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


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Arby’s Pilot Casino

By T. Dallas Saylor

 

Blessed are the poor in spirit, says

Gordon McKernan, big truck lawyer,

on one of his dozens of billboards lining

the Louisiana stretch of I-10, mixed in

with ads for boudin and cracklin’s,

the Coushatta Casino, the Tiger Truck Stop

which—after Our Tiger Lived Longer,

than whom I’m not sure, now features

a live camel—and Gordon’s rival

Morris Bart—One Call, Y’All.

 

I pull off for gas at one of these holy

trinity complexes featuring fuel plus fast

food plus casino: the door’s cartoon miner

pans for gold, swears that in the time I idle

guzzling a dozen gallons into my tank

or choosing between Combo 3 and Combo 5

I could be striking it so rich I’ll blow bills

out my tail pipe as I rocket right out

of this state, & why stop there, out of

the country, off the surface of the planet.

 

In the bathroom as I wash up at the sink,

adjust my skinny-ass jeans over my small frame,

straighten my N95 & fluff my long curls

in the mirror, a man walks in & stops,

apologizes, pokes his head out the door

& double-checks the sign. Why do I feel like

I’ve won this one, gotten away with something

forbidden—delicious, like the extra-large fry,

like one last quarter slipped in the slit

of the slot machine, & at last the crank comes up

 

three 7’s: I’m biblically blessed, birthmarked,

not a man in the desert but the desert

in a man, a camel stuck in a truck stop,

or three cherries, meaning the rib is ready

to rip, burst forth from my chest, compete

with a Coke & knowledge of good & evil,

so bless my poor queer spirit, God, because I’m

blowing this joint, I’m using my one call, y’all,

blasting off this nationwide runway straight

to the stars on a full stomach & full tank.

 

 


T. Dallas Saylor (he/they) is a PhD candidate in poetry at Florida State University, and he holds an MFA from the University of Houston. His work meditates on the body—especially gender and sexuality—against physical, spiritual, and digital landscapes. His poetry has been featured in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review, Christianity & Literature, PRISM international, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Houston, TX. He is on Twitter: @dallas_saylor.

Photo credit: “Lucky 7” by John Wardell via a Creative Commons license.


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after a school shooting: the cleanup crew

By Sister Lou Ella Hickman

 

the bodies are gone
so
today
i write
about the cleanup crew
those who see what we do not
and perhaps never will:
the desks
the white boards
the closets
o yes   and the floors
how do they feel
when they kneel down
to pick up
the spattered   scattered books
lunch boxes
artwork
finally
the dried chaos of blood
they must mop up
what do they feel
when they go home
when they open the door
when they sit in their easy chair
and drink their first stiff drink

 


Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, US Catholic, Commonweal, The Christian Century, Presence, Prism, and several anthologies.  She was a Pushcart nominee in 2017 and 2020. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published by Press 53 in 2015. Five of the poems were set to music and performed at 92Y in New York City on May 11, 2021.

Photo credit: “Mopping Up” by Steven Usher via a Creative Common license.


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When You Swim Out into the Ocean

By Claudia Wair

 

You float on your back, your face barely above water. There’s nothing but the silence of the ocean in your ears. In the saltwater’s embrace, you drift, weightless. You stare at the clouds above, trying to empty your mind. You’re away from the beach. Not so far that the lifeguard blows her whistle, just far enough from the splashers and the screamers.

The ocean is peace.

Here, you’re a gently bobbing body, not a stupid nigger, like the man on the boardwalk said when he bumped into you. The water doesn’t care that your skin is dark brown or that your hair curls tight. You’re a small human in a vast ocean.

The rage subsides to a dull ache. Your muscles finally relax. You roll over and swim back to shore. Stroke, stroke, breathe. Stroke, stroke, breathe. Then you feel gravity again, feel the sand, feel the breeze. You find your white friends and sit on your towel. No one asks how you are.

And you pretend you are fine.

 


Claudia Wair is a writer and editor from Virginia. Her work has appeared in JMWW, The Wondrous Real Magazine, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Corvid Queen, and elsewhere. You can read more at claudiawair.com, or find her on Twitter @CWTellsTales.

Photo credit: “At Sunset” by Giuseppe Milo via a Creative Commons license.


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Vile Affections

By Soon Jones

 

I grow up in a Florida church being warned about
god-hating bull dykes and sissy fairy fags
leaving the natural use of the woman,
which is sex, because
all a woman is good for
is sex and tempting men.

Yet when a woman tempts another woman
somehow that is not about sex,
though I’m pretty sure it is:
I want Crystal instead of Stephen,
the hottest boy in youth group,
apparently.

At a sleepover with church girls
I panic when they throw
down a copy of J-14 magazine
with *NSync on the cover,
and interrogate me on who
I want to marry.
This is a trap:
there have been rumors about me
and they’re all true.

I pick Lance Bass for his friendly face.
This is not the wrong answer,
but it is still not the right answer.
I should have said Justin Timberlake or JC Chasez,
apparently, but I’ve made my bed

so now I have to buy Lance Bass stickers
and say how hot Lance Bass is at youth group
and now everything I own is covered
in Lance Bass. I even write about him
in my diary, in case someone reads it.

I doodle in my Lance Bass notebook
while my pastor rants about an “it”
with “hips of a woman, but a face like a man”
who served him coffee in some roadside diner.
He shares his fantasy of renting a room
in a Miami hotel close to the gay bars
on Memorial Day weekend, and how,

God willing,

he would hide in the air ducts
and descend on the bull dykes and sissy fags
with an AK-47 and a Bowie knife, for
they which commit such things
are worthy of death.
He throws his head back in ecstasy,
licks his lips at the thought
of all those queers he would sacrifice
on the altar before the Lord.

I hold Lance Bass to my chest
as the men shout “Amen!”
tossing hymnals at the pulpit
like panties.

 


Soon Jones is a Korean lesbian poet from the rural countryside of the American South. Their work has been published in Juke Joint, Westerly, beestung, and Moon City Review, among others. They can be found at soonjones.com, on Twitter, and on Instagram.

Poet’s note: Passages in italics are taken from Romans 1:27 and 1:32.

Photo Credit: “Ungodly Hate” by K-B Gressitt.


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Feeding Stray Cats in Ukraine

By Rebecca K. Leet

 

As molecules of steel madness
concussed the air
and no next breath was sure

a vibration in his unbowed soul
prompted Sasha to step outside
and feed a posse of stray cats.

The offering –
from one displaced in the world
to others also beggared –
cost Sasha his right foot.

War presents, at times,
a tableau for tenderness –
often anonymous, usually unseen.

It always presents
a canvas for cruelty – unfathomable

yet undaunting
to the merciful who step outside
to succor the world.

 


Rebecca K. Leet has spent a lifetime across the Potomac River from Washington, DC, seeing the best of times and the worst. Writing poetry keeps her sane.

Photo credit: Yael Beeri via a Creative Commons license.

Editor’s note: Paws of War is helping to care for abandoned pets in Ukraine. The nonprofit has received a 4 of 4 stars rating on Charity Navigator, so it’s safe to assume your contribution will be well-spent.

Displacement

By Antony Owen

 

I am
the fox-flame in the wood
jumping through snow an ember
chased to extinction by lesser beasts.

I am
permanent as the moth in amber
its patterns decided by the white sun
its fate decided by the earthlings.

I am
the glass-blower’s lips’ creation
to consume whatever is put in me
if I break, I become injurious to touch.

I am
the exhausted bee in the shying rose
the heartbeat bass of my distant hive
preferring my own cruel natures.

I am
insignificant as a cloudy starlit night
yet everything is still revealed just hidden
like Greek Gods who move us to sea.

 


Antony Owen is a writer of conflict translated in English, Japanese and German. His work has been recognised internationally, including, a full bilingual collection translated in 2021 by Thelem Press and an award in the British Army Poetry Competition in 2018. His work has also been shortlisted for The Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry.

Photo credit: “Glassblower” by Kairon Gnothi via a Creative Commons license.


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Beowulf

By Irene Cooper

 

While my glamorous friend Anne underwent her abortion, I sat at a lunch counter and ate a grilled cheese sandwich and a chocolate shake before returning to the abortion clinic in the urban grid of Brooklyn. I sat in the waiting area and read Beowulf, assigned by my high school sophomore English teacher.

It wasn’t hard to imagine eighth-century Northern Europe—in my Irish working-class community there was nothing unfamiliar to me about drinking halls, trash-talking men, and tribal vindication. I took the side of the monsters—swollen outcasts, a vengeful mother and her son, descendent of the fratricidal Cain—although I knew—because I knew—they were doomed, predestined martyrs to the heroic trope. It’s even more difficult, now that I am in late middle age and my children are tender adults, not to wish for a better outcome for Grendel’s mother, incited to violence through her grief over the slaying of her son, but she never had a chance.

Anne, like me, was a little younger than her peers. She was not an outsider, but neither was she popular, per se. In that way, too, we were alike, but that’s where our similarities ended. I was overweight by the standard of the day, and poorly dressed, and therefore did everything I could to deflect attention. Anne’s mother worked in some mysterious capacity for Estee Lauder, and brought home gallon bags of makeup samples, of which Anne made liberal and dramatic use. She was dark and bird-like, an Audrey Hepburn for the 80s. In our freshman year, Anne developed appendicitis and parlayed the event into an entire final quarter off from school, during which she sunbathed in a bikini, studied Glamour and Vogue, and, when I came over, mined Jeremy’s—her mother’s boyfriend’s—secret stash of Penthouse magazines for story ideas I would then type, loudly, on Jeremy’s IBM Selectric.

Because I had no compunction about skipping school to keep Anne company, made no judgments about her hiatus (let alone her clandestine sexual relationship with a peach-faced boy two blocks over and one grade behind us), and was sometimes funny, I was the perfect (and only) candidate to accompany Anne to the clinic. My lack of judgment was not a virtue. It simply didn’t occur to me to have, let alone take, a moral position. I was used to things—bad things—just happening. I was accustomed to trying to make the best of it, afterward.

I finished Beowulf. Anne emerged, visibly relieved and hungry.

We’d stay friends throughout the next year, when she left the peninsula to live in a SoHo loft with her mother and Jeremy. Sometimes when I took the train in, Rachel—Anne never called her mother Mom—would take us to an art show, an occasion that left me bright-eyed, and Anne bored. Mostly, we’d go to Rocky Horror screenings and drink beer, after which I’d lie on the bare loft floor and let my head swim, while Anne vomited our revelries into the toilet. Senior year, I went to Rio de Janeiro as an exchange student. The year after that, she attended a small East Coast college, and I got a retail job in Houston, where my parents had moved in my absence. College was a bore, she said during a visit, but there were some cute guys. We sat in my bedroom smoking Parliaments with a fingernail of cocaine in the hollow tip. We neither of us had any plans. We lived by feel, each wondering if the other didn’t have the better set-up. I felt, at eighteen, that I’d forfeited my chance at college—that I was already too old. Anne enjoyed her visit best, I think, when she was flipping through bridal magazines with my mother at the kitchen table. Switched at birth, we’d joke. We didn’t know it, but everything was still open to us, all our fledgling mistakes and triumphs.

My eldest daughter and her fiancée live in a state where abortion will remain legal, for now, but the unnerving buzz is that this is the first domino—that LGBTQIA+ rights have been set up for a fall all along, as has same-sex marriage and accessible contraception. What will that mean, I worry, for the younger daughter, who’s contraceptive implant will expire in another year?

In the middle of Ron Padgett’s long-ish poem, “How to Be Perfect,” between Cultivate good posture until it becomes natural and Plan your day so you never have to rush is the line, If someone murders your child, get a shotgun and blow his head off. Perhaps Grendel’s mother was perfectly well-behaved, before she wasn’t. I suspect good behavior, or the slavish adherence to it, is another big lie, another promise unfulfilled.

A scene near the end of the 2005 BBC movie, The Girl in the Café, shows Kelly Macdonald’s character in the airport with Bill Nighy’s character, after she’s disgraced him at an international conference by talking about dying children in front of all his colleagues at the banquet table. He’d met her in a café, and in an uncharacteristic moment of spontaneity, asked her to join him for the G8 Summit in Reykjavik. He knows nothing about her (duh) and is surprised and aggrieved to learn she’d been in prison.

“I hurt a man. I hurt a man who hurt a child,” she tells him.

He asks, “Was it your child?”

She answers, “Does it matter?”

In the 2007 movie version of Beowulf, Grendel’s mother takes the form of a beautiful woman to seduce the hero in hopes that he will put a baby in her to replace the slaughtered Grendel. In the eighth-century text, as I remember it, she remains a monster, a hag, unseductive, the corpse of her monster son buried in her hair. In either case, she has only “mother” for a name, not even a kenning such as demon-bearer or seedfurrow or icicle-sheath. No, “mother” is her sole identity and purpose, as far as our heroes are concerned. And then they take that from her, too, and rejoice.

Grrr.

And what of Anne? The deer-path of our friendship forked at the end of adolescence. I cultivated my own glamourous mythologies, and still emerged dripping from the brine of my twenties to shed my scales on the toll-road of mortgage, partner, and 2.5 kids. I never liked weddings—uneasy union of the sentimental and the transactional—but, long after my own, have come to appreciate the precipitous question at the core of the ritual: Will you? It is a moment of consummate agency, bedazzled out of focus by diamonds and pearl-encrusted lace. The whole of the endeavor, however, hangs on the answer, and commitment is a matter of individual will.

Anne, I presumed, would someday say I will to a baby, if she could, after making the choice to say, I won’t.  I don’t presume to know what she’d think of the Supreme Court’s reversal, or how she might remember her own experience. I do know that when we had almost no sense of our own agency, we could take for granted that autonomy which was provided by law. We could—and lawfully—take care of ourselves as if we, and the embattled women we were to become, mattered.

 


Irene Cooper is the author of Committal, poet-friendly spy-fy about family (V.A. Press) & spare change (FLP), finalist for the Stafford/Hall Award. Writings appear in Denver Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, The Rumpus, streetcake, Witness, Beloit, & elsewhere. Irene supports AIC-directed writing at a regional prison, and lives with her people and Maggie in Oregon.

Photo credit: Phil King via a Creative Commons license


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“I can experience joy alone”

By Tristan Richards

 

I meditate on this line while hiking
away from the waterfall, and a doe
pokes her head out of the snow,
watching me, her eyes black and beady,
her body sandy, the color of spring
gravel turned mud. She is beautiful.
I freeze, my heart in my throat.
I become too aware of the ice
surrounding me, melting but still
cold enough to take me down.
She tracks me as I walk, alert
but faking confidence, toward
the parking lot. I think about how
strange it is to be so close to nature
and also surrounded by cars.
It is wild to set natural growth next
to what comes at you so quickly.
When I pass, she stands on top of
the hill and I see her full body,
white stripe running from her throat
down her belly, somehow calm and
ready to bolt at the same time.
I think each of us scared the other.
It is hard to exist in this world
as a woman and not be afraid.

 


Tristan Richards (she/her) is a poet and student affairs professional from Minnesota. She is the author of two self-published chapbooks: Not All Challenges Are For Us (2022) and The Year Was Done Right (2019). Her poems have been published in Preposition: The Undercurrent Anthology, on the Mankato Poetry Walk & Ride, and in Firethorne. In 2022, Tristan facilitated daily poetry writing workshops throughout the month of April for National Poetry Writing Month. She holds an MA in Leadership in Student Affairs from the University of St. Thomas and a BA in Communication Studies from Gustavus Adolphus College. You can find her on Instagram @tristanwritespoems or at tristanwritespoems.weebly.com.

Photo credit: “Doe in the Snow” by Richard Carter via a Creative Commons license.


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National Portrait Gallery

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By IE Sommsin


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Caricature of Senator Tom Cotton
Senator Tom Cotton

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Caricature of Sen. Ted Cruz
Senator Ted Cruz

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Caricature of Gtov. Ron DeSantis
Governor Ron DeSantis

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Caricature of Sen. Mitch McConnell
Senator Mitch McConnell

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Caricature of Elon Musk
CEO Elon Musk

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Caricature of Sen. Rick Scott
Senator Rick Scott

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Artist’s statement: I watch the news, and many faces that pass in the river of news strike me as utterly strange. Some are haunted; some have a childish malice. I’ve felt compelled to capture their essence in pencil, ink, and paint. These images are the first attempts to create a portrait gallery of a bizarre time in our political and cultural history.


IE Sommsin is a writer and visual artist who did too much time in graduate school. He divides the year between two political bubbles, San Francisco and his ancestral woods in Kentucky.


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

What Is Truth?

By Wells Burgess

  

Deep in the South, men gather.
First among equals, the Kingfish,
upstage, and it is only he
whose face you see; his minions –
that includes me, Markie –
have their backs to you. The Boss
plays solitaire; the cards slap
the table. “Markie,” he says,
where we gon’ put that road?”
“DeVreaux and the boys got
them all whupped up in Jasmine,”
I say. “Chairman talkin’ like
it’s yesterday. Folks
so starved for traffic, they’ll
walk ten miles on crutches
to vote for you.” Kingfish
looks me in the eye. “Markie,”
he says, “I  got a debt to pay.
Judge in Bayou goin’ on and on
bout how we are ‘destroyin
rural culture’ with the highway
projects. Owns a big tract. We
gon’ run that road right thoo
it so he hears them big eight wheelers
when he lays him down to rest.”
“Boss,” I says, “we got a rally
in Jasmine, big parade and all.
Tenth-grader singin a song he made up
about the highway they’re gettin.
Shall I call it off?” “Hell, no,”
says the Boss. He looks me right
in the eye. “Markie,” he says,
“Do you trust me?” And I say
back, “I do.”
The scene goes dark; another lights:
Jasmine Parish: scrub country,
hard-bitten faces, an old dirt road,
a boy, a wheel, a stick, Kingfish
on the stump. “We gonna’
put my big new highway right
thoo this ol’ Parish,” he says.
“Hire your boys to build it. Only
ramp for 60 miles go right to
this town. You folks gonna
be eatin the fat o’ the land.
Ain’t that right, Markie,”
he says to me. “Amen,” I say.
The scene goes dark. Another lights:
the Kingfish’s election headquarters,
a victory celebration. “I want a
Parish by Parish count,”
the Kingfish yells. When it comes
to Jasmine, DeVreaux shouts
“Eighty percent!” So I ask
the Boss, “So we gon’ give em
their road?” “Hell no,” he says.
“Goin’ thoo Bayou. Plans drawn,
press release tomorrow.” “What
we gon’ tell em down in Jasmine?”
The Kingfish looks me right in
the eye. “Tell em I lied,” he says.
DeVreaux won’t do it, so I make
the trip myself. Press release
come out, Chairman calls
a meetin’ of the Parish Council.
I show up. “Wha’ happened?”
Chairman asks. “He bout
guarantee us that road.” I
step right up. “Boss told me
to tell you he lied,” I say.
Folks bustin out cryin
and cursin, bout half of em
run on out the hall. Chairman
and others, DeVreaux’s people,
they stay quiet, and pretty soon
Chairman starts to chuckle.
“That’s the Kingfish for ya,”
he says. “Thoo and thoo.
Our turn will come.
He gon’ see to it.”

 


Wells Burgess began writing poetry late in life. His work has appeared in The Lyric, Measure, The Beltway Quarterly, Light, Think, Passager,, The Federal Poet, and Better Than Starbucks. In retirement, he teaches poetry at Encore Learning in Arlington, Virginia.

Photo credit: “I Win” by Kevin Labianco via a Creative Commons license.

 


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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.