Issue 141: September 2023

Welcome to Writers Resist, the September 2023 Issue

As Mercedes Lawry writes in the closing poem of this issue, “This Time, Ukraine,” how do we watch from afar? How do we watch the countless ravages and failures that populate mass media, our devices, even over-the-fence gossips? The impulse to look away is strong, but the need to maintain the focus—long enough, at least, […]

Two Poems by Nancy Squires

As the Waters Rise   O God, look down On all our drowned. Hear us, we beg— We’re on our knees. Sorry, so sorry About the trees, The polar bears, the birds, The bees; the icebergs Gone, the thirsty lawns, Plastic gyres, redwood Pyres and all the many, many cars. The eclipsed stars We never […]

Crying in Texas

By M.R. Mandell        after “Kissing” by Dorianne Laux            Crying as they hope for blood, crying as they flush the strips, crying as they hide their bumps. They are crying in bathroom stalls, behind Sugarland’s Kroger store. They are crying on Houston corners, outside the boarded-up laundromat. They are crying in each other’s arms, […]

Amendments

By Amy Cook   We hadn’t had a proper winter, but spring arrived anyway, confoundingly on time. Whatever you might have read about autumn in New York, the first morning the rows of tulips open on Park Avenue, or when the purple hyacinth spirals up through a neighborhood garden, or that cloudless April morning when […]

Montana

By Jeremy Nathan Marks For Zooey Zephyr   The big sky fifty-mile vistas where the Greasy Grass runs willowed valleys sweeping memory from the water to the sky an arrow long ago fired but whose arc is heard surely this land can contain one woman who says of our laws that while we pray to […]

The first day of cherry season,

By Emily Hockaday   the sky becomes apocalyptic. The air is wool in my throat. I wear a mask to pick my daughter up from school. The fruit vendors sit next to their colorful carts like the world isn’t ending, and I suppose it isn’t for now or it is just very slowly. And what […]

The Lure of Socks on Warm Feet

By Amelia Díaz Ettinger Never forget, September 20, 2017 and Maria   In my La-Z-Boy I sit, a Puerto Rican queen, feet-up admiring my knitted socks. I made these socks by knit and purl. 5,746 miles away from you it is easy to say, I worship. —And oh! How I preach this veneration, the warmth […]

Skull Fries

By Janis Butler Holm   Artist Statement: Fast food, a multi-billion-dollar industry, is slowly killing Americans and others. French fries and what they accompany are not harmless. Janis Butler Holm served as Associate Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal, and currently works as a writer and editor in sunny Los Angeles. Her prose, poems, […]

A Sunday in October

By Ariel M. Goldenthal   The day after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, I lied to my second-grade students: You are safe at Hebrew school. You will love learning the Aleph-Bet this year. Yes, you can open the windows and feel the early fall air ripple through the gaps between your outstretched fingers. You […]

Ho’oponopono

By Kelsey D. Mahaffey “In the book of the earth, it is written: nothing can die.”  – Mary Oliver   The morning after it happens again—weary with all the thoughtless use of prayer, I return to the Native path— for solace, for remembrance, for release— But grief is a heavy hold. Last night, I lay […]

It’s Complicated

By Mark Williams   I’m scrolling through my Facebook feed—sunsets, cats, lost dogs, cats—when I see a post from a friend I’ve known for thirty-plus years. Someone like someone you know, I bet. Your someone might roof Habitat homes, deliver meals to shut-in’s, conduct sing-a-longs at elder cares, teach kids to read. Without divulging my […]

The Mind-Plough

By Christina Hennemann   We rest on this earth where they once ploughed, the sweat and laughs formed freckles under the sun and soil sloppy on shoelaces; my mother stumbled over a rock, stitches on cheek, her needle and thread that sewed my socks, my curtains, shade from the blazing truth out there, we’re invading […]

Campers Rarely Drown at the YMCA

By Janna Miller   At camp, Julie told me I had to let her scratch my arms until they bled to be friends, and Julie told me to get lost in the woods or she wouldn’t talk to me, and Julie told me to do something I forget what, but I signed up for a […]

This Time, Ukraine

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