Issue 139: 16 March 2023

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 , […]

“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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

National Portrait Gallery

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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 […]

September Together

By Elizabeth Shack   Last September, we hiked the forest beside the fog-drenched sea. Followed a swift stream bridged with salmon spawning, returning from gray Pacific homes. Switchbacked beside a waterfall sparkling down steep granite. Emerged into sunlight with a view of lichen-painted rock and the blue-white ice that once sculpted this verdant valley. Is […]

A Woman of Good Manners

By Nikki Blakely   It is a universal truth that a man of good fortune must be in want of a wife, and Jayne set her sights on Edward, despite his reputation for being of a most disagreeable character. On their first date, they went to Possum Pond. Jayne had always been told the way […]

Scylla

By Bex Hainsworth   A nymph unburdened by beauty is a nightmare. My barnacle flesh scratches against stone as I curl up in my cave, full of octopus cunning; folding many limbs around myself, cruel, content. This was Circe’s gift: to make me a monster, a maneater. The distant roar of Charybdis rocks me to […]

Islands of No Nation

By Ada Ardére   We give them our children to fight in jungles and deserts, we give them our taxes to pave their roads, we give them our land to build their businesses, we give them our coasts to moor their battleships, we give them our waters to test nuclear weapons, and we have received […]

Reputation

TW: SA By Frances Koziar   He speaks of his reputation while I think of fates worse than death, his name, when I would gladly give up mine for a good night’s sleep, to see those nightmares shaped like ordinary men slain before their groping hands reach me; he speaks of having a life ruined, […]