(Judges 19) Remembering the Concubine

By Emma Goldman-Sherman

After being done to by the pack of men
after she collapsed at the threshold of the old man’s shack
after her master discovered her there unresponsive
he cut her up with his sharpened axe
not for nothing, not for hate, to get everyone’s attention
crying the way men cry when they do something brutal.

He cleaved her parts to send them out in hemp-woven sacks
dripping and stinking his petition, a missive to the leaders
and her rotten pieces spoke.

I hear her singing, her body in 12 parts
a music to force a response in each of 12 tribes
who replied with war, small punishment for blame.
They could have done much more
offered care, compassion, yes, new ways
to be men, what I want for my sons
and if my father still lived.

Let her body be remembered
that her neck might lift her head
again, her throat might breathe fresh
breeze her hands unclench and connect
to her unbroken wrists, and let her elbows
meet her arms to fold across
her newly expanding ribs. Recage
her softer organs to claim her heart’s
own vanished song as her feet re-ally
with her ankles, her knees reborn, her thighs
arise uncrushed as if nothing had ever gone
wrong. And let her hips sway freely untorn.

Emma Goldman-Sherman (she/they) is an invisibly disabled, chronically ill, autistic, gender dysphoric, queer, feminist poet and survivor. They support writers and artists at www.BraveSpace.online. Their plays have been produced on four continents and published by Brooklyn Publishers, Next Stage, Applause and Smith & Kraus. Their podcasts are available at TheParsnipShip.com and PlayingonAir.org, and are forthcoming from EmptyRoomRadio.com. Emma has an MFA from University of Iowa, where they helped organize a union for Research and Teaching Assistants. Emma is currently the playwright in residence at Experimental Bitch. Their poetry has been published at Oberon, American Athenaeum, Queerlings, Chaotic Merge, The Nasty Womens Poetry Anthology and others. Learn more at newplayexchange.org.

Image credit: “The Israelite Discovers his Concubine, Dead on his Doorstep,” by Gustave Doré, Circa 1880.

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Hi

By Rachel Rodman

“I’m just saying. I’m a nice guy. I just want to say HI. And you’re going to accept this greeting whether you fucking like it or not.” —Elon James White, from a now deleted Twitter account

“Hi,” he demanded.

He waited, while everyone watched; he waited with a smile, because this awkwardness was his power, his, his, his.

And something else for me.

But I did not give it. Still I did not give the “Hi” that was owed, though I knew that it was the custom here, to smile for men when they told you to.

A smile that was something else to you.

I had been here long enough, so I did know.

But I was not from here.

“Take me to your leader,” I had said, the first time we had spoken. When I had missed my sisters so much, so much—already, I had missed them so much—though not as much as I would come to miss them.

“Your leader?” he’d said.

“Your leader,” I’d affirmed. I had spoken very badly then (far less well than now). That had been weeks before, right after I had arrived, and I had not yet learned.

“You’re looking at him,” he’d said.

“I do not think so,” I’d said, and the way I spoke was very bad. I would piece this together afterwards, just how badly I had spoken, how badly I had taught myself, even with the assistance of the computer in the cryogenics chamber.

“You’re looking at him.”

“I do not think so,” I’d said again, and the way I spoke was still very bad. I would understand even more how badly later, because he would volunteer to teach me that: the meaning of shame.

Even though he was not a shipboard dictionary.

In my homeland, I had known about leaders. I’d required no shipboard dictionary to learn how to identify them. But I’d known very little about what a teacher was.

So I let him teach me.

I had, however, come to this world for the purpose of reconnaissance. I had come to analyze the air and water. I had come to make maps. As I worked, I also came more and more to correct my most serious misapprehension upon landing: that there was a leader, somewhere, to take me to.

In reality, it was not that kind of world.

So in time I regained my focus. In time, I stopped attending his lessons—the private ones that, in the beginning, he’d insisted were essential.

By that point, in any case, I thought I’d learned enough about shame.

But he’d continued to seek me out in public places, wherever I went to make maps, and he found other ways to teach me.

Initially, I was even astonished by the nuance of these additional lessons: how powerful shame can be. How, in particular, by exploiting an audience, he could shame me into submitting to him.

After a long, lonely, empty journey between the stars, I had also been confident in my understanding of space. (I was intimately aware, in particular, of the effects that one might have on space by passing through it.) But he did things to space that I had not previously understood to be possible: legs spreading to possess more of it (though it was more than that); arms spreading to take the rest (though it was more than that). “Manspreading,” the shipboard dictionary had called it, at least in certain contexts, and the entry had been accompanied by a picture of a man sitting on a bench in a public vehicle, and doing so expansively.

At the same time, his actions on space also constituted a sort of language, even though the words were few. I could translate it like this:

Validate me.

I knew what it meant now; I understood absolutely. (For not even the shipboard dictionary had been so persistent a teacher.)

Validate me.

So eventually, even in public, I increasingly strove to stop participating.

Even as, with ever increasing passion, he continued to teach me.

“Hi,” he was saying now, and everyone was staring, because I did not answer.

“Hi,” he said, in order to accentuate my noncompliance.

“Hi, Hi, Hi,” he was saying, because now he was going to get his validation.

He always did.

Sisters, I had said, days before, when the nature of these lessons had first begun to do more than wear. Please come, sisters.

It was selfish to ask this.

This was not a good world. Even though the air and the water were good. Even though this would be a good place for our spores to grow.

But this was not a good world.

“Hi,” he demanded.

I was only asking them for me.

With the ansible, I had sent them a message: This is a bad world, the world where I am. But perhaps, if you come…

In the journey, my ship had been used up. Our ships always were, in passages like these. Most of what remained: the computer and the cryogenics chamber, had burned up in the entry, leaving, as was usual, almost nothing.

Just me. Just the ansible. And the capacity to send one instantaneous message.

Perhaps, if we are together…

On this world, it would take many, many, many rotations to grow another ship and more fuel, and perhaps weapons too. (As first conceived, it had not been that kind of mission. First missions never are.) Until then, I had only myself.

I had gone the long way, but now that I had made that path, long and lonely between the stars, it could be much quicker for them, no cryogenics chamber required.

That, at least, could be said of my journey.

Though the way back would be just as long.

It was selfish of me to ask. It was selfish, selfish to ask.

To maroon them with me for so many rotations on this bad world.

Would they come?

“Hi,” he said, and his face was close, and everyone was watching, in this place where people came to sit and where coffee was sold. (I needed coffee, I increasingly found, though I hadn’t on the ship; I needed it to assist my mapmaking.) And the shame—yes—was everywhere, but most of it came from me, from parts of myself that, prior to his lessons, I had not known existed, or ever imagined might be violated.

This was part of the lesson.

Validate me.

He was taking all the space now; he was manspreading, manspreading into it, and, in spite of the familiarity, there was also a nuance to the way he expressed himself that I still did not entirely grasp, even as I increasingly sensed that it lay at the heart of the matter: that he seemed to want it all the more—that he wanted it implacably—precisely because he knew I did not want to give it to him.

Is that what I still needed to learn?

In that moment, however, I sensed something else, something behind me. But in that moment I did not turn.

“H—” he started.

Then, in that public place, all the people were screaming and all the people running, and with the frantic exit of everyone went some of my shame.

At the same time, there was a blast of heat and light. And something else on the wall, too, in place of where he had been—a distributed smear of what had once been him:

Manspreading.

In that smear, that “manspreading,” I recognized a basic misapprehension of the language: subject and object switched, so that it had become something that was done to the subject, rather than something the subject did. The man, in this incorrect interpretation, was not the one who did the spreading, but rather the object that was spread (gory and thin, in this case, and on the wall of a public cafe). This kind of mixup felt familiar to me; it was the sort of error committed by someone who has fundamentally not learned to speak correctly.

It was incorrect.

But not, I thought now, so very shameful.

So I turned. And, as I did, I suddenly apprehended, more profoundly than I ever had before, a feeling that, in the first rotations of my existence, safe in my homeland, I had continuously experienced but had never had any need to express—a feeling that, in part, a long, long journey, alone among the stars, had been required to teach me.

“Greetings,” I said, but not to him.

For my sisters had come.

Rachel Rodman’s work has appeared in Analog, Fireside, Daily Science Fiction, and many other publications. Her latest collection, Art is Fleeting, was published by Shanti Arts Press. More at www.rachelrodman.com.

Image credit: By Diario de Madrid for the Madrid Municipal Transport Company, 2017.

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Where My Family Is From

By Howie Good

Artist’s statement: My family originated in Eastern Europe. Any member who did not emigrate prior to the rise of the Nazism—my maternal grandmother’s parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins—were exterminated in the death camps during World War II. No record of exactly what befell them or where was ever discovered, despite intensive efforts by my grandma.

The collage is composed of a historic photo of a barracks in a death camp in Poland. I superimposed and colored by hand the ghostly coat in the foreground.

Howie Good’s handmade collages have appeared or are forthcoming in Mayday, Sulphur Surrealist Jungle, Defunkt, Drunk Monkeys, Blue as Orange, decomp, The Offshoot, Mad Swirl, Mercurius Magazine, Scapegoat Review, Wrongdoing, Willows Wept Review, Writers Resist, Kitchen Table Quarterly, and Otoliths.

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Yet Another Poem About Trees

By Larry Needham

“Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!”

—Bertolt Brecht, “To Posterity”

Before the jar
the anecdote
and Tennessee,

wilderness.
Forests primeval,
grim and awful—

extravagant
as first growth
imaginings.

The Dark Ages.
Then dominion
bleaker still.

Maps, surveys,
plots, deeds, sub-
plots, divisions;

trees measured,
monetized,
milled to spec;

scaffolding
raised up, torn
down, tossed into

the burn barrels of
histories
declining on

the ash heap
crematoria
of woodlots

warming the near
reaches of
advancing night.

_____

Hard to admit
the bleak truth of
a twilight

premonition:
Birnam Wood
departing

that one cast shade on
clear-cut fell
ambition,

slash-and-burn
madness, doubtful
illuminations

kindled in darkness,
guttering in
airless corridors,

all talk of
tomorrows
sucking up

the oxygen,
and, at the end,
no one left to

breathe a word about
equities,
justice or

what followed in
un-natural
succession:

birthright woods
supplanted and
the newly planted

contracted to
an oak on crutches
and hollowed-

out sycamore, mere
stand-ins for
a tired allusion.

_____

The witness
to dark times
wasn’t wrong about

its silences,
indifference,
cold imperatives,

having weathered
the flood—too avid,
perhaps, for landfall

too hopeful of
olive branches,
rainbow signs and

fruitful generations-—
unmindful of the
fire next time,

new dark ages and
a certain justice in
our sad leave-taking.

In blindness or
naked disregard
he was not unlike

the rapt poet of trees
and makers before
The Great War who

couldn’t see death in
the Aisnes and Ardennes
forests for his Trees

and never thought he’d
ever see an end to
first-growth woodlands

or dream that there
could possibly be
future times without

green canopies,
sublimity, poems,
posterity.

Larry Needham is a retired community college teacher who has published on Romantic literature and the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali. His work has recently appeared in a handful of online journals including: Amethyst Review, The Alchemy Spoon, and Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio.

Photo credit: Thomas H via a Creative Commons license.

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U-turn

By Sarah Waldner

Sharp U-turn on the language around
fossil fuels. The text now includes a reference
to “low emission and renewable energy.”
New funding arrangement on loss
and damage. Phase-down of unabated
coal power. Concrete demonstration
that we really are all in this together.
No one will be left behind.

Sharp concern on the low wage around
solid rules. The text now includes a preference
for “dough addition and immutable density.”
New crushing pavement over loss
and damage. Gaze-down from unabated
coal power. Concrete demonstration
that we really are small in this weather.
No one will be left behind.

Sharp heartburn on the sandwich around
possum duels. The Etch-A-Sketch now includes a mess
for “pro magician and chewable elderly.”
New hush-hush engagement of fox
and cabbage. Chase-down of underrated
troll chowder. Wet feet explanation
that we really are all Paul in this dresser.
No one will be left behind.

Originally from British Columbia, Canada, Sarah Waldner is currently residing in the Ontario area where she is a student at Trent University.

Poet’s note: The first stanza of this poem is comprised of direct quotes from a BBC article about COP27 and the speakers at the conference within it: Climate change: Five key takeaways from COP27 – BBC News.

Photo credit: James Saper via a Creative Commons license.

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Global Outcry

By Amal El-Sayed

A wave of blue and yellow—
A sea of sky and grain
Washed all over the world.
Braving snowstorms and epidemics,
You marched in the name of peace.

A row of strollers lying in wait
In Poland, in Slovakia.
Supplies, donations, support.
Homes—opening
Families—welcoming
The whole world—enclosing Ukraine with love.
So much love.

I applaud you for your humanity—
But I ask you:

Did you offer that same warm welcome to Syrian children
Who are slowly being chewed by hunger in patched tents?
Did you embrace the Syrian mothers with the same solidarity
Or did you leave them to freeze to death in bone-chilling camps?

Where were you when Iraqi women
Struggled to escape the blows and kicks and slaps
Of domestic abuse?
Or did their abayas make them not civilized enough for you?

Where were you when Afghan women
Cried hopelessly for help under the rule of terrorists?
Or did their burqas make them subhuman?

And pray tell—where were you when Mexican children
Were turned away at your borders?
Left to the gangs, the traffickers, the cartels!
Or did the color of their skin make them lesser?

Where was your outcry when Palestinians were
Displaced, tortured, executed, massacred—
Their blood fertilizing the land, their screams echoing through the sky.
Yet still, you turned them away.
Where was your welcome, your sympathy, your so-called humanity?

And did you forget the refugees from
Congo, Ethiopia, Sudan, Nigeria, Dominica, Haiti
Who walked through deserts and crossed perilous oceans
To reach YOU.
But all you did was turn your cheek and say:
Illegal, Criminal, Other.

Amal El-Sayed has an MA in English literature and is currently working on her PhD in English poetry. She is an assistant lecturer at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Pacific and Spillwords. Her short story “Unmask Me” is to be published by Wyldblood Press in October 2023.

Image credit: “Refugees in Despair” by Ani Bashar via a Creative Commons license.

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A Moon Is a Moon Is a Moon

By Mandira Pattnaik

Warning: domestic violence

Because you’re the moon, Mother thinks you’re full of circles and spots, and never consistent — rebellious and sulking, often hiding in hoodie jackets, known to break china even with a sponge scrubber, and mostly saying what is best avoided, making mistakes. Sister is better. She poses no troubles, hangs on the wall like a dish cloth, never speaks, never does anything at all. Then Aunt Cheema comes visiting, shepherding guests known to her, strangers to us, and you suspect it’s the same as two weeks before, one that’ll make your family smaller by taking one away. It’s Sister who goes first, her hair plaited, jasmine flowers in them, carrying a tray of sherbet in finest wine glasses, she greets and listens while they make plans, and speaks only in consenting nods even though it’s her marriage they’re talking about. You’re told to walk to the store, with a list of items that you’re sure aren’t urgent, but what can circles do when they’re rolled about, and it’s best to stay away— grooms are known to prefer one to the other, as if they were items on a shelf. When you get back from the store the guests are gone, the atmosphere at home is loud and vengeful, the conversation dents the walls. It emerges that when the prospective groom asked Sister if she could cook Bhindi-aloo-keema, or embroider, or tie bandhani threads (and you know the answer is no), Sister, being land unchanging, consented to all, and now it was a matter of truth versus dare.

Because you’re the moon, Sister suggests it’s the circles, well-rounded, that are the problem: that you’re likely a positron having a positive charge that attracts men of marriageable age, but that the men are repelled by her because she’s firmer and leaner, the nuclei within, a collision with annihilation. When you wonder how she’d know, because the grooms never came to meet you, she says it’s because of how their eyes rove and peek behind the drawn curtain.

Because you’re the moon, you’re still the moon when many months later Sister, like land, unchanging, cannot escape when the man she was married to is merciless to her while his family watches, like good riddance. Your Mother is told only a day after.

Because you are the moon, you make yourself small thereafter, waning, waning, waning, until you completely disappear, so men know you’re unreliable and they never come near.

Mandira Pattnaik is the author of collections Anatomy of a Storm-Weathered Quaint Townspeople (2022, Fahmidan Publishing, Poetry), Girls Who Don’t Cry (2023, Alien Buddha Press, Flash Fiction) and Where We Set Our Easel (forthcoming, Stanchion Publishing, Novella). Mandira’s work has appeared in The McNeese Review, Penn Review, Quarterly West, Citron Review, Passages North, DASH, Miracle Monocle, Timber Journal, Contrary, Watershed Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, and Prime Number Magazine, among others. She edits for trampset and Vestal Review. Learn more at mandirapattnaik.com.

Image credit: chiaralily via a Creative Common license.

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Scheherazade

By Phyllis Wax

The tales she told
night after night
for a thousand and one nights—
fascinating enough
to keep the king entranced
and to save herself from beheading.

But bedtime stories from today’s Persia,
women targeted like wild game—
pheasants or pigeons, squirrels, rabbits—
men taking aim
at faces, breasts, genitals
to cause maximum pain,
birdshot pellets maiming those most tender,
most sensitive spots,
the parts men seem to like best

Who is listening
to these tales?

Social issues are a major focus of Milwaukee poet Phyllis Wax, but she is also inspired by nature and human nature. She has read in coffee houses, bars, libraries and on the radio. Among the anthologies and journals in which her poetry has appeared are: Feral, The Widows’ Handbook, Writers Resist, Jerry Jazz Musician, Rise Up Review, Spillway, Peacock Journal, Surreal Poetics, Naugatuck River Review, New Verse News, Portside, Your Daily Poem. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, as well as the Best of the Net and Bettering American Poetry anthologies. Reach her at poetwax38@gmail.com.

Photo credit: “Iran Protests” by Taymaz Valley via a Creative Commons license.

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Batasan ng Lansangan — Street Parliament

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By Arthur Altarejos

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Batasan ng Lansangan

Naririnig ko na sila bago pa ako lumiko
Hinahati ang hangin, kutsilyo’y kanta
At katok ng tibok ng tambol na ginugunita
Ang tunog ng sumasayaw na kawayan

Dito sa puso ng imperyo
Kalahating mundo ang pagitan
kami’y nagtatagpo’t nakikiramay
Para magbukas ng korte at ipatunay
Na ang distansya ay hindi nagbubunga ng apatya
Hindi rin nito tinatastas ang tela ng pagalala
Na bawat kawalan ay dahilan din ng aming kalungkutan
At bawat kaapihan ay amin ding hahatulan

Na may pananalig kasing sigla ng araw
At tapang ng isang bala na pinalaya
Kami’y patuloy na umaawit
Sa ilalim ng isang radyaktibong kalangitan
Na binubunyag ang bawat butil ng galit
Ng bawat kasapi na gumawa ng paraan
Magkongreso
Bilang isang bayan
Sa dayuhang lupang ito

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Street Parliament

I hear them before I even turn the corner
Carving the dull air with song
And drum beats that remind me
Of the sound of dancing bamboo

In this city at the heart of empire
Half a world away
We come to hold court and prove
That distance does not beget apathy
Nor does it strain the fabric of memory
That each loss is also ours to mourn
And each slight ours too to condemn

With the conviction of daylight
And the confidence of a bullet
We sing our songs
Beneath a radioactive sky
Reflecting every bit of rage
Of every little life
We have managed to congress
Into a nation
On this foreign soil

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Arthur Altarejos is a Filipino community organizer, community worker, and health educator based in New York City. He writes about the things lost and gained in translation between Hiligaynon, Tagalog, and English, the languages of his home. His writing has appeared or will soon appear in Sky Island Journal and Blue Daisies Journal.

Image credit: “Drumming and Day-Dreaming” by Wayne S. Grazio via a Creative Commons license.

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When Ruby Falls

By Marjorie Gowdy

“Have you been targeted by the President of the United States?”
Lady Ruby Freeman in chalkboard-white suit, crimson hat,
asks The Man.

Swept aside like yesterday’s ashes, Our Lady.
Stalwart Georgia pine,
poll counter, valiant, precise.

Slandered on screen by a middling mayor-madman.
Chased like a fox by hungry hounds, rushed to ground,
Ruby gave her girl a ginger mint.

See Ruby Falls, the highway signs say. Spectacular scenes
of cascading magenta and pearl, cavern’s secrets
cry on the face of beaten rock.

Can you believe them? Slicked-haired, pop-eyed pols
pointing wrinkled fingers at the screen?
No, don’t.

Listen instead to Lady Ruby, underground, reputation splayed.
Like the Falls, secreted to a cool haven.
Wrapped in red robes, singing truth.

Stone-hardened men connived Ruby’s fall. Slapped her heart.
Yet our bounteous bronze goddess stands to burst their lies.
She is Lady Ruby, and Ruby will rise.

Marjorie Gowdy has pursued careers that fed her writing. Recent poems are included in Valley Voices, Indolent Books, Clinch River Review, Artemis, the summer and fall/winter 2022 editions of Anthology of the Writers’ Guild of Virginia, The Centennial Anthology of the Poetry Society of Virginia, the book Poetry Ink 2022 by Moonstone Press, and the 2022 book Quilted Poems. Her chapbook, Inflorescence, was released in March 2023. Also an illustrator, Gowdy lives and writes in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Photo credit: Raymond Clark Images via a Creative Commons license.

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Twin Pandemics, Twin Cities

By AJ Donley

They warn you about the dangers
that you’ll be feverish
that your throat will hurt
that it’s contagious
that you won’t be able to breathe

they try to scare you away from action
with the risk of symptoms
that have always been there

because COVID is new
but racism is not

I wear a mask to protect my loved ones
from the pandemic that affects them
my white friends and family
worry about what goes into their lungs
when people of color are breathing in
the soot from communities we’ve burned
to the ground then blamed on riots
we doused them in gasoline and got mad
when they lit a match to keep warm
no wonder they can’t breathe

Now I’m feverishly marching
my throat hurts from screaming
anger is contagious—but so is justice—
let it infect you
lest it kills you

AJ graduated from the University of Minnesota, Morris with a BA in psychology and English. She also has her MA in forensic psychology from the University of North Dakota. Currently working in the sexual violence field, she seeks to explore the human psyche and illustrates what she sees with poetry. AJ plays with form, language, and imagery in an attempt to interpret what she experiences. She seeks decadence and authenticity and piercing honesty. Poetry is a practice and is never complete; just as the mind is subjective and dynamic, so too is her writing.

Photo credit: Dominic Dominic Jacques-Bernard via a Creative Commons license.

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Questions/Answers (for Black U.S. citizens applying to register to vote in Selma, Alabama, in 1963—based on actual exams)

By Ellen Girardeau Kempler

After you pay your poll tax, Boy, I’ll ask you

how many jellybeans are in the big jar
I keep on my Registrar’s desk?

How many bubbles are in this bar
of soap?

How many seeds are in a watermelon,
any watermelon? (An answer you should
naturally know.)

How many drops of water are in the Alabama River
running faster than you could ever march, under the bridge
named for the KKK’s Grand Dragon, the bridge you’ll have to cross
before the correct answers to my questions even begin to become clear,
before, out of the tear gas fog, you feel the shock of electric cattle prods,
the whack of lead pipes raised to concuss you past thought, only then
will you understand that NO is the answer to ALL of my questions.

Because I am your judge, jury and executioner.
Because NO is the only way we can keep you chained
caged buried burned drowned beaten hanging
in the place where we first brought you,
intended you to stay.

Ellen Girardeau Kempler’s poems have appeared in the 2022 Mindful Poetry Anthology, Narrative Northeast, Writers Resist, Phoenix Rising Review, Gold Man Review, Orbis International Poetry Quarterly and many other small presses and anthologies. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” her chapbook, Thirty Views of a Changing World: Haiku + Photos, was published in December 2017 by Finishing Line Press. Learn more at www.ellengirardeaukempler.com and follow her on Instagram @placepoet and Twitter @goodnewsmuse.

Image credit: Courtesy of the poet, an image from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

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Bipolar

By Angel T. Dionne

“But you don’t look bipolar,”
as if bipolar
is screaming at cars from the sidewalk
as if bipolar
is hopping up on tables
to proclaim that I’m the Messiah
as if bipolar
is no career
and no relationships.

“But you don’t look bipolar,”
as if being happily married
means I can’t struggle
as if an academic career
means that the ups and downs
hurt any less
than they would
if I were jobless
as if leading a normal life
invalidates my illness.

“But you don’t look bipolar,”
meaning that they think bipolar type II
should be easier to deal with
than type I
meaning that they don’t see five days up
and two weeks down
as a medical struggle
meaning they can’t see that although the symptoms are different,
they’re nonetheless painful
meaning they don’t see why it’s necessary
for me to take two little pink pills
one little white one
meaning they view my psychiatric medication
as a crutch
a weakness
meaning that they view my cycles as romantic
creative
eccentric.

Angel Dionne is an English professor at the University of Moncton Edmundston campus. She finished her PhD in creative writing at the University of Pretoria in 2020, and she is the author of a chapbook of strange flash fiction entitled Inanimate Objects (Bottlecap Press) as well as co-editor of an anthology entitled Rape Culture 101: Programming Change (Demeter Press). Her work has appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul, JAKE, Sein Und Werden, The Molotov Cocktail, The Missing Slate, The Peculiar Mormyrid, Crack the Spine Anthology, Everyday Fiction, Narrow Doors in Wide Green Fields, Surrealists and Outsiders, Good Morning Magazine, Garfield Lake Review, and Litbreak Magazine. She currently lives in Canada with her wife and cats. Learn more at angeldionne4.weebly.com.

Photo credit: “State Normal School” in the public domain via Salem State Archives.

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The Crucible

By Christie M. Buchovecky

An old friend messaged today.
Told me “Got a funny story
if ya have time . . .” and sent a clip:
riding by an old Colonial I recognized,
despite a view obscured by rain
and the barred windows
he’d had to film behind.

“Nothing like riding
down your old street
in the back of a police car”

I made time. Clawed it back
from meetings, spreadsheets, VIPs.
You must for someone who
made a kinder home of your heart.

Our bond was forged twenty years ago,
tempered in apparent contradiction.
Honors Student / Future Tradesman,
Class President / Class Clown,
Teachers’ pet / Boy given detention
just for walking down the hall
with a traffic cone
on his head.

“Was in town for a job;
stopped by to thank our science teacher.
Her class made me a better welder.
Hoped to tell her that now
I teach students like me – make them see
how working with your hands
doesn’t mean you are stupid.”

I always knew he was smart. He knew
I wished being smart didn’t matter
as much as being kind.

“She wasn’t there, but that admin guy
who used to file my detention slips?
Yeah . . . he’s principal now. Lectured me
for not knowing to sign in, then
had me arrested for trespass.”

Funny, how some things never change.

The last time I went back,
administration offered me cake.

A geneticist in New York City, Christie M Buchovecky devotes her days to finding answers for families caught in the diagnostic odyssey. In the evenings, she can be found either enjoying excellent food and ridiculous games with friends or curled up on the couch with her husband and cats (notebook in hand). Ever curious about the world and our place in it, Christie turns to poetry to examine truths we hold within ourselves. Previous work can be found in Humana Obscura and on Instagram @cm.buchovecky.

Photo credit: Fabrice Florin via a Creative Commons license.

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Out-of-Pockets to Pick

By David Icenogle

They tell me
the copay for my medication is only
a hundred and fifty dollars.
The best way to measure privilege
is the way people use the word “only.”
They tell me
I should be relieved
because without insurance it would’ve been eight-hundred.
Why not make it a million?
They tell me
never, never, never
stop taking your psychiatric medications abruptly
unless you can’t afford them apparently.
I’m already buying off-brand food
just to pay for the off-brand, generic prescriptions,
maybe I could afford the one-fifty
but what I can’t afford is the uncertainty
because last month it was one-twenty.
Spare me
the carpet-bombing of jargon that you think
will bully away my questions.
“It’s complicated” ain’t an answer
especially when it’s on purpose.
Here’s something not complicated,
people die without insulin
so don’t intimate that this is negotiable,
don’t intimidate and call it consensual,
and don’t boast about what insurance has saved me
when it’s all Monopoly money.
I’ve spent way too many lunch breaks on hold
just to be told
I should’ve had an ailment that’s in-network.
My patience has met my out-of-pocket.
I just want it to make sense.
If an apple-a-day keeps the doctor away
then this system is an orchard
rotten to the core.
It has the bedside manner of a buzzsaw.
And no
I can’t tell you how to fix it
but that doesn’t make me or it less broke,
so if ya’ll keep blowing smoke
I’m going to keep pulling fire alarms
until the insulin runs out.

David Icenogle is a writer and mental health advocate from the Midwest. He has written nonfiction work for the University of Nebraska-Omaha and the National Alliance on Mental Illness, as well as poetry for Asylum Magazine, A Tether to this World, Main Street Rag, From Whispers and Roars, and others. He also produces a YouTube channel focused on addiction and mental health called “No Chaser with David Icenogle.”

Photo credit: Sy Clark via a Creative Commons license.

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Emma Thompson Full Frontal at 62

By Angelica Whitehorne

(found poem from Emma’s interviews for the film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande)

It’s challenging to be nude
at 62. The age that I am.
Nothing has changed.
Can’t stand
in front of a mirror, always pulling
something, judging it.

The neural pathways
of eight-year-olds going,
“I hate my thighs.”

I was 14, hating my body.
Everything that surrounds us
reminds us how imperfect we are,
everything is wrong with us.

In acting, it’s challenging to
see untreated bodies on the screen.
We aren’t used to women in the real-world.
We aren’t used to seeing time.

This thing is the same as it ever was.

The dreadful demands,
carved into my soul.
I didn’t think I could’ve done it.
And yet.

I can’t just stand there.
So, I stood there, nude at 62.

This is your vessel,
it’s your house,
it’s where you live.

I have lived in it.
I have experienced pleasure in it.

Angelica is a writer living in Durham, N.C., with published work in Westwind Poetry, Mantis, Air/Light Magazine and The Laurel Review, among others. She is the author of the chapbook, The World Is Ending, Say Something That Will Last (Bottle Cap Press, 2022). Besides being a devastated poet, Angelica is a marketing content writer for a green energy loan company and volunteers with Autumn House Press. Learn more at angelicawhitehorne.myportfolio.com.

Image credit: “Three Girls in front of a Mirror” (“Drei Madchen vor dem Speigel”) by Otto Müller, c. 1922, via the U.S. National Gallery of Art.

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WWJD

By Maureen Fielding

“KOREAN WOMEN STRIPPED,
TORTURED BY JAPANESE.
Oriental brutality at Seoul…
American missionaries take no part.”

So reads the 70-year-old headline
of a Los Angeles Daily Times cutting,
yellowing, displayed behind glass
in the Museum of Korean Contemporary History.

My question is this:
Did the missionaries take no part in
the stripping,
the torturing,
or the defending?

Did those godly folks
book first class passage on the SS Korea,
travel thousands of miles
across Pacific Ocean swells and surges,
battered by typhoons,
seasick in their cabins,
just to watch young women tied together,
struck with swords and butts of guns,
dragged off by policemen and soldiers?

To deliver Jesus?
To save the pagan souls?
To witness brutality?
To watch torment and humiliation
but to take no part?

We learned in school of the martyred missionaries,
the Jesuit priests in Canada,
Franciscans in Japan,
Daughters of Charity in China.
These were the missionaries of my childhood,
missionaries who could inspire a 10-year-old girl to
build a shrine of dandelions and violets,
to pray to plastic statues and pictures on the wall,
and weep at their sufferings.

But who were these missionaries who took no part?
The words pain me as if a sword had struck
some precious spot, excising
some last fragment of faith.

Maureen Fielding is an associate professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State Brandywine. Her work has appeared in Westview, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Marathon Literary Review, and other journals. She has taught English in South Korea, and she has been teaching about Japanese Militarized Sexual Slavery in Women’s Studies classes for 20 years. She is working on a chapbook based on research conducted in South Korea before the pandemic began. She has also written a novel inspired by her experiences as a Russian intercept operator in West Berlin during the Cold War.

The photo is provided by Maureen Fielding. The 1919 Los Angeles Daily Times article that inspired this poem is on display at the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History, in Seoul, South Korea.

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REMINDER: Writers Resist Reads 22 April 2023

Join us on 22 April 2023 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific

for a virtual reading by the contributing creators of the March 2023 issue of Writers Resist

Email WritersResist@gmail.com for the Zoom login information.

Contributors to the March issue include:

Sister Lou Ella Hickman
Dallas Saylor
Irene Cooper
Claudia Wair
Frances Koziar
Wells Burgess
Elizabeth Shack
Soon Jones
Joanne Durham
Antony Owen
Ada Ardére
Bex Hainsworth
Nikki Blakely
Rebecca K Leet
Tristan Richards
IE Sommsin

Welcome to Writers Resist, the March 2023 Issue

Behold our spring issue, with all it’s glory and turmoil.

Just a reminder: We celebrate each issue of Writers Resist with a virtual reading of its works by their creators. The reading for this issue is on Saturday 22 April at 5:00 p.m. PACIFIC. Email WritersResist@gmail.com for the Zoom link.

And enjoy the poetry , prose, and artwork in this issue by the following contributors:

Joanne Durham, “Don’t give kids any gifts tied to reading”

Dallas Saylor, “Arby’s Pilot Casino”

Sister Lou Ella Hickman, “after a school shooting: the cleanup crew”

Claudia Wair, “When You Swim Out into the Ocean”

Soon Jones, “Vile Affections”

Rebecca K. Leet, “Feeding Stray Cats in Ukraine”

Antony Owen, “Displacement”

Irene Cooper, “Beowulf”

Tristan Richards, “I can experience joy alone.”

IE Sommsin, “National Portrait Gallery”

Wells Burgess, “What is Truth?”

Elizabeth Shack, “September Together”

Nikki Blakely, “A Woman of Good Manners”

Bex Hainsworth, “Scylla”

Ada Ardére, “Islands of No Nation”

Frances Koziar, “Reputation”

Senator Rick Scott by IE Sommsin.

“Don’t give kids any gifts tied to reading”

By Joanne Durham

—One on a list of restrictions from the Sarasota County School District,
in response to Florida HB1467, posted on Twitter

Go then, pack away Honey I Love, unfit title
for eight-year-olds. Hide Can I Touch Your Hair?
braided with so much empathy it must be banned. Destroy
A Caribbean Dozen, the book Robert finds first thing
each morning, which sometimes gets him through the day
without stabbing a classmate with his pencil. “I practiced
the poem from Haiti,” he tells me. Remove Good Books,
Good Times (the editor was gay). Search Daryl before
he goes home, be sure there’s no Pocketful of Poems
he’s hidden to read with a flashlight under his covers. Snatch
Out of Wonder out of Eddie’s hands as he and Dora share
the rocking chair, puzzling over “chasing justice”
and “smile like moon.” She teaches him the hard words,
he shows her the funny part about alphabet soup –
choosing their favorite books, they give each other
gifts they must unlearn to give. Sanitize the empty
poetry shelf just in case some trace of joy remains.

Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022) and the forthcoming On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books). Her poetry appears in Poetry East, CALYX, Chautauqua, Wordpeace, Rise-Up Review and many other journals and anthologies. She lives on the North Carolina Coast, with the ocean as her backyard and muse. Visist her website at joannedurham.com.

Editor’s note: You can help stop book banning by opposing book challenges at your library’s and schools. Find information and support from the following “freedom to read” organizations.

American Library Association

#FReadom Fighters

PEN America

Unite Against Book Bans

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.