Tribute

By Eric Abalajon

My coffee tries to push back the basement chill
crawling up my legs, as I read a friend’s message.
I want to describe to you my table, Mayamor.

I remember your poem where you simply
list the towns won over by,
and sustaining, the movement.

It was, however, a security issue to publish it
in any mainstream venue, even a college folio
as it could be used as a blueprint for retaliation.

Safe to assume in this protracted fight,
our enemies read our poems as well.
The piece is an interesting rejoinder to
the image of a subversive poet, one not writing
witty metaphors against tyrants
but labors in naming of an emerging realm.

I would like to imagine, it was drafted
in folded cigarette packs during breaks
from long treks where you were
embracing fauna, seldom
acknowledged allies to armed encounters.

Another thorn of living in the
other side of the world is
the unease waking up to tributes for you.

Evenings is when we grieve our martyrs,
but I get to feel your weight of your life
on my chest, like Mount Napulak, in broad daylight.

Eric Abalajon is currently a lecturer at the University of the Philippines Visayas, Iloilo. His works have appeared in Ani, Katitikan: Literary Journal of the Philippine South, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Tiger Moth Review, and elsewhere. Recently his poems are included in the collections Sobbing in Seafood City (Sampaguita Press, 2022) and Footprints: An Anthology of New Ecopoetry (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). He lives near Iloilo City. You can find him on Twitter @JLaneria and on Instagram @jacob_laneria.

Image credit: “Cemetery of San Joaquin,” Iloilo, Philippines, by EdseastresD600, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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Lithium & High Heels

By Heather Dorn

Barbie’s feet come preformed for sexiness, but the rest of us must learn to curve our arches like a playground slide. We start young, even as babies, barely able to walk, staggering up church or pageant stage steps—sparkling quarter inch heels, lace dresses, makeup bruising our eyelids blue, punching our cheeks red. This for a trophy, some money, salvation, attention.

When I’m out with women friends, sometimes men will ask to buy me drinks. I usually say no because there is an implication that if I accept a drink, I owe him attention.

Even when I say no, they often still bother me: You should sell thrift store watches to Boscov’s, one man tried to convince me after I told him I was getting my Ph.D. Sometimes I say I’m married, or have a boyfriend, or have a girlfriend. Sometimes I let someone else’s ownership of me be a reason so a man will listen to my no, when I’m tired and my no is not standing on its own. Of course, I don’t always say no.

Once a friend asked how I got some pot lollipops I’d brought to a party. Someone gave them to me, I said.

But who? she repeated. How much did they cost?

I don’t know. Someone said, ‘Do you want these’ and I said ‘Yes’ and I took them.

I hate you, she pretended to hit me.

Beauty is subjective, except my mom says it isn’t and I can see her point. I don’t have any physical reaction to that music, that poem, that mountain, that man, that woman, but I know she is considered “beautiful.” That eye matches that other eye and this is beauty. I learned it from TV and magazines and movies and pageants, and the way my mother tilted her head in the mirror and knew her light. Sometimes an imperfection is called beautiful, when it accompanies matching eyes.

Beauty is subjective, except it isn’t—like sanity. Is sanity subjective? Is sleeping in a closed, dark closet as a teen a quirk or a sign of manic depression? If you ask my mother, it’s not normal. Is vacuuming at 3 a.m. insane? My mother says that’s normal. And my mother knows what is correct, true, normal, attractive. She tells me how to be these things. She once told me I had my Aunt Julia’s nose, thin and narrow, and she would help me get a nose job to fix it when I got old enough. To this day, I dislike my nose. I could not fix it now though because I have finally learned what I really look like and so it’s too late.

It’s hard for me to be attracted to someone who I don’t know. This chasm between my feelings of attraction and the objective standards I know I’m supposed to use to gauge attractiveness leave me feeling an outsider in conversations about beauty. When other girls were falling in love with boy bands and actors on the covers of magazines, I was pining after characters from Victorian novels or 80s teen movies. I didn’t want to kiss Molly Ringwald, I wanted to kiss Claire from The Breakfast Club. I didn’t feel like Ally Sheedy, but Allison Reynolds, right down to the makeover at the end. I didn’t want to date Judd Nelson, but John Bender, and I wanted to be and kiss Claire, and to wear one or both diamond earrings she so easily gave away to her one-day make out partner.

Girls like Claire always had the right everything. It’s not just clothes, or hair, or makeup, or nails, or shoes, or bras, or jewelry, or purses. It’s also the time and space and money to keep, use, and update these items. Makeup runs out, hair straighteners break, clothes go out of style.

When I first started making semi-regular money babysitting, I spent it on drug store makeup and the shampoo I wanted. Coconut smell. Back then I was still getting hand-me-down clothes, and curlers, and shoes. Now, almost all my shoes are new.

My ex-husband never minded me spending money on my hair, as long as I kept it long, but requested that I cut his hair so that he didn’t have to pay to get it done. More than saving money, I think he was trying to avoid people. He hated people. The small talk was probably annoying to him as well. Though he’s much better at small talk than I am.

Small talk is filling the air with noise when silence will do. He can talk to people for an hour about the weird Binghamton weather, get to know them slowly over a few years, and then still not really know them when they later move away. People will think he is a really nice guy and so cool for helping them move. They don’t know he helped them move to get them out of his life.

I will not help anyone move. It’s tedious and I’m weak and tired. I will not talk for an hour about the weather. I don’t check the weather or carry an umbrella. That’s so much planning, just to avoid water. And who remembers rain exists when the sun is out? Instead, I will run up to a new person, shake their hand, and launch a manic stream of words: My name is Heather! I’m bipolar and like Indian food! Years ago I was triggered by some PTSD and went through extensive therapy! I’m not close to my family! I’m so glad we will be teaching this course together this semester!

I want to know people all at once.

Or more correctly, I want them to know me all at once. It takes time to get to know someone—and I’ve got no time for that. But part of my bipolar brain can be not caring or caring so much that it stops me from interacting at all for fear of fucking up. Like saying fuck at the wrong time.

I was worried I was going to say fuck when I went to my ex-husband’s first work dinner. Most of the people he worked with, including his boss, are nice, respectable, Christian people. I doubted that they cared for all my facial piercings: an eyebrow ring, tongue ring, lip ring, and nose ring at the time. I was sure that I was going to fuck up, irrationally nervous that when we prayed before the meal I’d be called on to contribute: Hey Jesus, thanks for this high-fucking-class food, thanks for fucking dying for me and shit, p.s. I don’t think your mom was a virgin, A-fucking-men.

This would not work.

I was out of practice with my high heels too. The day before the dinner, I spent hours in the shoe section of Macy’s trying on heels. I was teaching at the university, going to school full time, and had toddlers at home. I didn’t feel at all connected to the person who had once worn heels. Her body was gone and wearing heels was different now. Three pregnancies had made my foot grow a half size. Size 9 heels looked huge when the clerk put the box next to me, a green pair nestled in the paper.

I put them on and stood up, balancing on the thin pegs.

They’re not even that tall, the saleswoman anticipated my complaint.

I don’t think I can walk in them, I staggered around the department like a newborn puppy.

You’re not going to find any shorter. It had been hours and she was done with me.

I was done with me too. I knew the dress needed heels. It was that kind of dress, the shoe lady told me, the dress lady told me, magazines told me, TV told me, movies told me, my mother told me. I knew I had to wear high heels with that dress and that dress to this event. I knew I had to go to this event and to not say fuck. I knew this is what was expected. It’s sometimes hard to tell whether to do an expected thing or whether to jump out the window, my brain always teetering on the window sill.

My ex didn’t go to my work events in uncomfortable clothes and painful shoes, but I’ve never driven him to the hospital when he wouldn’t stop throwing a training wheel down the driveway or listened to him worry for hours about a sent email.

Relationships are not equal. This is mathematically impossible.

Once, shortly after moving to Binghamton, he and I were walking through the mall with our kids and his parents in tow. His mother was getting on my nerves. She had a way of slapping me in the face and making it look like a caress. I was arguing with him, instead of his mother, because arguing with her wasn’t an option. Because he never stuck up for me. His parents were not the type of people to show emotion, especially not in public. The only acceptable emotion was laughter, and even then, let’s not be rude about it. I was growing angrier and louder as we argued, until he finally asked me to quiet down.

That was when I turned around, in the middle of the mall, my children and in-laws standing behind, and yelled, “Fuck off!”

Later, recalling the Fuck off incident, we would laugh. This was once I had been on a Depakote, Seroquel, Lithium cocktail for a few years and he probably didn’t feel the weight of my altered states any longer. Sanity is subjective—except it isn’t.

But not every part of mania is bad. Some people say they wouldn’t be bipolar, if they could choose, but it affects everyone differently and some days I feel I won the neurological lottery.

I remember the times when I had sex with my ex before he went to work, called him home for sex at lunch, and then begged for sex when he walked through the door that night. I remember wearing high heels all day, catching a glimpse of my legs in the full-length mirror, my brain buzzing at the sleek shimmer of glitter lotion that made me feel like magic. It was hard to think of anything other than sex and it was never enough. But this would only last a couple of weeks.

Usually followed by a crash.

And the crashes were low. Weeks in bed. Extreme physical pain, just from being. Crying daily, all day. It’s impossible for me to remember the way it felt because I can only feel that distorted when my perception is altered. I do remember many moments when I thought everyone I knew would be better off without me around.

I also thought about driving off an overpass.

And mania could be a problem too: feeling like a god was countered with the paranoia that everyone I knew was talking about me behind my back, hated me, that my husband of over twenty years was conspiring to leave me to be with an unattractive woman with uneven eyes and a perfect nose.

Hypomania is less intense. When I was hypomanic in my Masters program, I planned my semester in a weekend. Class plans for fifteen weeks in three days. When hypomanic, I paint, I write, I even clean. I don’t need to sleep. I love the way I feel—like being high but better because I’m high on me and I’m all throughout my veins.

The medication takes this away from me.

And the depression and the mania, it takes all these away from me. It makes me more level. More like myself or less like myself, whichever way you see it.

I also take pills for attention tremors, which are caused by the Lithium. The tremors occur anytime I’m trying not to shake, which makes putting on nail polish much harder than in the past.

I try to put on new nail polish once a week, but it has been every two to three weeks lately. When I’m putting on nail polish I can’t really do anything but put on nail polish. I can watch TV, or listen to music, or have a conversation, but that’s all I can do. And sometimes I do none of this. I do my nails in silence, in nothingness.

I’m trapped in a space of open blankness and I can’t leave until the paint dries.

Some people like my nails and tell me. My lovers. A colleague. A student. I’m glad they like my nails, even though I did my nails for the reflection time, for the moments I look down typing and think they look like candy, for licking them when I’m alone, for the pictures I get of them shining on a coffee mug that make me feel like I’m a hand model, for some feeling of accomplishment, for some discovery of art.

It’s been a few years since I started my current cocktail of medication, and I sometimes wonder if I take it to make myself more comfortable or to make everyone around me more comfortable. Of course, it does both, but I wonder what my goal is. Most days, I think I take it for me, so I can wake up in the morning and get to work, so I can go the day without telling a friend to fuck off, so I can think about something other than sex.

But some days I think I take it for everyone else. The world is set up for people who don’t need to take pills.

I wonder if I could ever be cured, though no one ever has been. I decide it’s not a disorder, being bipolar. Maybe it’s okay to feel like a god. Maybe it’s okay to see colors like flavors. Maybe it’s alright to stay up all night until I fall over asleep from exhaustion, a pen still in my fingers. I don’t want to take my medication. But I must work tomorrow, so I swallow my pills.

I’m always glad I did in the morning. I argue with myself every night.

Heather Dorn was born with a plastic spork in her mouth. As a child her mother took her to Taco Bell so she’s Taco Bell obsessed. She grew up mostly in California and Texas, knowing Taco Bell is not Mexican food, but nostalgia is yummy. Heather’s poetry, fiction, essays, and art can be found in journals like The American Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, Ragazine, and The Kentucky Review. She earned her Ph.D. from SUNY Binghamton, where she is a lecturer. After work she goes home to watch true crime. On the weekends, she wishes she had a washing machine.

Photo credit: jon jordan via a Creative Commons license.

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Secrets in the Gazebo

By Penny Perry

For my Aunt Leona Heyert Tarleton
who died at age 33

We are looking at the mockingbird
in the lemon tree. This is the first day
of my cousin’s summer visit.
I wriggle closer to her.
“I know how my mother died,”
my cousin whispers.
The gazebo is the place for secrets.

My Aunt Leona was almost famous.
She wrote plays that were on Broadway,
did crossword puzzles in ink. On a cold
spring day when silly girls wore sundresses
and shivered, Aunt Leona wore a smart
wool suit and pinned a spring violet
on her lapel.

Wendy’s mother died when Wendy
was only seven months old.

My cousin squints at the sun shooting
off the adobe tile roof. This is the first day
of her summer visit.
The jasmine smells sweet. She is thirteen.
I am eleven.

“She had an abortion,” Wendy says.
Her eyes are bright. She loves telling me
things I’m not supposed to know.

“A-bor-tion,” I repeat. Grandpa taught us
to sound out long words.

Grandma calls my cousin an orphan
even though she has a father.
“My mother didn’t want to have a second
baby so soon.”
“A baby?”
“It wasn’t a baby.
Your mother drove her to the bad doctor.”

“She wouldn’t do that.”
“But she did.”
I blot my wet face with my sleeve.
The excitement has left my cousin’s eyes.

Now I know why sometimes Mother
locks the bathroom door, turns the water
on full blast. She thinks I don’t hear her cries.

Wendy has long legs and her feet
touch the ground. My legs dangle
and the tie on the right sneaker has come
undone.

A seven time Pushcart nominee, Penny Perry has published a poetry collection, Santa Monica Disposal and Salvage (Garden Oak Press). Her novel Selling Pencils and Charlie, also from Garden Oak Press, was a finalist in the San Diego Book Awards in 2021. Her new poetry collection, Woman with Newspaper Shoes, was published June 2022 by Garden Oak Press.

Photo credit: “Polite Notice on Studded Door” is by Morning-meadow Jones, an American junior high school dropout, who later went on to realize her full potential and drop out of college too. She is a mother, migrant, and multi-media creative, practicing all manner of arts from her home in Wales, UK. She recently launched her writing career at the age of 51. Foolow her on Twitter at @Morning_meadowJ.

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.

Feeding the Goldfish

By René Marzuk

We walk to the edge of the pond at the far end
of the backyard—a pond dirty and small, slightly bigger
than a bathtub—filled with plants and fish carefully chosen
for their ability to survive off each other. “An ecosystem,”
you offer.

A grubby Eden. Colored shapes appear
and disappear within the murky waters, like spilled glass
marbles or ghosts drawn in sfumato, dodging our gifts.

Each crumb is an excess to be pondered. Kindness,
many a time, finds its way into a contract.
“How much, just how much exactly,
will this miracle cost us?”

René Marzuk is a poetry and prose editor at Writers Resist.

After completing a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Rene is on the path to finish his English MA at the same institution and is already considering his next steps. Accidentally born in Ukraine to Cuban parents, he grew up in Havana, Cuba, and migrated to the United States as an adult.

He is currently a contributing editor of The Envious Lobster, a collection of nineteenth-century American children’s nature writing, where he focuses on rescuing the works of non-white and child authors. Overall, his research interests include Modern American literature and literary-cultural intertextuality, children’s literature, cultural studies, semiotics, code-switching practices, and articulation of marginal identities in literary works, among others.

Both inside and outside of academia, Rene has worn and continues to wear many hats. As of right now, he writes poetry, runs, takes pictures, and dabbles in drawing and illustration. He lives in High Point, North Carolina.

Photo credit: Image by Matt Artz on Unsplash.

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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.

Welcome to our June issue, and farewell to a beloved editor

The summer of 2022 is roiling with challenges.

By the time you are reading this, or soon thereafter, Roe v. Wade is likely to have been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, and “states’ rights” will quash human rights. People around the globe will suffer from increasingly extreme temperatures, weather events, and food and water shortages. In the United States, there will be a damnable number of new mass shootings. Ukraine will be ever more battered by Putin’s violent imperialism. And many folks will flirt with despair.

Yet, despite the struggle, we are not without hope. Remember why we launched Writers Resist in the dark days after Trump’s election? To resist oppression, to share our fears and hopes with a kindred community. And we have.

To borrow a Nina Simone quote in the following essay by our beloved editor DW McKinney, “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.”

At Writers Resist, we’ve not only reflected the times, but shared visions of a more equitable future. And so we continue.

While DW’s message is one of farewell, and we will sorely miss her, she is moving on to important places where she will continue to make positive change in a challenging world—while Writers Resist continues to benefit from the enlightenment she brought to our process.

So we say goodbye to DW and welcome the opportunity to continue resisting creatively.

In the meantime, we are searching for another volunteer editor willing and able to donate some time for the love of words.

Are you interested? Contact K-B, our publisher: kbgressitt@gmail.com.

BTW: Join us for an online reading of this issue’s contributing writers on Saturday 23 July at 4:00 p.m. PACIFIC. Email K-B for the Zoom link at kbgressitt@gmail.com.

From DW McKinney

DW McKinney

My maternal grandfather would play Nina Simone’s records in his den on rare evenings when the air was too warm and thick. He’d leave the doors leading to the outside patios open and we’d sit still, staring into the night as we drank in her voice. Even as a child then, I could feel the weight of her lyrics pressing heavily on us. It was probably a mercy that I didn’t hear her sing “Mississippi Goddam” until I was an adult.

In the summer of 2015, on a day that was similarly too hot to be outside and the air too thick to breathe comfortably, I took a lunch break from my job as a proofreader for the Texas Legislative Council and wandered into the Blanton Museum of Art. The oppressive heat from outside had worn me down so that by the time I entered the museum, my defenses were gone and I was raw and vulnerable to the emotional weight of the main exhibit.

The Blanton was hosting Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, an exhibit that showcased paintings, sculptures, photography, and other media and art forms created in response to the 1960s’ political and social climate. A handful of visitors and I stood in a large egg-shell white room, the whole of it swallowing us and forcing us to seek refuge in the paintings hanging on the walls. I was gazing at Barkley L. Hendricks’s “Lawdy Mama” (1969) as I let the air conditioning soothe me. In the portrait, a young Black woman with an afro held her arm as she stood against a gold leaf backdrop with an arched top. The woman’s expression shifted from resignation to acceptance to neutral the longer I stared. It was that intense focus that emptied me of every distraction and allowed me to hear the musical notes tugging on my ear.

I followed the notes into an alcove where no one else had entered. A lone bench sat in the room. A film played on the white screen tacked to the wall in front of the bench. Nine Simone sat at a piano and vigorously played its keys. Every part of me stilled, and I was transported back into the sepia tones of my grandfather’s den. When the song was over, I waited for the reel to replay so I could watch the film from the beginning. I listened again and again, sitting there for who knows how long, aware that I had not eaten. Aware that my break was crawling to its last minutes. Aware that the white museum patrons took one look at the screen before moving quickly away into the next room. Aware that it was just Nina and I for quite a long time, just the two of us ruminating on freedom, Black bodies being beaten, and Black churches burning.

“Mississippi Goddam” rolled in my head all the way back to work and for a long time afterward. I couldn’t shake Nina Simone’s righteous anger or the ugly truths in the lyrics. Over my lifetime, I’ve listened to hundreds of political songs in rap, hip-hop, trip hop, electronica, Latin pop, and rock. But “Mississippi Goddam” was the first time that I felt a song’s claws rip into me and never let go. The sting of it never faded. I have been chasing that feeling since that afternoon in the museum.

That same summer, the documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? was released. The film featured archival interview footage of Nina Simone saying, “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.” Creatives evoked that quote ad nauseam in the days following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. I think writers and artists struggled to translate their thoughts and emotions following the election. So many of us wanted to defensively weaponize the lamentations we let loose into the new void we found ourselves in. Nina Simone became a filter for us to shape our weapons.

In the years since then, I became more closely drawn to creative works that delved into the visceral and heartbreaking but truthful variations of our lives. When I joined Writers Resist in June 2021, I looked forward to learning more about how our words create change. How our words become protestations that spur action. How we can shape a resistance on paper and through electronic waves. I was also hoping to become educated through the WR readership on how to improve my own literary activism. I am grateful to say that in my short tenure as an editor, I have done just that.

As I move on from my editorship this June, I leave with many lessons about voice, poetic form, second chances, and grace. I am thankful for the opportunities to read political commentary from writers all over the globe. I am especially thankful that our contributors have nurtured my curiosity about resistance in the literary arts.

If you’re curious about where I’m going from here, I will be expanding my current editorial role at Shenandoah and beginning a new position as a reviews editor for a small journal that debuts in 2023. But most immediately, this summer I will be leading the inaugural year of We Are The House: A Virtual Residency for Early-Career Writers through Raising Mothers. I’ve created this year-long residency to help parent-writers with almost no publications establish their nonfiction portfolio. It is the steppingstone toward my dream goal to establish a more dynamic, multi-genre residency for parent-writers.

As I leave, I can express nothing but gratitude to Writers Resist’s readership and to my generous colleagues on the masthead. I am never too far away.

Onward,
DWM

Photograph of the Sun by XoMEoX via a Creative Commons license.

Photograph of DW McKinney courtesy of the subject.

**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.

I don’t even remember his name

By Sarah Gundle

Something made me think of him. For days now, it has been bothering me: I can’t remember his name. I can recall many of our conversations, the gentle character of his voice, the resignation in his eyes, but not his name. I’ve wracked my brain. I saw him almost twenty years ago for almost a year in twice weekly sessions. I was a young intern working in a city hospital. He was a former prisoner who had served stints for everything from petty larceny to armed robbery.

In prison, they strip you of everything: first your name, then your identity, and finally your humanity. You become a number in a brutal system. Except I learned, for him, this process had started way before he had landed in prison at 19. And now I, who cared for him deeply, seem to have erased him too.

• • •

Mandated by the court to enter therapy, his chart had a red notation at the top I didn’t recognize: “Violence/aggression risk.” His diagnosis was “Schizoaffective disorder,” and the chart noted he had a long-term substance abuse problem. Reading on, I saw he had gotten out of prison two weeks earlier.

Though the notation gave me pause, I was afraid to say anything. It was the second month of my internship, the training year before getting my doctorate. I was at the very bottom of the psychiatry clinic hierarchy, and to put much faith in my own misgivings, not to mention voicing them, was more than I could risk. The first time we met, I made sure it was during daylight hours.

Eyes downcast, his large frame filled the doorway of my closet-like office. He had rich, dark skin, heavily pockmarked cheeks, and sat with a restrained intensity. I clutched my hands tightly while he began speaking so softly I had to lean closer to hear him, our knees almost touching.

“Do you have any trauma in your past?” I asked. Remaining silent, he cast his eyes around the office landing on an old globe tucked onto one of the upper shelves.

“What is that?” he asked.

“Oh, just an old globe. It’s probably very out of date.”

“Can I look at it?”

Unsure what to do, I took it down and placed it in his lap. Gently, he spun it around—his acorn-colored eyes lit up.

“That’s a gorgeous thing, huh?” he said. “The whole world—right here.” He spun the globe and landed his finger on a spot, “Vietnam?” He sounded out.

“Oh, it’s very beautiful. I was there last year.”

“What?” His head spun back toward me. “What is it like there?”

Before our session ended, I returned to my question: “Can you tell me about your trauma history?”

The light in his eyes doused; he almost whispered his response. “I’m a very bad person. I did something really terrible when I was a kid. And I’ve been paying for it ever since.”

I didn’t press him for details—our time was up.

After that, we began every session by spinning the globe and an exploration of the country his finger landed upon. He was always curious about the food. “Man, that sounds good,” he teased me one day after our imaginary journeys took us to a place where fried crickets were a popular street food. His trilling laugh filled the room.

When he was nine, on an unusually cold day in his small North Carolina town, he and his six-year-old brother climbed onto a frozen lake to explore. Halfway across, the ice cracked. Though he managed to scramble to safety, his brother fell in, disappearing in the pitch black water.

Afraid of being punished, he hid in a nearby forest for two days until—ragged, hungry, and numb with cold—he returned home.

“My father beat me with a switch this long.” He held his hands out to show me. “I didn’t feel a thing. I knew I was bad. I knew I killed him. I wanted him to keep beating me.”

After his brother’s funeral, his father barely spoke to him again. At 13, he was sent to live with relatives in Manhattan where, after nine months, they took him out of school, so he could work full time in their shop. His first arrest was at 19. Over three decades, he had never spent more than two years outside of prison.

“I just get a feeling, you know. I can’t take it. It builds up, and I know I need to go back.

“But why?” I asked.

“I deserve the punishment,” he said, his eyes suddenly vacant.

One of the first things I did after meeting him was call his doctor, a grizzled veteran of the psychiatry ward.

“He’s delusional,” he said, off-handedly.

“But what delusion?” I had seen no evidence of this.

“Hang on, let me look it up in his chart.” I could hear him crunching something as we spoke. “Oh, he endorses hearing voices. You understand what that means right?”

I swallowed tightly. “Of course, I do.”

I brought it up at our next session.

“He asked me if I ever hear voices. I told him I do—it’s like . . . well, these echoes in my head sometimes. Like if I get sad, I start remembering my brother’s voice.”

I stared at him. “You understand that’s not an auditory delusion—it’s a very normal reaction to having experienced a terrible trauma.”

“I didn’t experience trauma, my brother did,” he shrugged.

I called his parole officer, eager to understand the danger warning on his chart.

“Who?” I could hear the papers shuffling. “I have no idea about him—I just make sure he’s not breaking the rules, doctor.”

I began seeing him twice a week, prompting the officer to call me: “You know he’s supposed to come only once a week, right? And what is this about a job training program you have him in? You’ll see—he’ll be back in jail long before he’s ready for a job.”

At one point, I asked him about his substance abuse. “Your weekly urine tests are always clean. When did you stop using?”

“Oh, I don’t use,” he smiled ruefully. He explained that he had to snort coke to give him the courage to commit his crimes, which he pulled off using a plastic handgun. Of course, he tested positive after every arrest.

“But how can this be? Not only are you not an addict, you’re not psychotic. I’m going to change your diagnosis in your chart. And we’re getting you off these anti-psychotic meds.”

I was indignant, eager to have something to fix. I stopped mid-sentence because he was looking at me curiously.

“Why are you so worked up?” he asked.

“You shouldn’t have to live with the side effects—the dry mouth, the nausea, the headaches,” I responded, furious. “You shouldn’t have ever been on these medications!”

“It’s really ok—I swear it is. Change the chart, ok, sure, but it doesn’t change anything for me,” he replied, softly smiling, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

I changed his diagnosis to PTSD. His psychiatrist changed it back a week later.

• • •

He always had huge smile when I met him in the waiting room, but as soon we began down the hallway to my office it was suddenly gone. I commented on it once as we sat in my office. “You always greet me with a smile. Then when you stand up, it’s like a light goes out. Why is that?”

He waited a second. “I’ve learned to walk like I’m invisible.”

“You’re . . . crying?” He looked baffled. “About me?”

“You’ve been dropped by so many people. It isn’t fair,” I blurted. We sat together in a thick silence, his eyes on the floor. After a while, he spun the globe, this time landing on Sweden.

“Wouldn’t it be great to go there someday? I bet there are big mountains of snow.” He grinned.

I nodded, wiping away my tears. “It really would. But I hear they eat smelly fish. Yuck.”

“Yuck,” he agreed.

One day, he came in looking depressed. “I don’t want it to be a surprise to you—I’m getting that feeling again.” I knew exactly what he meant but we both pretended I didn’t.

The next week he missed his session.

• • •

I wanted to change his circumstances, to make an inequitable system take note of him. I look back now and wince at my frenzied efforts—all that time I should have just been listening to him better. I didn’t want to believe that a trauma he experienced at age nine could mark him indelibly, or that the world could take a vulnerable kid and rub him so raw through racist, punitive systems that the only place he thinks he belongs is in prison. He tried to tell me that is exactly the world in which he lives, but I so wanted it not to be true that I disbelieved him.

When he’d left my office the last time, nothing much had changed. His chart still held the red notation, the vocational program had failed to place him, and those charged with watching out for him—the harried parole officer, the indifferent psychiatrist—still had no idea who he really was.

But he had changed me. Gone was my naïve faith that a wise and beneficent system would catch those who tumbled into its waiting arms. Now I believed otherwise: that I couldn’t even break his fall.

A few weeks later I received a slim, slightly crumpled, letter in the mail, addressed to the clinic. The return address was a correctional facility. I waited to read it until I got home.
“Please don’t think this is your fault Dr. G. And remember: You gave me something I never thought I’d have—you gave me the world.”

Years later, his letter sits in a long-forgotten file somewhere, one of the items that has done the most to disillusion me, but also make me a better therapist. Despite his impact on me, he too has slipped from view, like a dream that dissipates upon waking. I can’t even remember his name.

Sarah Gundle has a doctorate in Clinical Psychology and a master’s degree in International Affairs (with a concentration in human rights) from Columbia University. In addition to her private practice in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, she teaches courses on trauma and international mental health int the Mount Sinai Hospital system. She is also a member of Physicians for Human Rights and works in their Asylum network, where she evaluates the mental health of persecution survivors seeking asylum.

Photograph by Sophia D Photography via a Creative Commons license.

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Slave Cemetery

By Elizabeth Spencer Spragins

anguish overflows
levees lined with unbleached bones—
a channeled fury
gathers silt of centuries
and the river roars their names

Elizabeth Spencer Spragins is a fiber artist, writer, and poet who taught in North Carolina community colleges for more than a decade before returning to her home state of Virginia. Her work has appeared in 80-plus journals and anthologies in 11 countries. She is the author of three original poetry collections: Waltzing with Water and With No Bridle for the Breeze (Shanti Arts Publishing) and The Language of Bones (Kelsay Books). Visit her website.

Photograph by Gregory Monk via a Creative Commons license.

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Body Before Extinction

By Emily Hockaday

I sing to the water and lower my only child
into the foam, wiggling toes first. I think about
all the species the ocean held
that I don’t know the names of
that have gone extinct this past year
and focus on the sound of the waves
and all the metaphors
that the tide could cover.

I have walked this beach
and pulled balloons, broken bottles,
cracked plastic, and wristwatches
from the surf and dunes
without seeing another person
for miles. I listen for the wind
through the beach grass and
the plover and seagulls
and hand my daughter a trash bag
and gloves. I don’t even know how many
animals are left. I am afraid
to look for the answer.

Emily Hockaday’s first full-length collection Naming the Ghost is out with Cornerstone Press November 2022. She is the author of five prior chapbooks, most recently Beach Vocabulary from Red Bird Chaps. Her work has appeared in print and online journals, as well as the Wayfinding, Poets of Queens, and In Isolation anthologies. She can be found on the web at www.emilyhockaday.com and on Twitter @E_Hockaday.

Photograph by Aryeh Alex via a Creative Commons license.

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Throwaway

By Karen Kilcup

Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal? –Rachel Carson

A one-woman Revolution,
Jemima Wilkinson was stoned
for preaching the light that lives
in everyone. The Public Universal Friend
was driven north from Philadelphia
to the Finger Lakes, her movement forecasting
what would follow: women’s rights,
abolition, the Underground Railroad.

Today the monstrous trucks lumber north
with New York City’s trash, creating
a mountain baptized Seneca Meadows,
leaving a trail of sludge and garbage that leaches
slowly into the lakes, their stretched-out
digits trying to grasp what it all means,
will mean, in a moment when land and water
and history are for sale by the Town Council,
which spews the gospel of lower taxes
and buries ever deeper the women
of Seneca Falls, Seneca Lake,
and the sparkling railroad that carried
so many to fresh futures.

In this place, this time, what does clean mean?
What—or who—is dirty? Will we push
the plastic and the people underground
for good, or will the glacial hands
that hold the Haudenosaunee
send the refuse down, down,
until it returns elsewhere
in poisoned protest?

Poet’s note: A Quaker known by many as the Public Universal Friend, Jemima Wilkinson fled the ostensibly liberal city of Philadelphia shortly after the American Revolution, joined by devout followers who saw her as a spiritual guide. Susan Brind Morrow’s story in The Nation, “The Finger Lakes Are Being Poisoned,” ironically parallels Wilkinson’s flight to the appalling movement of diesel trucks that carry New York’s waste to the formerly pristine region that is home to centuries of Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) people, as well as to some of America’s most important movements for social justice advanced by Native Americans, women, and enslaved people—all historically considered subhuman and “dirty.”

A teacher and writer for more than forty years, Karen Kilcup is the Elizabeth Rosenthal Professor of American Literature, Environmental & Sustainability Studies, and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at UNC Greensboro. She feels fortunate to work with many students of color, first-generation students, and LGBTQI+ students at this Minority-Serving Institution. Their courage and imagination inspire her and give her hope. Her forthcoming book, winner of the 2021 Winter Goose Poetry Prize, is titled The Art of Restoration.

Photograph by OwlPacino via a Creative Commons license.

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A Simple Act

By Erin Edwards

It is a simple act to stand in the middle of the road. Simple, but effective. A car either has to stop and wait or run you down—and it just wouldn’t do for a hearse carrying the body of a former government official to accelerate towards a woman in the middle of the street.

Making a scene wasn’t something I’d planned. I hadn’t even been paying attention when they’d announced the route for Eric Marshall’s funeral procession on the news. Events simply collided, leaving me the perfect moment. The universe implored me to do something.

The route intersected my walk to work. Barriers prohibiting pedestrian access to the road lined the pavement, except at the crossing. There, two police officers simply held up a rope, keeping us all back. We were expected to stand in silence. Once the cars passed, they’d let us through, they assured us. But Eric Marshall had never let us rest for one moment once he stepped into office. What right did he have to a peaceful forever?

I didn’t want to wait until the cars had passed.

I looked around at the people bowing their heads, waiting respectfully for the procession to drive by. But Eric Marshall had done nothing to earn my respect.

The police officer guarding the crossing looked the other way, and there was my chance. I ducked under the rope and bolted for the middle of the road.

The procession was forced to stop. The car of a prominent government official, even a dead one, hitting a woman in front of dozens of cameras was unthinkable. The funeral was being streamed to the nation, but it wasn’t Eric Marshall’s show anymore. I looked around and saw the policemen frantically discussing my presence. Tackling a woman to the ground on live television wasn’t an option either, but I knew it would only be a few moments before they had the cameras turned off so they could haul me away. I needed to make it more difficult for them, so I sat down and laid back, tucking my arms underneath me to make myself harder to grab.

The tarmac was warm, cooking in the sun. I rested my head, feeling the uneven surface through my hair, and ignored the commotion around me. No one raised their voice—this was a funeral, after all—but there was plenty of debate. It would probably only be minutes before I was dragged away.

If I’d planned it better, I would have worn a long red cloak and a white bonnet, just so my stance on Eric Marshall’s politics was clear. He had stood in the way of so many women and their health, their right to choose. He’d convinced everyone that criminalising abortion had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, but no one thought to mention the women who died as a result of the bill. Some were lost to backstreet abortions. Some took concoctions the internet promised them would end a pregnancy but wound up ending their lives. And some women just couldn’t take it.

I had heard stories of women placed under house arrest, under twenty-four-hour suicide watch, because they were deemed a risk to the foetuses they carried. Eric Marshall would turn us all into handmaids, if he had the chance. It was only right that someone stand between him and eternal rest.

The sky was cloudless and far-reaching above my head. I wondered how long it would be before I got to see it again—I knew I’d be heading to a police station rather than work when they moved me. I was contemplating whether they’d give me a chance to contact my flatmate and explain my absence at home, when I heard a yell.

“Another one!”

Before I had time to register where the shout had come from, someone skidded across the ground and stopped beside me.

“Sorry,” they said with a giggle. “I didn’t think that through.”

I turned to see another woman. She was far closer than I’d normally be comfortable with, but I appreciated the show of solidarity. From my limited vantage point, she was dressed for work, in a pencil skirt and floaty shirt with billowing sleeves. I wondered if she’d shredded them during her shaky landing. Despite any damage she might have done to her clothes or herself, she was grinning.

“Hi.” I laughed, a little manic. “You know they’ll arrest us for this?”

“Yeah, I figured. But if there’s two of us, it’s harder for them,” the woman said, shrugging. “I’m Daphne.”

“Allyson,” I introduced myself. “Thank you.”

We were at rather an awkward angle to shake hands, but instead Daphne threaded her arm through mine and linked us together. If they tried to drag one of us away, they’d have to take us both.

I didn’t ask Daphne why she hated Eric Marshall. She could have just hated the way he had knocked over the first domino—there was already talk of having women of childbearing age assigned to a guardian, whether that be a family member or partner, to ensure she “acted responsibly.” It was only getting worse. There was always the chance her hatred was personal. She could have lost a friend, a family member or a loved one. It wasn’t the kind of thing you asked someone when you’d just met and you were lying on the burning tarmac in the middle of the road in front of a funeral procession.

They must have shut off the cameras, because a police officer came to stand over us. The sun shone behind his head, backlighting him so all of his features were sunk in shadow.

“All right, ladies, you’ve had your fun. Show some respect, get moving,” he ordered, waving his hands like he could waft us away like a bad smell.

“This is a protest,” Daphne said, her voice stronger than mine would have been.

“This is a funeral,” the officer replied.

“You see a funeral; we see a celebration of the loss of our human rights,” Daphne shot back.

She tightened her grip around my arm. Despite the sun, I stared right up at the officer’s face, jaw clenched. Leaving quietly wasn’t an option.

The officer huffed and walked away. The debate on how best to pitch us out of the road was growing loud. I could hear shouting and radios, as they called for backup and argued over strategy. They didn’t want to make martyrs of us, but every second we were left there was another moment that Eric Marshall was rotting in his coffin.

I turned to look at the hearse, only feet from me. The black paint was glossy enough that I could see my face in it. There was me, there was Daphne, and there was what seemed like miles of empty road. If I had planned any of this, I would have brought handcuffs to lock myself to the grill. We likely had mere moments before we were picked up and tossed into the back of a police car.

“It was nice to meet you, Daphne, I said. “Thanks for doing something stupid with me.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s over,” she said.

I could hear a grin in her voice and when I turned to see what she could possibly be smiling about, I found her looking the other way. At the crossing where I’d originally snuck through, there was a whole group of women. There had to be twenty or thirty of them, all pushing forward against a row of police. The officers had abandoned the rope they’d been holding up and were trying to create a wall of riot shields.

Our anger had been building for so long. Layer upon layer of it, another spark added to the fire each time we felt the restraints of Eric Marshall’s policies: the men-only bars and restaurants we were banned from for our own safety, the TV adverts begging us to take care of our health to ensure thriving offspring, the poster campaign that screamed “A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOME!” It was enough to drive anyone to rage. They say that a woman can display superhuman strength to save a child, but no one ever realised that she could do it to save herself, too. She just had to be pushed far enough.

I watched, sideways and half-blocked by Daphne, as the group of women burst through the line of police. Once one had breached the blockade, they all piled through the gap before it could be closed again. Shouts of victory and glee rang out as they ran towards us. Suddenly the empty road was a sea of bodies, clustering together and grabbing on to each other so no one was left vulnerable.

Information was shared through the crowd as quickly as people could speak the words. The official broadcast had been shut down, but social media livestreams had almost immediately started up in its place, shared by onlookers from nearby buildings. The world was watching.

Any lack of a plan on my behalf was immediately rectified by the women around me. They shared the number of a protest support line, reminders to go limp if someone tried to lift you, orders not to give personal information even if arrested. No one had any doubt that we would all be taken into custody, that Eric Marshall’s funeral procession would eventually continue, and he would be laid to rest. But first, we would make our stand.

Erin Edwards is a dedicated Londoner and compulsive writer, most often found in an archive or at the theatre. She is committed to providing the world with more queer content and is currently working on far too many different projects to do just that. You can find her Twitter at @EEdwardsWrites.

Photograph by Victoria Pickering via a Creative Commons license.

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What I Learn

By Lorna Rose

I listen to the sweaty silence,
his throbbing presence as he stares at
my developing chest.

I learn to calculate the tides.
Learn his breath smells like mints when he’s offering me up.
Men’s gazes have teeth.

Pivot and scan for the response he wants
at the appropriate time.
You’re pretty. Perform for me.

Legs and boobs get you far. They open doors
to bedrooms
where all good girls go.

Learn to hide and calculate the tides.
Aren’t you proud you made your father happy?

Lorna Rose is a Pacific Northwest writer and speaker. Her narrative nonfiction and poetry have been recognized by Pacific Northwest Writers Association and the Oregon Poetry Association, and have appeared in About Place Journal, Third Wednesday, Jellyfish Review, Scary Mommy, and elsewhere. Lorna also speaks publicly on motherhood, finding resilience through writing, and her experience in AmeriCorps. She is at work on a memoir about going from LA party girl to trail worker in rural Alaska. For more, visit Lorna’s website.

Photograph by That guy names Jere via a Creative Commons license.

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Everyone Tells Me

By Alma A.

Everyone tells me
It wasn’t my fault,
That karma will get him,
Will leave him to rot.

Everyone tells me
I should have fought harder,
And why did I wear that,
I was asking for trouble.

Everyone tells me,
That ‘no’ isn’t binding,
It’s fluid, it’s blurred,
I am overreacting.

Filthy, contaminated,
Shameful, guilt-ridden.
I could have stopped him,
A dim future, unwritten.

Everyone tells me,
That I’m not okay,
But maybe I will be,
Maybe someday.

When hell freezes over,
And rapists stop raping,
Only there might I get
My chance at escaping.

But when my words reach no ears,
And the fighting ceases,
I’m the one who will be there
To pick up the pieces.

Alma A. is originally from Boston, and now resides in Canada with her cat and dog. She is a student with a passion for writing, and she aspires to do it on a professional level. She mostly writes science fiction in her spare time and sells her crafts on the side.

Photograph by Jane Fox via a Creative Commons license.

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Fury

By Skye Wilson

I want to break his bones for what he did.
No metaphors, just snap against my skin;
pain blooming in his eyes like burns on flesh.
I’ll scorch all of the skin he touched me with.

I want to grow to twice my usual size,
drink in the pain and terror in his eyes,
feel the power as I tower in starlight,
inhale the fear he sensed on me that night.

Tell Salome the Baptist’s head won’t do,
I take more than half a kingdom to subdue:
I need rivers of the blood of all the men
who kill their lovers and who hurt my friends.
Give me the lives and wives they don’t deserve.
Give me a platter: on it, place the world.

Skye Wilson is a bisexual Scottish writer, living in Newcastle. She has an MSc in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh. Her work is preoccupied with the body and belonging. Find her words at skye-wilson.com or on Twitter @skyegwilson.

Image by Sharon Brogan via a Creative Commons license.

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The Failed Real Estate Caper

By Sue Katz

The first thing Miriam noticed when the taxi dropped her off at Ruby’s house was the For Sale sign on the lawn. She took a magic marker out of her handbag and wrote “NOT” in capital letters, but it turned out too faint to be easily seen. “It’s the thought that counts,” she muttered with no small measure of anger.

Ruby had fallen and broken her elbow. That can happen. But Ruby’s son Lionel was trying to take advantage of the situation by insisting that Ruby move into assisted living while he sold her house out from under her. Despite his charm, Lionel seemed determined to crush Ruby at every turn. Her wealth was entirely tied up in her home—he called her “house poor”—and he couldn’t wait to get his hands on it.

Miriam let herself in by the front door, which Ruby had unlocked for her earlier. She found Ruby slumped in a living room chair. Ruby gestured with her head towards the bedroom, and Miriam went directly there. She found Lionel packing a suitcase. On the floor were a trunk and two large cardboard boxes. Clearly he had been hard at work. He looked up and, when he saw her, he bestowed the kind of flirtatious smile handsome men use to smooth their way through life, but it didn’t work on Miriam.

“Ruby doesn’t want to sell. She doesn’t want to move. And I’m wondering why you are forcing the matter, Lionel.”

“I think I know what’s best for my mother,” he answered without changing that smile.

“I think Ruby knows what’s best for Ruby,” Miriam said.

“With all due respect, this is a family matter.”

“With all due respect,” Miriam said, “it all depends on how you define family. Ruby and I have been close for over 65 years—a couple decades longer than you’ve known her.”

“As far as we’re concerned, you’re a nice lady, a good pal to my mother, and you’ve got zero to say about this situation. If you want to bring some soup around or send a card, feel free. As for this house, I’m going to sell it, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” He returned to stuffing Ruby’s things into the suitcase.

Ruby had quietly come to stand behind Miriam for this exchange. “Sorry, Lionel. It’s not your house to sell,” she said.

“You can’t take care of yourself with that dodgy arm, Mum, let alone this whole house. And you can’t really afford to bring in full-time help on your Social Security. I’d hate to have to force you through the courts.”

“The courts?” Miriam cried.

“Yes, if she’s making irrational decisions and putting herself in danger, there are things a son can do about that.”

The two women looked at each other. They made every effort to look somber, but they couldn’t control themselves. Miriam giggled while Ruby laughed out loud.

“What’s going on?” Lionel asked.

Ruby calmed herself enough to say, “I believe a wife trumps a son, dear.”

Lionel looked concerned. “Mum, you’re not making sense.”

“Tell him, Miriam.”

“Your mother and I got married a few months ago. We worried what you or the authorities might try to do to us someday. We’re old women each living alone, solitary, low hanging fruit, as they say. We figured we’re like an old couple who have been together a very long time anyway, so we decided to make it official.”

“Didn’t you notice my ring, honey?” Ruby waved her wrinkled hand in Lionel’s direction.

“Or mine?” Miriam said, showing off her identical gold band.

“And don’t worry,” Ruby said. “Miriam will be living here for as long as I need her. We’ll be just fine.”

She looked at Miriam. “Could you possibly take down that nasty sign in my yard?”

“Yes, and I’ll call the agent to cancel, as well. Shall I say I’m a member of your family?”

“Sure. Tell them you’re my spouse.”

The two women giggled and left the doorway of the bedroom, chatting happily. “Put everything back nicely, will you Lionel?” Ruby said over her shoulder.

His fading smile curled with anger, robbing him of his beauty, but his scowl formed too late for the women to notice.

Sue Katz’s business card identifies her as a “Wordsmith and Rebel.” Her journalism and fiction have been published in anthologies, magazines, and online on the three continents where she has lived, worked, and roused rabble. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Gertrude Press, Writers Resist, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and the Boston Globe newspaper. Her fiction books, often focusing on the lives of elders, include A Raisin in My Cleavage: short and shorter stories, Lillian’s Last Affair and other stories, and Lillian in Love. Katz’s first play was produced by the prestigious The Theater Offensive in honor of Stonewall 50.

Photograph by Alan Levine via a Creative Commons license.

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Two Poems by Ron Dowell

We Are What We Shine

after J. Venters and M. Barajas

Bright as a jewel, we are what we shine.
A gang’s red-blue color-coded word clash
Compton’s graffitied not-so “Welcome” sign.

Compton Court obliterates the blue skyline,
Angeles Abbey minarets, brown grass,
like burnished silver, we are what we shine.

We suffer potholed streets silent decline
show taxes limit terms make thunder crash
Compton’s graffitied not so “Welcome” sign.

Change old habits & shade the asinine
who pour concrete slabs over weeping ash
as a begrimed city loses its shine.

Compton Creek crawdads, waters unwind
spawn Dr. Dre, Coste-Lewis, Niecy Nash.
Compton’s artists unveil the “Welcome” sign

Our shimmering gold—Venus, Kendrick’s rhymes
Venters, Barajas, their COVID backlash
bright as a jewel, we are what we shine.

Compton rolls out our “Welcome” sign.

• • • • • •

Ebonics

My native tongue felt perfectly normal
until they labeled it Ebonics in the 70s.
School disparaged my native tongue

like jazz, denigrated and disrespected.
The principal paddled me with the holey oak.
The new whip burned my ass, lashing and tentacled.

He tried to beat out vernacular for sleeping
through American heroes like Jefferson Davis
Father Serra, Charles Lindbergh. For his doctorate

a man discovered the new Negro language.
Even today, I violate grammar rules, unconscious
even today, I slip forward, or back, into natural speech

even today, I sing coded enslaved spirituals
Wade in the water, cause God’s gonna trouble the water
hounds don’t follow when we wade in the water.

Ah ‘on know what homie be doin. He be runnin’
They say a child’s personality forms by age five
–knowing two languages, he knows two worlds.

I learned a new language, but the new world hides.
I’m burdened, weighted, an imposter in a world
that squeezes me like a piece of coal.

Under pressure, like a black diamond, I sparkle dark
and hard I chew steel.

Ron L. Dowell holds two Master’s degrees from California State University Long Beach. In June 2017, he received the UCLA Certificate in Fiction Writing. His poetry resides in Penumbra, Writers Resist, Oyster Rivers Pages, The Wax Paper, Kallisto Gaia Press, The Penmen Review, Packingtown Review Journal, and The Poeming Pigeon. He’s a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow. Visit his website at crookedoutofcompton.com.

Photograph, City of Compton.

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Search Terms

By Holly Stovall

I opened the search bar, typed in “middle-aged women support Black Lives Matter” and narrowed the results to “images.” Google spit out a white couple, on the stairway in front of their mansion, pointing guns at protesters marching by. It’s not what I was looking for, but Google taunted me—Aren’t you curious? I clicked on the link.

What?! So now I’m standing under a pixelated oak tree holding a sign that says, “Abolish the Police,” while across the lawn, a man and a woman are aiming guns at me. The man with a gun is shorter than the woman with a gun, but his weapon is bigger. Their faces are pink, like pigs. Everything is lit—back lit, front lit, inner lit, and I’m in a multidimensional screen. I turn my sign over to show daisies on tall stems.

The woman is looking at me, but tilting her head towards him. “Who the fuck is this?” she says, and then, to me, “How did you get in here with us?”

Her pistol is polished. Her top is a navy French boating chemise with a sequin appliqué on the breast pocket. It overwhelms the pixel compactor and spews out blinding rays of fluorescence.

“Didn’t your daddy teach you not to point guns at people?” I say. “Aim it at the sky.”

I scan the perimeter of my vision for the “leave” option, but find none.

The woman explains that this isn’t Zoom; there’s no exit option. Her name is Kelly, and she doesn’t know how she and her husband, Brody, got swooshed in. They had been in opposite wings of the mansion. Kelly wants to know what I was doing when the search engine sucked me in, so I say I was just browsing the internet, clicking on random stuff.

She lowers the gun and asks me about my search terms. Hers were “middle-aged women righteously threaten protesters with gun.” I don’t say what I’m thinking. First, that the adverb, righteously, is unnecessary. Also, that she’s the only middle-aged woman who rose to the top of Google results for waving guns at people practicing the right to free speech. Last, she embarrasses me.

I ask her if she has any theories about why Google generated me for her, but before she answers, Brody informs us that Google is an algorithm.

“Are you familiar with mansplaining?” I say, and then regret it because he’s wielding a fat automatic attached to a black strap slung across his hot pink Polo shirt. Even though we’re just pixels, the threat feels real, and I’m afraid. I don’t know the rules in here, but it seems I shouldn’t have pissed him off.

Kelly thanks Brody for his Google wisdom. “Hun,” she says, “go on up the steps. You should be above the rest of us.” He falls for that.

Kelly asks me if I was caught on video threatening nice suburbanites with BLM signs and causing Google to throw me out onto the first page of her search.

I explain to her that no, I live in a small town, west of the city, where we just stand on the edge of the park, next to the highway, and hold up protest signs for the delivery cars and hog carriers to see. There’re no mansion dwellers there who would aim guns at us.

I don’t tell her that I wrote an op-ed for the local paper, criticizing police for Kayla Montgomery’s death. Kayla was a blond woman who worked at the gas station and called me “dear,” even though I’m old enough to be her mom. A sheriff’s deputy pulled her over for what he claimed was “impudent driving” and shot her five times. She was unarmed. My column went viral on social media and generated pushback. That must be how I got on Google’s radar.

Brody descends to butt in again. “Did you hear me? Google results are generated by an algorithm. It’s just about how many hits a site gets. That’s all.”

His hot pink polo shirt contrasts nicely with the gunmetal of his weapon. His belt, though, is brown. Christ. He could have bothered to match his belt with his weapon. I tell him to Google “mansplain,” but I do it in a sweet voice, so I have an out if he gets angry.

“I’ll knock the lights out of you,” he says. He holds up his fists and lets the gun fall across his belly like a guitar. The pixels simulate smoke shooting out of his ears.

Kelly turns to him. “It’s a compliment, hon. Mansplain is what men do as an act of generosity towards women because our brains are small.” Brody turns and climbs back up the stairs.

Kelly wants to escape. She tells me that, before she got sucked in, she had a client who sent her an email saying she was trapped in a pixel compactor, and could Kelly please get her out and sue the search engine. The client claimed that when two people are Googling at the same time and their search terms intersect, the engine can get tangled, generate energy, and suck you in like a black hole.

I point out that she and I were each searching for middle-aged women who were involved in the protests.

“And we must have hit return at the exact same time,” Kelly says.

I ask her what made her enter “middle-aged women” in the search bar.

“I wanted to see women who look like me,” she says.

“Me too, women who look—” And before I finish my sentence, I’m swooshed back to the safe side of my laptop.

Later, Kelly phones me in this world, where things are soft, shadowed, cold and hot. I ask her what happened to Brody. He’s still in there, and she calls his current home the “mancompactor.” She claims he loves it because he can watch Fox News through the sight of his gun.

Holly A. Stovall has published short fiction, personal essays, literary histories, literary criticism, and scholarly research. Her creative writing appears in Writers Resist, Litbreak Magazine, and is forthcoming in Belle Point Press’s Mid/South Anthology. She holds a PhD in Spanish literature, an MA in Women’s History, and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Northwestern University. She lives in rural Illinois with her spouse, teenage son, and standard poodle.

**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.

Letter to Aminu

By Ololade Akinlabi Ige

After Salawu Olajide

Dedicated to my country, Nigeria

What greets you when you get here?
Walls of broken spines? Fences of bleeding bruises?
Burnt roofs that open mouths? Windows with wounded hearts?
Your father was a victim of the last bomb explosion
and his grave grows mushroom flowers.
Your mother is an able handicap; on her cleavage are signatures of poverty.
Hauwa, your sister, was shot by Boko Haram.
That day, the clouds wept and the sky shrank.
Hakim, your brother, became a courageous coward.
He fled to Ibadan on a day the night was burnt to ashes.
That was the day we counted our dead and forgot numbers.

What greets you when you get here?
Your father’s house that stands on one leg?
Or your uncle in the wheelchair?
Maybe your friend with broken arms?
Or Amina, your girlfriend with a bleeding vagina?
Our village is a womb that harbours silence.
Children no longer cry aloud, instead they sob silently
like their fathers do when coffins are thrown into six feet.

What then can greet you when you get here?
Men of khaki marching on the hungry soil,
bullets of bandits diving in the space,
blood of innocent souls burbling like a fountain,
Almajiris holding their future in empty bowls,
or wails of a mother who just buried a son.
Maybe Mr. President, whose visit is for a mass burial.

Yet under an umbrella we still remain as one.
Mr. President said our war is technically defeated.
With one signed accord, we believe we shall see
to the end of the war that ate your sister and father.

Ololade Akinlabi Ige is a Nigerian poet. His works have featured in Muse for World Peace Anthology, 84 Delicious Bottles of Wine for Wole Soyinka, Word Rhymes and Rhythm (WRR) anthology, Sabr Literary Magazine, Wreath for a Wayfarer, Songs of Peace: The World’s Biggest Anthology of Poetry 2020, Dissonance Magazine (UK), Voice Journal (USA), Teach. Write. Journal (USA), dyst Literary Journal (Austrialia), Northern Otter Press Journal (Canada), Levitate Magazine (Chicago, USA), Harbor Review (USA), and 2020 Anthology (Canada) among others.

Photograph courtesy of RNW.org via a Creative Commons license.

**A note from Writers Resist:**

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

War Ghazal

By Linda Laderman

Again, we witness panicked people fleeing war.
You tell me, people don’t care, it’s Ukraine’s war.

Sitting in an Ann Arbor bistro, we order baked Turkish eggs,
& I mumble, even Turkey opposes this war.

One booth over, a woman applies siren red lipstick,
then gestures at the screen over the bar. A televised war.

Empty trains rumble down tracks outside the restaurant.
The chef rings a bell. Everyone cheers, detached from war.

At Costco, gas lines stretch into the street. A driver
hollers to the car behind him, price gouging, a gas war!

A man in army fatigues stands outside the corner CVS,
hawking Ukrainian flag pins. He shouts, no more war.

Down the block, neighbors discuss Ukraine’s desolation.
Isolated in a hospital basement, patients huddle. Pawns of war.

You switch on news of war-weary crowds cramming trains.
I shut it off. Suspended in silence, the distant din of war.

In an ordinary neighborhood, a mother, her children lie dead.
What more do we need to know about this fucking war?

Pleas for ammunition, boots on the ground, a no-fly zone.
We send sanctions & drones. Ukraine, it’s your war.

Babyn Yar, 33,771 Jews murdered by bullets in a Ukrainian ravine.
We agree Zelensky, never again! Still, fire fuels a madman’s war.

Linda Laderman grew up in Toledo, Ohio. She earned an undergraduate degree in journalism from the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Her news stories, features and poetry have appeared in media outlets, magazines and literary journals, most recently in 3rd Wednesday Quarterly of Literary and Visual Arts and The Scapegoat Review. She returned to school in the 1990s, graduating with a Master’s of Liberal Studies and a Juris Doctor degree from The University of Toledo. Linda currently lives in the Detroit area. For the last decade, she has volunteered as a docent at the Zekelman Holocaust Center, and recently gave her time as a writer and case screener for the Wayne County Detroit Conviction Integrity Unit.

Photograph by manhhai via a Creative Commons license.

**A note from Writers Resist:**

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

Seeking solace?

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Welcome to our March 2022 issue, with works by:

Victoria Barnes
Amelia Díaz Ettinger
Ellen Girardeau Kempler
Erica Goss
Debbie Hall
Dotty LeMieux
Frederick Livingston
K.L. Lord
Phyllis Wax

We hope you find solace therein—while envisioning peace for Ukraine.

Then, join us Friday 15 April 2022 for

Writers Resist Reads

a virtual reading and chat with contributors to the March issue of Writers Resist

5:00 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time

To receive the Zoom link, please RSVP to WritersResist@gmail.com.

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.

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Two Poems by Victoria Barnes

A Cosmic Dirty Story

—from the New York Times, 9 August 1945

From an open door in the sky,

the threshold of a new industrial art.

To the earth, an explosion of red:

the new and terrifying weapon.

In the morning newspaper, images arrive:

an imagination-sweeping experiment.

As we read the story, we learn—

The great bomb … harnesses the power of the universe to destroy the enemy by concussion, blast and fire.

With the fire, we consider our victory:

eminent scientists gathered, frankly fearful to witness the results of the invention, which might turn out to be either the salvation or the Frankenstein’s monster of the world.

In the glory of it all, the flash was pure—

an element of elation in the realization that we had perfected this devastating weapon.

Yet in our blindness an ocean apart, we see no blood.

What has been done … is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.

In reading more, we smell no cinders.

Practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death.

In listening for imagined voices, we hear no calls.

We are more prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely.

In turning away, we relish no victory.

The cruel sight resulting from the attack is so impressive that one cannot distinguish between men and women killed by the fire. The corpses were too numerous to be counted.

In knowing now, we reject our place:

What is this terrible new weapon, which the War Department also calls the ‘Cosmic Bomb’?

Coda:

In knowing now, we reject our place:

How will these righteous-thinking American people feel about the way their war leaders are perpetuating this crime against man and God?

Liberty Island

Give me your cliff
your cloud
your dreamy vision
of birds and fog
and flying

in the whir and whirl

of industry and asphalt
and commuters
in sooty rain—

of mothers and babies
and withered neglect
in malaise maligned—

with searing tears
I lift my lamp
but shut
the golden door.

Victoria Barnes has studied mythology, creative nonfiction, poetry, bookbinding, metaphoric thinking, and a bunch of other seemingly unrelated mishmash. She did not take math past high school, an accomplishment given her too many college degrees. She endeavors in taking photos and writing poetry. Currently she is writing a cycle of poems imagining Amelia Earhart’s thoughts on each airborne leg of her last flight and studying the skies in her travels, especially in the Southwest U.S.

Photo credit: Daniel Horacio Agostini via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist:

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