Editor – Page 5 – Writers Resist

Amendments

By Amy Cook

We hadn’t had a proper winter, but spring arrived anyway, confoundingly on time. Whatever you might have read about autumn in New York, the first morning the rows of tulips open on Park Avenue, or when the purple hyacinth spirals up through a neighborhood garden, or that cloudless April morning when the cherry trees first spill with the glut of blossom, those are the days I wish would linger. I turned forty-three in late March, right before the weather turned.

Filed: March 7, 2023. Florida Senate Bill 300, Pregnancy and Parenting Support: “prohibiting physicians from knowingly performing or inducing a termination of pregnancy after the gestational age of the fetus is determined to be more than 6 weeks, rather than 15 weeks.”

On the morning of Thursday, April 13, 2023, a week after it had been passed by the Florida Senate, the Florida House of Representatives took up the bill.

That day, in New York, the Central Park weather station measured a high of 90 degrees, breaking a record set in 1977. Old and potbellied men loitered by the Hudson River, shirtless, broiling. I took off my shoes and sipped greedily at a raspberry Arnold Palmer. The café at the pier is seasonal, but, like Brigadoon, miraculously opens on days that call people to the water.

At the river, I’m streaming the House of Representatives on my phone, and they race through nearly fifty amendments, all proposed by civil servants seeking to dull the law’s vicious scythe. Each amendment is allowed consideration for two and a half minutes.

“Will the sergeant secure the balcony please?”^[1]

It is certain the abortion ban will pass. The Florida House of Representatives has one hundred and ten voting members present on this day, and they will vote for the bill by a nearly two to one margin. Still, as is their right, ordinary Floridians have come to Tallahassee to protest the ban, which has exceptions for rape, incest, and human trafficking—provided you can prove it. With documentation.

I live in a building that is two blocks from the Hudson, less than a mile from Bethesda Fountain, and a mile and half from the reservoir. And still, I often feel parched. This particular Thursday, the water is desperately choppy, as if at war with the summer vibes the sun is trying to gift. A week from now, I will be lying in a hospital, a female radiologist swiping the ultrasound thingie (instrument? wand? scepter?) across my right breast where an unidentified mass waits to be named. The screen displays charcoal and ivory waves that undulate, tip and teeter. I stare at them, feeling sticky and warmed by the ultrasound gel. The radiologist gives me a cursory glance, every now and then.

“Black women and birthing people will be most affected by this abortion ban.”

We have become careful, of late, to say the things that go without saying, because it is worth it to have them said aloud. We waste time and capital sparring over the substitution of words, while the Slenderman creeps at the edge of the forest, leering at his prey. And prey are everywhere. My friend, who has six-year-old twin boys, recently asked them what their active shooter drills are like. They go to an elite private school that can afford security, and still, they prepare. Attention is paid.

The heat will last just a few days, before pulling us back, making us glad that we hadn’t installed the air conditioners just yet. I will still go down to the water to read and write, in the chill and mist, not wanting to be wasteful of the hours. Above me, vehicles fly up the Hudson River Parkway, heading out of town.

“Sergeant, will you secure the chamber and remove the gallery?”

It is impossible to tell how many protestors have filled the statehouse, but I can hear them being removed, one by one. Two days ago, an organization called Equality Florida issued a travel advisory, warning fellow Americans that Florida is no longer a safe place to be, especially if you are a person of color or queer or perhaps just unprepared to become the victim of random gun violence.

“Please [accept] this amendment so we don’t re-traumatize sexual assault victims.”

“I understand we’re banning books, so y’all might not have read all of that.”

“We are thinking of situations that have not been contemplated by this bill.”

Not a one of the amendments passes, of course. I play with my pink strappy sandals, on the ground, next to my chair. At some point this summer, I’ll get a pedicure, but today my feet are repulsive. My mind wanders. The amendment people are wasting their time, I think, and their breath. Going down with the ship. But history is filled with truth-tellers on the Titanic.

“This is a friendly amendment.”

“Read the next amendment!”

“Any . . . further outburst and the sergeant will remove you, and we can proceed with our business.”

When my youngest niece was born, just after midnight on August 12, 2021, she was almost two weeks late. Every day past her due date, I teased my brother that the baby was waiting for our late grandmother’s birthday; that Grandma Barbara was somehow orchestrating the delay. Hannah Rose was a perfectly average-sized newborn (indeed, born on the day that she now shares with a great-grandmother she never knew), but it stands to reason she wasn’t actually late. Rather, a physician had perhaps miscalculated how far along my sister-in-law actually was. It’s not an exact science.

So how do the doctors in Florida know when six weeks are up?

How do the legislators know?

Still, they prattle on. Behind me, a group of young women searches for a place to sit. Most of

the good spots are gone. It’s really very hot out.

“Have all members voted? Have all members voted?”

“We have a brief introduction and announcement from Representative Caruso.”

Between the amendments, Representative Caruso, who will actually vote “no” on the six-week abortion ban, takes the time to introduce a sergeant from the Delray Beach Police Department, who is visiting their chamber today. The officer had previously been convicted of a felony, for having stolen some money from a mall in Orlando. Governor DeSantis, who will sign this bill into law at 10:45 this evening, had pardoned the man, and now the officer is applauded as a “hometown hero.”

There will be six hours of debate, after all of the amendments go down in flames. None of it means a thing. The climb is too great, the gulf too wide. I put my sandals back on, and when I get up, the group of girls looking for a seat are pleased. They have frozen drinks in hand. I head to my apartment, where I will insist we wait for the next heat wave to install the air conditioning, but where I am still free.

“Please show that the amendment does not pass. Read the next amendment, please.”

^[1] Each quote in italics was spoken by a member of the Florida House of Representatives on April 13, 2023.

Amy Cook (she/they): MFA candidate, Rainier Writing Workshop, 2021 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Amy’s work has appeared in The Advocate, Queer Families: An LGBTQ+ True Stories Anthology and fifteen literary journals. Affiliations: BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop (Advanced), New York City Gay Men’s Chorus alum.

Photo credit: Rebecca Cruz via a Creative Commons license.

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Montana

By Jeremy Nathan Marks

For Zooey Zephyr

The big sky fifty-mile
vistas where the Greasy Grass runs
willowed valleys sweeping memory
from the water to the sky an arrow long
ago fired but whose arc is heard
surely this land can contain one woman
who says of our laws that while we pray
to remain humbled that blood in our palms
is a great glacier melting as though we were
the sun.

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in the Great Lakes Region of Canada. He is the author of the collection, Of Fat Dogs & Amorous Insects (Alien Buddha, 2021). He holds two passports and does not maintain a social media presence.

Photo credit: Michael Bourgault on Unsplash.

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The first day of cherry season,

By Emily Hockaday

the sky becomes apocalyptic. The air is
wool in my throat. I wear a mask to pick
my daughter up from school. The fruit vendors
sit next to their colorful carts like the world
isn’t ending, and I suppose it isn’t for now
or it is just very slowly. And what did
the vendors do at Pompeii? Skewer meat
and sling it under an eerie sky. I bring home
3 lbs of the jeweled fruits. The sun
is the same bright pink behind the haze—
a Rainier cherry hanging above us.
My daughter is studying wildfires
at school, or perhaps just the lifecycles
of trees. She tells me forest fires can be good
for the Earth, right? Because redwood seeds
need fire to grow. Our hallway smells
of smoke from the skylight. We move inside
a yellow cloud. Even as the air quality
outside becomes a disaster, we make plans
to cap our stove’s gas line. I think of
my daughter’s new pink lungs.
I was reckless with mine, but hers
are pristine, and I want to preserve them.
I imagine her serotinous redwood cones
cracking in the heat. I hope that’s
what humanity will do too. Crack
so that seeds release. At night
I roll a towel against her window.
The fires can only burn for so long.

Emily Hockaday’s second collection, In a Body, an ecopoetry collection with themes of parenting, chronic illness, and grief, is coming out in October 2023 with Harbor Editions. Her debut, Naming the Ghost, was released with Cornerstone Press in 2022. She has received grants from the City Artists Corp, Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation, the De Groot Foundation, and the NYFA Queens Art Fund. She is a fellow with the Office Hours Poetry workshop and was a 2022 resident at Bethany Arts Community.

Photo credit: Denise Kitagawa via a Creative Commons license.

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The Lure of Socks on Warm Feet

By Amelia Díaz Ettinger

Never forget, September 20, 2017 and Maria

In my La-Z-Boy I sit, a Puerto Rican queen,
feet-up admiring my knitted socks.
I made these socks by knit and purl.
5,746 miles away from you
it is easy to say, I worship.

—And oh! How I preach this veneration,

the warmth of pale green light
the whiteness of sand
the contrast of ocean currents
the dwarf forest, and the crowded towns—

Yet, the truth can’t be changed—I left.
Abandon your Central Cordillera for the Blues,
an exchange of choice, not necessity.

I saw the hurricane while wearing star-banded socks,
glued to a television where electricity is constant,
three hot meals a day, sitting at home.
There were no cold cuts day after bloody day,

no Samaritan truck around the corner,
no spoils of mud, and expiring life
no kitchens without a roof
no bottled water in locked warehouses
the trees bare of leaves, not a single flower
petals can’t contain the hurts.

That September, out my window,
the meadow was full of lupines.
Purple or gold,
their curious heads sat one on top of another
a soft pyramid greening gently in the breeze.
The sight of those flowers,
a hurricane of shame.

Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a ‘Mexi-Rican,’ born in México but raised in Puerto Rico. As a BIPOC poet and writer, she has two full-length poetry books published; Learning to Love a Western Sky by Airlie Press, a bilingual poetry book, Speaking at a Time /Hablando a la Vez by Redbat Press, and a poetry chapbook, Fossils in a Red Flag by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, and she has an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Oregon University. Presently, she and her partner reside in Summerville, Oregon, with two dogs, two cats, and too many chickens.

Photo credit: Carissa Bonham via a Creative Commons license.

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Skull Fries

By Janis Butler Holm

Artist Statement: Fast food, a multi-billion-dollar industry, is slowly killing Americans and others. French fries and what they accompany are not harmless.

Janis Butler Holm served as Associate Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal, and currently works as a writer and editor in sunny Los Angeles. Her prose, poems, art, and performance pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines. Her plays have been produced in the U.S., Canada, Russia, and the U.K. Learn more at www.janisbutlerholm.com and www.laplaywrights.org/member/Janis-Butler-Holm, and follow her on Facebook.

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A Sunday in October

By Ariel M. Goldenthal

The day after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, I lied to my second-grade students: You are safe at Hebrew school. You will love learning the Aleph-Bet this year. Yes, you can open the windows and feel the early fall air ripple through the gaps between your outstretched fingers. You can have recess outside next week. Your teachers don’t need to be trained to apply a tourniquet. There’s nothing wrong with our classroom’s tall glass windows that look right into the front garden. I’m closing the blinds because it’s so sunny out. Let’s start with our usual morning activity. Today we’re learning about praying to God, which isn’t related at all to the reason your mom’s eyes looked red this morning and your dad whispered, “Maybe he should stay home today.” This happened in a synagogue very far away—not like where we live at all. No, this isn’t something that happens often.

I don’t tell them how the education director called all the teachers on Shabbat, a day when work is forbidden and rest is required, to tell us that despite, or perhaps because of, the horrific loss that day, religious school would still take place the next day; how the doors to synagogue, usually propped open on Sunday mornings to accommodate the flood of parents holding half-eaten bagels and their children’s hands, were locked; how we had to show our photo I.D.s to the officers in the main lobby who told us that we would collect our students and bring them to the classroom—parents wouldn’t be permitted inside; how Rabbis passed around handouts hastily adapted from the ones secular teachers received after the first school shooting this year, but didn’t need because they, like us, are used to the terror by now.

Ariel M. Goldenthal is an associate professor of English at George Mason University. Her work has appeared in The Citron Review, Flash Frontier, MoonPark Review, and others. Read more at www.arielmgoldenthal.com.

Photo credit: Sharon Pazner via a Creative Commons license.

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Ho’oponopono

By Kelsey D. Mahaffey

“In the book of the earth, it is written:
nothing can die.” – Mary Oliver

The morning after it happens
again—weary with all
the thoughtless use of prayer,
I return to the Native path—

for solace,
for remembrance,
for release—

But grief is a heavy hold.

Last night, I lay awake
searching each shooting
star—the moon a wound
the sky refused to heal.

And today, as usual, the sun
woke from bended knees—
rising to break
the long hush of night.

So many have left
to hunt for arms—
answers or anger,
who can say? All around,

there are islands of dew
gathering the spring fields,
birds busy with work—
children still to feed.

Forgive us.

Somehow, a worn cradle of
moon still rocks—heaving waves
upon the shore. A ground dust dances
in the merciful arms of wind.

Dearest Mother,
if we ever choose to weep,
let it be tuned to the depths
of your whale’s forgotten song.

Kelsey D. Mahaffey rests her head in Nashville, TN, but keeps half her heart in New Orleans. She needs music and nature like breath and water, and walks the earth barefoot beside three humans and a bow-legged cat. Her work can be seen or is forthcoming in: Eunoia Review, Cumberland River Review, The Sunlight Press, and “The Keeping Room” at Minerva Rising Press.

Photo credit: Debbie Hall, photographer and author, and Writers Resist poetry editor.

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It’s Complicated

By Mark Williams

I’m scrolling through my Facebook feed—sunsets,
cats, lost dogs, cats—when I see a post
from a friend I’ve known for thirty-plus years. Someone
like someone you know, I bet. Your someone
might roof Habitat homes, deliver meals to shut-in’s,

conduct sing-a-longs at elder cares, teach kids to read.
Without divulging my someone, I think it’s fair to say,
on balance, his scale tips to the good—
as your someone’s scale tips, most likely,
on most days, anyway. The post in question

refers to a certain President of the United States
who wants to outlaw semiautomatic guns, a first step
in outlawing all guns and if you are not afraid to show it,
re-post this, it says. This, three days
after the most recent carnage. How is this possible?

So don’t be surprised when your friend re-posts or compares
bullhorns in Nashville to handguns at the Capitol
or spouts the dangers of firearm registries. But
if you figure things out—how a someone like this
can be a someone like that—let me know.

I could be dying to hear from you.

Mark Williams’s poems have appeared in Writer’s Resist, The Southern Review, Nimrod, Rattle, and The American Journal of Poetry. Kelsay Books published his collection, Carrying On, in 2022. His fiction has appeared in The Baffler, Eclectica, The First Line, The Write Launch, and Cleaver. He lives in Evansville, Indiana.

Image credit: Golden Gate Blond via Cyberbullying Research Center under “Fair Use.”

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The Mind-Plough

By Christina Hennemann

We rest on this earth where they
once ploughed, the sweat and laughs

formed freckles under the sun
and soil sloppy on shoelaces;

my mother stumbled over a rock,
stitches on cheek, her needle

and thread that sewed my socks,
my curtains, shade from the blazing

truth out there, we’re invading
our ancestors’ graves, more than

we can grasp, and is there life
on Mars or a pink unicorn moon?

Board the spaceship you lot, here’s
nothing left for you, leave us alone;

we cling to our possessions,
the meat and the litter, are you

even qualified, or have you fled
the war, well then I feel for you,

but I’m trying to get a mortgage
and my secret subtenants shower

way too long, the bills, my guilt
and my mother, she needs to heal

from what he did to her and the fall,
did you know that women suffer

three times more than men from
multiple sclerosis? It’s the stress,

the male gaze and female smile,
oh dear, I didn’t mean to, come

back here, my arms are open,
together we’ll handle this—

let’s plant those seeds in the earth.

Christina Hennemann is a poet and prose writer based in Ireland. Her debut poetry pamphlet was published by Sunday Mornings at the River in 2022. She won the Luain Press Poetry Competition and was shortlisted in the Anthology Poetry Award and longlisted in the National Poetry Competition. Her work appears in Skylight 47, fifth wheel, Livina, Ink Sweat & Tears, Moria, National Poetry Month Canada, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a full-length poetry collection. Visit her website at www.christinahennemann.com.

Photo credit: Miika Laaksonen on Unsplash.

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Campers Rarely Drown at the YMCA

By Janna Miller

At camp, Julie told me I had to let her scratch my arms until they bled to be friends, and Julie told me to get lost in the woods or she wouldn’t talk to me, and Julie told me to do something I forget what, but I signed up for a canoe trip before she finished and I tumbled out because some counselor thought it would be funny to rock the boat and sent us into the river, where sharks ate at my feet. They sometimes swam this far inland to feed, and I screamed and tried to throw myself into the submerged boat until the other counselor told me to not be an asshole, her voice rising nearly as high as mine. After that, the sharks just nibbled on the ends of my sneakers. Someone rowed by and made us swim to the end of a private dock, and the counselor who dumped us said a manatee knocked us over, and I thought maybe it was a manatee that wanted my feet, but probably the counselor lied. When we dripped up the boat ramp, some campers clapped, but Julie laughed because I got stuck in the river like a baby and if I wanted to be her friend, I had to do a double back flip into the pool. Before the counselor yelled at me, I would have done it, but Julie hadn’t been called an asshole or fed to sharks in the river, so I swam over to some other girl she hated and we played all afternoon, Julie floating by herself, no one left to bring her ashore.

Librarian, mother, and minor trickster, Janna has published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Cheap Pop, Whale Road Review, Necessary Fiction, Best Microfiction 2023, and others. Her story collection, All Lovers Burn at the End of the World, is forthcoming from SLJ Editions in 2024. Generally, if the car overheats, it is not her fault. Visit her website and follow Janna on Twitter: @ScribblerMiller.

Photo credit: Jamin Gray via a Creative Commons license.

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This Time, Ukraine

By Mercedes Lawry

Beneath the ground
a green thunder, roots
weave among limbs
of the fallen, so war
digs and swallows
and the birds still etch
the smoking sky.
Prayers falter, disappear.
How do we watch from afar,
our fingers twitching, our thoughts
but ashes? Hopeless it seems
as the rusty wheel of history
creaks on, repeat, repeat.

Mercedes Lawry is the author of three chapbooks. The most recent, In the Early Garden with Reason, was selected by Molly Peacock for the 2018 WaterSedge Chapbook Contest. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner, and she’s been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize. Her book, Vestiges, was just released by Kelsay Books. Her collection Small Measures will be published in 2024.

Photo credit: KenC1983 via a Creative Commons license.

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Welcome to Writers Resist, the June 2023 Issue

Summer’s upon us, and wild flowers have painted California’s landscapes brilliant. The flowers’ seeds can lie dormant for decades, emerging only when their soil is disturbed. While the works in this issue have been inspired by seemingly countless disturbances confronting us today, may the poppies inspire hope and action.

In the meantime, we’re delighted to present our June 2023 issue and the brilliant writers and artists who define it.

Arthur Altarejos “Batasan ng Lansangan — Street Parliament”

Christie M. Buchovecky “The Crucible”

Angel Dionne “Bipolar”

AJ Donley “Twin Pandemic, Twin Cities”

Andrea Dulanto “The Revolution Is Where We Are”

Amal El-Sayed “Global Outcry”

Maureen Fielding “WWJD”

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

Emma Goldman-Sherman “(Judges 19) Remembering the Concubine”

Howie Good “Where My Family Is From”

Marjorie Gowdy “When Ruby Falls”

David Icenogle “Out of Pockets to Pick”

Camille Lebel “Two Poems”

Larry Needham “Yet Another Poem About Trees”

Phoenix Ning “Birthday Wishes”

Mandira Pattnaik “A Moon Is a Moon Is a Moon”

Rachel Rodman “Hi”

Angelica Whitehorne “Emma Thompson Full Frontal at 62”

Sarah Waldner “U-turn”

Phyllis Wax “Scheherazade”

Bänoo Zan “The Rise of the Martyr”

Join them and the Writers Resist editors Saturday July 8 for Writers Resist Reads, a virtual literary celebration. Email WritersResist@gmail.com for the Zoom link.

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.

Photo credit: “Wild California Poppy fields in Walker Canyon in Lake Elsinore” by slworking2 via a Creative Commons license.

Two Poems

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By Camille Lebel

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I choose
the boy who calls every night to discuss a million nothings, our voices hushing
when my mother picks up the line. Sitting behind me in history, watching footage
of the earth imploding, his finger traces the one-inch ribbon of skin exposed
between low-rise denim and a too-tight tee. That one feather touch infusing
recognition of the word, want.

Free
we stitch trust together with running words. We reject awkward Applebee’s dinners, school dances, roaring football games. We find ourselves on sun-soaked park benches, breathing being. We do not perform piety at Sunday morning services, seeking parental approval. From one another, we require no promises of forever to embrace the now.

Shameless
we make informed preparations. We walk the fluorescent-lit aisles of the corner pharmacy,
no repentant red-cheeked glow burning our faces. He asks for explicit consent again.
And again. The night I soak sorrows in Absolut oblivion is not the time. He knows
a lack of protest is not an invitation. Yes. is not always yes.

Vulnerable
when the time comes, we pretend no prowess. We ask questions and listen to answers.
Entwined fingers move together into uncertainty. We explore with intention the paths between flesh and bone. We laugh at frequent fumbles. Eyes bright, he looks at all I am.
I name my needs without hesitation. Less. More. No. Yes.

Gentle
is the joining. Not two falcons spiraling toward the earth, all adrenaline in panicked plummet.
More clematis exploring the garden arbor until deep violet abounds, boards and blooms reaching skyward to the sun. More steady drip of the leaky kitchen faucet. Soft beads
falling patient, steady, until the sink overflows.

Empowered
I have no regrets. My worth is neither the presence or absence of this. I do not pray
for absolution. No aching knots choking my throat. My soul remains snow-pure. Intact.
Content, I turn into the man still beside me, and we sleep. The following day, he remembers
to speak to me.

Vocabulary Lessons

My son renounces simple language.

Pleading for syllables, his toddler tongue fumbles; focused persistence finding purchase

between jaws, biting into hard consonants with pearly milk-teeth.

He is ravenous for vowels rolling soft across his lips. Furious to be denied another

sweet. Dismayed at skinned flesh of a knee fresh-scraped across pavement.

Twinkling stars? Luminescent. Tiny fingers tying shoes? Infuriated. Plastic dinosaurs

make way for ichthyosaurus, velociraptor, paleontologist: his future endeavors.

I revel in sharing the sweetest delicacies: compassion, community, restoration, justice.

But his palate must abide bitter pills and unsavory days; already

he learns to name villains: avarice, prejudice, ignorance, exclusion. Dropping

succulent words into his open mouth, I offer phonemic morsels on a platter

praying they become blades to chisel hard hearts, transform myopic visions, demolish

fear with a clear, crisp voice speaking life abundant.

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Camille Lebel, educator and mother to seven, lives on a small hobby farm outside of Memphis. She’s published or forthcoming in Hidden Peak Press, Rogue Agent Journal, Literary Mama, Sledgehammer Lit, Black Fox Literary Magazine, ONE ART, Inkwell, and more. She enjoys traveling, horse-whispering, and eating dessert first. She largely writes in the school car-line as a way to process special needs parenting, child loss, and religious trauma. You can find her on Instagram @clebelwords.

Photo credit: “Clematis.” by Free the Image via a Creative Commons license.

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The Rise of a Martyr

By Bänoo Zan

For Nika Shakarami 1

At your memorial 2
the Luri 3 song echoed on speakers:
“Mother, mother, it’s time for war . . .” 4

Today would have been your birthday

Forty days before
on the streets of Tehran
dead girl—living God—
burning your hijab—
darkness on fire—
your Derafsh-e Kavian 5—

leading the chants
fearless—undaunted—unstoppable—
you were the female Kaveh
un-lionized in epic

When the dictator’s men closed in
revolutionaries dispersed in all directions
as shooting stars in a galaxy—

and then, they were around you—
tall heavy men—
who beat and threw you into a car—

That night, your phone was disconnected
all your photos and videos—
dances and singing—gone

Today would have been your birthday

The search started in
hospitals, prisons, morgues—

Days after, your mother received a call
“The kid was in our custody for a week
Revolutionary Guards wanted to
s l o w l y interrogate her—
After we built the case file
she was transferred to Evin prison.”

Then “The Call” came—
the family summoned to identify your body—

Today would have been your birthday

At your funeral, hundreds were waiting for
your coffin—that never arrived—

Your lifeless body kidnapped—
buried in some distant place—
But the uprising was where
the people were

At your tomb
that was not your tomb
your mother held up your photo—
no tears in her eyes:

Today would have been your birthday—
but is now your burial day—

Your martyrdom mobarak 6, Nika!
Your birthday mobarak!

Bänoo Zan is a poet, librettist, translator, teacher, editor and poetry curator, with more than 250 published poems and poetry-related pieces as well as three books, including Songs of Exile and Letters to My Father. She is the founder of Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night), Canada’s most diverse poetry reading and open mic series (inception: 2012), a brave space that bridges the gap between communities of poets from different ethnicities, nationalities, religions (or lack thereof), ages, genders, sexual orientations, disabilities, poetic styles, voices, and visions. Bänoo is the Writer-in-Residence at the University of Alberta, Canada, September 2022-May 2023.

Photo credit: val & Julien noé via a Creative Commons license.

[1] Sixteen-year-old protestor in the ongoing women’s revolution in Iran killed on 20 September 2022

[2] Chehelom, the 40^th, referring to the 40^th day after someone is buried, an important time in the mourning cycle for a person

[3] Pertaining to Lorestan or Luristan province, Iran

[4] دایه دایه وقت جنگه

[5] Iranian mythology: the standard of the Persian blacksmith Kaveh who led a popular uprising against the foreign demon-like ruler Zahhak, one of the stories versified in the epic Shahnameh, The Book of Kings, by Ferdowsi.

[6] Blessed

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The Revolution Is Wherever We Are

By Andrea Dulanto

Yes, I wore the thrift store T-shirts, the torn fishnets,
but I was no riot grrrl.

I was already in my twenties when I read about riot grrrls in Newsweek,
too old to write manifestoes on my body.

No, it was more like I was too afraid of music that gets into all of your nerves
(too loud, too punk, too queer)
visceral.

Despite my sincere lesbian fuck you to everything,
I was secure in the mainstream
or the alternative version of the mainstream.

Dutiful daughter
of conservative South American parents from Argentina and Peru,
raised to pass for/present as white
to be the middle-class Catholic school girl from the gated Miami suburbs
raised to be wary of all that threatens the fabric
of the supermarket and the mall,
the go to work, go to bed at a decent time of night
lifestyle.

raised to be a 1950s white middle-class housewife

raised to believe in American Top 40,
Casey Kasem

I was kept inside with all the safe music, safe as bleach,
nothing safer than strong chemicals to take away the dirt and screams of life.

II.

Christmas 2012, alone in my friend’s living room,
I watch indie films, documentaries
& for the first time, Portlandia.

At 42 years old,
I consider moving to Portland.

But what’s in Portland?

Same lawns, same garage.

I watch every Sleater-Kinney video on YouTube.

Carrie Brownstein is no longer a young young girl playing guitar to kids in record stores

she’s mature, polished
styled

she wears red lipstick

her house is a photo in fashion magazines
hardwood floors, Mad Men furniture.

I am older than Carrie Brownstein,
and I am listening to Sleater-Kinney as if I was 15.

O the red red lipstick

all the songs
I didn’t know.

III.

onstage
Carrie sways and kicks and thrusts her hips over to Corin
their body language, part of their music, their performance
she rests her head on Corin’s shoulder
another level of punk
another level of not caring what anyone else thinks

every queer heart
open (s)

IV.

no revolution in the suburbs

but the revolution
is wherever we are

alone in your friend’s living room
listening to Dig Me Out

a housewife
leaving home

Andrea Dulanto is a Latinx queer writer. Publications include Bending Genres, Entropy, FreezeRay Poetry, peculiar, SWWIM Every Day, Berkeley Poetry Review, Court Green, and others.

Photo credit: “Revolution and LGBT rights” by Nagarjun via a Creative Commons license.

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Birthday Wishes

By Phoenix Ning

Sixteen-year-old person of color desires escape from this inferno
where dark-skinned individuals burn, and alabaster spectators
cheer from the sidelines, popping confetti guns and feeding
oil to ancient flames while claiming to be long-awaited saviors.

Eighteen-year-old student desires world history classes with curriculums
that celebrate African kingdoms, Indigenous empires, and South Asian cultures;
textbooks that condemn armor-clad imperialists stripping gowns of freedom;
articles that honor revolutionaries whose empty pockets did not silence their shouting.

Twenty-three-year-old woman desires to shatter the chains created
by men who think all girls are moons trapped by their gravity,
males who believe themselves to be suns instilling life into
fragile females who must offer their bodies as tokens of gratitude.

Twenty-year-old lesbian desires to taste the sweet wine of love
and cavort in inebriated glory with the woman whose gentle touch
sparks wildfires in her heart frozen by acerbic remarks fired by toxic relatives
when she turns her head away from men and smiles at her rough-hewn ladylove.

Phoenix Ning is a twenty-year-old Chinese writer of sapphic antiheroines and queer found families. She is currently a senior studying human-computer interaction. When not writing, she can be found watching C-Dramas and penning raps. A fierce advocate of diversity in media, she hopes that her audience will feel empowered after reading her words or listening to her songs. Learn more at ladyphoenixning.com.

Image credit: Jennifer Rakoczy via a Creative Common license.

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(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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