#savegaza
#stopapartheid

forgoing niceties

“There are NO Two Sides to Genocide”
“End the Palestinian Holocaust”
“Bombing Civilians is a War Crime.”

We, the phantom feet of Palestine,
bastions that won’t sterilize speech
nor forget grotesque portraits of grief—

the tempest-tost, we hear,
and offer aid and alms,
support and a salam.

II. Salah (prayer)
Injuries like rotten peach flesh,
cries absconding sinew,

each second expiates sins,
each breath, an act of worship.

Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, Isha’a,
takbir, qiyyam, ruku, sujud, tashahud,

dawn, noon, midday, dusk, nightfall,
stand, recite, bow, prostrate, sit.

Death lies in the sky.
Palestine rises as it’s razed.

I. Shahada (faith)
In wisps, it sinks from welkin,
seething and seizing around
the cracks of the prized city,
lodging into stalled lungs,
a tide, a tether,

a profession of faith,
smile of iman before burial,
another seed of watermelon:
tough as rind, sweet as fruit,

red as a phoenixing dawn,
with a spring-dandelion sun
cawing wondrously,

“From the river to the sea,
Palestine will be free.”

Stare where, from the debris,
an iris grieves a poppy,

and opens like a cupped palm.

Maira Faisal is a Kentucky Youth Poet Laureate representative, a sophomore at Northern Kentucky University, and a writer. Her work has been recognized by multiple university journals, Hanging Loose Press, and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. As a Pakistani American and Muslim, her pieces often address Islamophobia—especially as it relates to current events such as the Palestinian genocide and Kashmiri repression.

Photo credit: Marius Arnesen via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Zoo

By N. de Vera

I fidgeted at the line for immigration after arriving at LAX. When it was my turn, I calmly answered the officer’s questions, hoping this was a routine interview that would go smoothly. However, when I saw that look on his face, I knew what I was in for—again.

“Wait here, ma’am,” the officer said. “We need to ask further questions. Another officer will take you to a private room.”

I shook my head in disbelief. I was aware of the drill by now.

The officer asked me to hand over my passport, but it wouldn’t be long until he confiscated my phone too. I texted one word to my mother, who worried about me every time I flew back to America, and to my partner, who was waiting to pick me up at the airport.

“Zoo,” I sent to both of them.

It was our safe word. It was short enough to type and send within seconds—just enough time to alert them about my whereabouts before I lost access to my phone for hours, or however long it took me to convince the immigration officers that I was a legal resident. When my mother and my partner received my single-word message, they would know I was getting detained once again.

A new officer from Customs and Border Protection signaled me to follow him. So I did. I carried a bulky folio with paperwork that should prove my legal status in the United States of America. This new officer led me to an interrogation room and rushed through a brief list of rules, which I was already too familiar with.

No talking.
No noise.
No devices.
No food or drinks.
No bathroom breaks, unless permitted.

The officer then left and locked the door. I sat and waited alone.

It was quiet in my room, but I could hear a child crying in the room next to mine. It wasn’t uncommon for mothers with children to get detained too, especially if they were entering America without their husbands. I could hear the faint sounds of an officer’s attempts to get the mother to “shut the baby up,” but to no avail. He yelled louder to “tame it,” as if he were competing with the child’s crying—one noise drowning out the other.

I sat in silence, flipping through my folio. I stretched and stood a couple of times, but I never walked around. I was being watched. A colleague had warned me that pacing might be misconstrued as defensiveness and guilt, so I learned to be careful and limited my movements to prevent further suspicion.

Two full hours went by until the immigration officer finally showed up again at my interrogation room.

“State your full name and date of birth for the record,” he demanded.

“Alexandra Estrella Vazquez. September 28, 1990,” I replied.

“What is your purpose for entering the United States, Ms. Vazquez?”

“I live and work here, sir.”

“Where is ‘here’?”

“Los Angeles, sir.”

“What is your occupation?”

“I’m a data analyst.”

“Pretty girl like you don’t look like a data analyst to me,” the officer said. “Where’s your proof?”

I pulled out my files from my folio. My visa authorization clearly showing my legal status. My signed employment contract. My pay slips from the last three months.

The officer reviewed the documentation, but he wasn’t satisfied.

I showed printouts of sample presentations with analyses that I’ve put together and screenshots of myself conducting data analytics training sessions. These internal company artifacts were confidential, but I needed to have them in case questioning came to this point. It often did.

The officer still was not convinced.

I asked if I could regain access to my phone to show him more evidence accessible online. The officer was silent and looked at me, unblinking. I exhaled when he authorized it.

The officer leaned next to me, too close for comfort, as I trembled holding my phone, showing him my colleague’s recommendations, data analytics certifications, my email exchanges—everything I could possibly think of to convince him that I was who I said I was, no matter how personal or classified.

Finally, he uttered the three words I’d been waiting to hear for hours. “You can leave.”

I hurriedly collected and placed my paperwork back into my folio then thanked the officer. What should I have been thankful for? He had no explanations for what I did wrong. No suggestions for what I could do differently to prevent myself from going through this trauma every time I enter this country. He hadn’t earned my gratitude, but I did it anyway out of obligation.

It was the seventh time I had been detained, but I knew that I ought to feel blessed because others had it worse than I did. Some didn’t even make it past that room and were sent back home.

I stepped out of the interrogation room and rushed to find my way to the baggage claim area, hoping my luggage was still there before it’s taken off the carousel as unclaimed baggage by airport personnel.

As I took the escalator down, I was met by a large sign that read, “Welcome to the United States of America.”

The irony was not lost on me—to be dehumanized, to be caged until I, a 30-something female Colombian data analyst, was no longer perceived as a threat. Yet here was America again, sweeping this incident under the rug, welcoming me back.

I should be happy, I told myself. I should be grateful that I get to live here.

Ignoring the tears falling down my cheek, I closed my eyes and muttered under my breath, “Land of the free. Home of the brave.”

I repeated the phrase to myself over and over again until I deluded myself into believing it to be true.

Land of the free. Home of the brave.
Land of the free. Home of the brave.
Land of the free. Home of the brave.

N. de Vera (she / her) is a queer Asian writer based in Los Angeles. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in over twenty literary magazines and journals.

Photo credit: Molly Haggerty via a Creative Commons License.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Two Poems by Lonav Ojha

To Refaat Alareer,
who became a kite

Brother, you looked so loving,

holding very gently

that box of

strawberries, and behind

your home, not yet,

not again,

but incessantly

in ruins.

You were not a number,

you were,

an educator,

a cheerful poet,

settler’s boogeyman,

and now that you’re dead, English is also

a language for mourning.

A strike occurs in a medium

it does not

simply

………

….

…

fall.

And your words

hang in air

heavier than any

gravity bombs.¹

1. American

• • • • • • • • • •

A letter to a friend explaining the student movement

I have been listening

to more Bollywood these

days. I have been writing Press Statements

for the Press that does not state what

must be stated. I live in despair. And I

sometimes wish I didn’t have to, but hearing

love songs, Bollywood love songs, without

having anybody to love in a Bollywood sort of way,

means I’m hoping to learn a few things

about romancing myself.

A newly made friend

told me

during the protests that he’s serious about

killing himself, & he was writing

a letter, and another

said she’s cutting herself after many years.

The first person, we don’t talk anymore, because I have

nothing to say.

They’re still alive. I am also still alive.

I am listening to Bollywood songs. I am writing

Press Statements.

I am talking to L, and he says,

the Vice-Chancellor is planning something

HUGE!!

He’s been flying back and forth to Delhi. He,

is a bastard, and I’m listening

to Bollywood songs, and I’m doing alright.

And I’m trying to love my friends, the ones I can,

the ones who can love me.

Long live that look

on your face, and mine. I am

listening to Bollywood

songs, and I’m imagining someone

who would have me fully.

I suffer egregiously from the main character

syndrome. I suffer from having faith

in people. Long live the crane

behind the Magis block that spent a year

building what it will never occupy.

Long live the cats in the New Academic Block

that don’t give a shit. So I am

writing Press Statements. I’ve always

danced in my room,

when nobody’s watching,

when the world is burning,

and I haven’t stopped.

Lonav Ojha is a 22-year-old writer from India. His work has previously appeared on ASAP Art, Agents of Ishq, LiveWire, and The Open Dosa. He was also longlisted for the 2024 TOTO Awards for Creative Writing in English. He writes regularly on his personal blog, Stories Under My Bed, where he attempts to reimagine resistance from the praxis of joy and education. Since the 2014 national elections, his country has plunged into the depths of Hindutva fascism, crushing dissent in all its varied expressions and stifling whatever remained of academic freedom in public universities.

Photo credit: Magne Hagesæter via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

18 Jennas

By Jenna Mayzouni

A social media influencer had posted that he looked up how many people were killed in Gaza who shared his name. Morbid curiosity seized me, and I searched for mine.

On November 1,^[1] there were 18 Jenna/Janas killed in Gaza.

On my birthday every year, my mother recounts the story of my birth. How I was a difficult pregnancy, how she labored for 17 hours, and how I probably should have been a Cesarean. How my name came to her in a moment of thoughtful prayer and reflection. How I was facing upward and almost killed us both. And every year, she ends it on the same note: “But everything was worth it after I saw your face.”

On November 1, there were 18 Jenna/Janas killed in Gaza.

There was a Jenna in Gaza who died before she reached her first birthday. If her parents are still alive, how are they feeling? How does it feel to be that Jenna’s mother? To have protected that Jenna for months as a part of one’s body, only to send that Jenna into the world and lose her? Who will the mother tell the story of Jenna’s birth to now? The dreams of a relationship they will never have will haunt her instead.

On November 1, there were 18 Jenna/Janas killed in Gaza.

الشعر الغجري المجنون
Crazy, curly Romani hair . . .

. . . a line from an Arabic poem my mother loved. My mother said that when I was a child, all my hair was straight except for wisps of curls on the back of my neck. When I was 11, I hit puberty, and the worst transformation of my life began. My hair became wild, untamable, frizzy, thick, and out of my control. When I would scream at it, my mother would laugh and say, “Crazy, curly Romani hair.” A straightener stood no chance against Chicago summers and hijab cotton, creating something of chaos for every holiday and event. It wasn’t until my 20s did I appreciate the glory of curly hair. The wisps of curls on the back of my neck became my title card. The crazy, curly hair became something to love, something that marked me and became a testament to my heritage.

On November 1, there were 18 Jenna/Janas killed in Gaza.

Seven of those Jenna’s were 11 years old. Instead of worrying about their hair, about school, about their futures, they spent their last moments on this earth afraid for their lives. Who were the women those Jennas would become? Would they love their hair? Would they love their bodies? Would they struggle with the transformation and an awkward phase? Did they have mothers who put oils in their hair? Who struggled every morning to give them the perfect braid? Who whispered their love in the early hours of the dawn with every hair they straightened, with every curl they put in place? They will never be those women; their mothers will never fix their hair again. Girls in Gaza are shaving their heads, using tents as menstrual products for their first periods. Maybe it’s easier to imagine these seven Jennas focusing on their hair because it was the least of their problems.

On November 1, there were 18 Jenna/Janas killed in Gaza.

When I was eight, the world felt enormous. I wanted to be an adult so quickly because I wanted to see the world. I was going to travel, fall in love, and have a family one day. The next day I was going to be a pirate queen. The day after that I was going to be an astronaut. The week after, I was going to be an actress. In between, I would practice the faces I would make for my adoring fans. Some nights, I would stay awake because I would worry about dying in my sleep, afraid I would never accomplish my goals. I wanted to be great, to be remembered, to be loved. I wanted the world to see me, and I didn’t want to die before being seen.

On November 1, there were 18 Jenna/Janas killed in Gaza.

As Arabs, our middle names are our father’s names. They are meant to trace our lineage. One Jenna had my first name, and her Baba also shared my Baba’s name. She was eight. My inner world was a galaxy when I was eight years old, and I’m sure Jenna’s was too. But now that galaxy is gone. What were Jenna’s dreams? Were they big? Were they small? Was she steadfast and knew what she wanted? Was she shy and worried about what others might think? Could she even have time to dream, or from a young age did she stop?

On November 1, there were 18 Jenna/Janas killed in Gaza.

I think about 8-year-old Jenna often. I imagine a world where her worst fear was not being able to see her dreams come true, not the war. Maybe there is an alternate universe where that is the case. Where all the Jennas grow up and get to be these beautiful women with their own dreams, hopes, and futures. Where they wake in the morning to the sound of birds, not drones. But in this universe, 8-year-old Jenna is gone. Eighteen Jennas are gone.

On November 1, there were 18 Jenna/Janas killed in Gaza.

This is my record to the world that they were here. Even if for a short amount of time, they were here and they lived. The world will see them, even if they died before being seen.

_________________

^[1] in 2023

Jenna Mayzouni is a Palestinian Jordanian American author. She has lived in Illinois, Ohio, Jordan, and Morocco, and currently resides in California, where she works as a freelance reporter with BenitoLink. Her stories focus on the narratives of BIPOC and immigrant communities with a special interest in family dynamics. She went to Denison University and majored in International Studies with a minor in English. She has worked as a Bilingual Domestic Violence Victim’s Advocate, was an Authentic Voices 2022 Fellow with the Women’s National Book Association, and as an intern with the Ladderbird Literary Agency. She has a short story in the Women’s National Book Association Authentic Voices 2023 anthology, Between Pleasure and Pain: An Authentic Voices Anthology (Vol. 2). Her work has also been featured in the Posse Newsletter, and Women’s Republic.

Photo credit: Aurelian Săndulescu via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Jannah is a single strand. My father is the complementary prognosticator strand.

By Abdulrazaq Salihu

3’ 5’
Jannah has seven gates. My father is dead. A dirty cutlass
My people would enter through all. Stabbed into his flesh. My father
Jannah is thirsty. Is dead. Gun to the head, bullet
My people are water. Jannah is shahada. To his skull. My father is dead
My people died in sujood. Jannah is a I cannot unsee the terror. A flood
Myth. My people are the fate. Jannah Cleanses itself with my father’s blood
Is the road, my people are the destinations.               My father is dead. Who did this to me
Jannah is a miracle by the mouth of a Father is gone. Gun too soon. Gone.
Wound. My people are casualties. The Lokoja sands open and swallow
Jannah is a gun, my people are bullets. My father, but he’s only gone when I
Shoot your shot or give the gun, Believe. My brother sees Pa in dreams
Jannah is silence. My people I tell him dreams are only dreams until
Are dead. My people are gone. We believe. My father is gone. Jannah
My people are pebbles Is jannah because my father is gone,
The size of light. Jannah Because light left us black,
Is a gift. My people unwrap. Jannah Because my father is a blue light
Is touch. My people: shy flowers, fold. Full of tenderness. My father is dead
Jannah is poison. My people are milk. Jannah is jannah. My father is jannah.
Jannah is black stripe against the skin                       My father is the only door: enter
Of white music. My people are songs. Through shahada. Through my father’s
My people are sins. Jannah is forgiveness. Delicate skin. Jannah is an RNA strand,
Jannah is jannah because my father died.                  My father is the complement.
Jannah needs my father………………………………………My father needs his people.

Jannah is the gap between my thumb and index. My people are songs the size of quiet.
5’ 3’

Abdulrazaq Salihu, TPC I, is a Nigerian poet and member of the Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation. He won the Splendours of Dawn Poetry Foundation’s poetry contest, BPKW Poetry Contest, Poetry Archive Poetry Contest, Masks Literary Magazine Poetry Award, Nigerian prize for teen authors (poetry), Hilltop Creative Writing Award, and others. He has received fellowships and residencies from IWE Writers Residency, SPRING, and elsewhere. He has work published or forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Unstamatic, Bracken, Poetry Quarterly, Rogue, B’K, Jupiter Review, Black Moon Magazine, Angime, Grub Street, and elsewhere. He tweets @Arazaqsalihu; Instagram, @Abdulrazaq._salihu. He’s the author of Constellations (poetry) and Hiccups (prose).

Photo credit: BBC, under “Fair Use” for commentary.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Welcome to Writers Resist, the December 2023 Issue

It’s been a year that too often has left many of us without words—thankfully, not those who’ve made this issue possible.

Their voices offer clarity, sorrow, hope, humor, and a reminder to embrace nature’s beauty. Stop for a moment, listen, and, if you like, let folks know what you think.

Then, join us in the new year for a virtual reading of this issue’s works, Saturday 27 January 2024, at 5:00 p.m. PACIFIC. Email WritersResist@gmail.com for the Zoom link.

Our thanks to those who created this issue:

L. Acadia Wrong Rainbow

Amy L. Bernstein Slowcookery

Myna Chang Suburban Median

Deborah Hochberg Two Poems

Bryana Joy what happened before the good sex

Kerry Loughman The Whale

Tim Murphy Wildness Unafraid

Jane Muschenetz Point Blank

William Palmer that name

Linda Parsons Two Poems

Lorraine Schein The Last Revolution

Mary Stebbins Taitt Disappearing into the Flesh Market VII

Phyllis Wax What About the Men?

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Slowcookery

By Amy L. Bernstein

“Because when it comes to truly explaining racial injustice in this country, the table should never be set quickly” – Nikole Hannah-Jones, “What is Owed,” New York Times Magazine, 2020

I stand on the far shore of the fast-moving
Combahee River,
opposite the Collective,

afforded a distant glimpse through a lead-paned window
into a snug, low-slung house on the riverbank where

Barbara, Demita, Beverly,
Sharon, Cheryl, Margo, Gloria
are in the kitchen
crowded hip to hip
making dinner to please themselves

the roast has just gone in to
marinate in its juices,

the carrots and potatoes will grow
fork-tender

but not for hours,
not until the pan is bubbling

I see them drinking wine and dancing
slowly
the river moves fast,
conveying time along wet ribs

and the ever-echoing shots of Harriet’s raid

but inside the house,
all is marination

the womyn are steeped in life—
schooled and schooling others

they slip in and out of the
dining room,

setting the table for dinner
one plate cup fork knife at a time,

for nothing about this meal is
taken for granted,
handed out,
handed over

it is so-so-so not easy
yet will be savored
by them
in their own good time

as the Combahee parades
its flowing witness.

Amy L. Bernstein writes stories, essays, and poems that let readers feel while making them think. Her novels include The Potrero Complex, the award-winning The Nighthawkers, Dreams of Song Times, and Fran, The Second Time Around. Amy’s poetry has appeared in Yellow Arrow Journal, Loch Raven Review, Lost Boys Press, Parliament Literary Journal, Passaic-Voluspa, She Is Kindred, and elsewhere, and in an anthology chapbook, Baltimore, I (want to) Love You.

Image credit: “Through Forests, Through Rivers, Up Mountains” by Jacob Lawrence 1967, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

Editor’s notes:

Read about Harriet Tubman and the Combahee Ferry Raid of 1863.

Read the “Combahee River Collective Statement.”

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

The Whale

By Kerry Loughman

never budged

becalmed she was

bleached by sun

& beached on relentless rise

of blue water liquid leeched

from her eyes her orifices

her great mouth agape

her lungs did evaporate

Climate-changed her

wishes drowned

in sand

Kerry Loughman is a retired educator and photographer living in the Boston area. She writes about memory, art, family, and nature in the city, looking for small transient moments of beauty . . . or discord. Her work has appeared in Mass Poetry’s The Hard Work of Hope and Poem of the Moment, Nixes’ Mate, What Rough Beast, The Main Street Rag and is forthcoming in Lily Poetry Review.

Image credit: “The Whale” by Christopher Michel via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Two Poems by Linda Parsons

How a Woman Becomes Herself

When the neighbor’s weed tree drapes over the power lines and shades her garden, she contemplates going out by moonlight to dump salt on the roots—but that could backfire and flow instead into the garden, be its ruination. These good neighbors invite her over for fine smoked brisket and can’t even see the problem from their side, so why doesn’t she just grow a pair and tell them, but she takes the aluminum ladder and reaches to the highest branches she can lop off with her superloppers, so maybe they will see her teetering and mistake her for a dragonfly. Truth be told, she’s out there iridescing for her ownself and no one else, her own muscles braided in the sun, yes, muscles at seventy, her arches hugging the top step, balanced as the scales in her Libra rising, Libra the sign of lovingkindness, and maybe they’ll hear her prayer for a little rain, a prayer that some of the body’s salt sours a root or two—because she’s no old wife in this tale, no wife at all, and who can say how it pours when it rains, how in the end it all comes out in the wash—weed, pride, sweat—all but the wings, or the shadow of wings.

Sassafras

Don’t you be sassafras, my daughter
says to her daughters, and so it goes,
straight from my mother’s shush of seen
and not heard, my mouth not to dispute

her word. Now a woman of a certain age,
word-hunger rages to depths even I
cannot sound, tongue burnt with all
manner of truths: a voice unrecused

to witness, laced with cinnamon bark,
cardamon fire, tea for fatigue and fever.
I speak my palmate self, canopy untold,
oils applied to sting and sprain,

my unquiet seams. I purify the blood,
neither sugar nor spice, but healing sear
for whatever stubborn wound the world
hands out. More than match struck

to tinder, more than knocking on wood’s
door long enough to shatter the walls,
more than sass or backtalk or sulled-up lip
or any tabula rasa, I will be sassafras

and more, all that indisputable more.

Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Baltimore Review, Shenandoah, and American Life in Poetry. Her sixth collection, Valediction, contains poems and prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Image credit: Erich Ferdinand via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.