Writing is an act of resistance
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Toads and Maidens
By Carol Casey Don’t assume, because some creature rests in your palm, that it is safe. It knows it’s not. A toad, dry, rough, bumpy texture like braille—read the message: I’m better free. My biochemical language is telling you something vital in the only way I have: I want to be free. I can…
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America likes to ask
By Emily Knapp Are you like me? or not like me? Are you normal? or not normal? Are you human? or not human? Are you a boy? or a girl? Are you a woman? or a man? America likes to say: We are right. You are wrong. We are normal. You are not. Fit…
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Gravity Ungrateful
By Mark Blickley Yes, I am dressed in mourning. Dark clothes for a dark time. Yet I yearn to escape pandemic imprisonment with the germ of an idea that will allow me to soar above my confinement in an airborne threat against complacency and boredom as I reach up to a blue heaven that…
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The everyday
Poetry, COVID-19, social distancing, pandemic, Ronna Magy, sequester, physical distance, wear a maskBy Ronna Magy Here, another day, another morning, another hour, another moment. Mantle clock refusing to turn even half round the dial. She is, he is, they are, the country is, waiting. For TV anchors, doctors, government officials to discuss, divulge, to declare in words, phrases, sentences, in passages clearly anchored to the land,…
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tell me you’re open
By A. Martine Editor’s warning: sexual violence i wake from the dream with gashes in my chest snakes turning warm on my blood half-interred in the wounds while i go maybe it was me surely it was me, surely it was me athena would have torn them from me and slung them at my…
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And They Lived Happily Ever After
By Myna Chang Myna Chang writes flash fiction and short stories. Recent work has been featured in Flash Flood Journal, Atlas & Alice, Reflex Fiction, Writers Resist, and Daily Science Fiction. Anthologies featuring her stories include the Grace & Gravity collection Furious Gravity IX; and the forthcoming This is What America Looks Like anthology…
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Refugees Displaced in Foil
By Uzomah Ugwu The guards did not even give us numbers or sound the vowels in our broken names that were whole before we arrived at this destination that keeps us moving in grief. She asked what I wanted to eat like we weren’t going to die here at any minute, any hour, borrowed moments we…
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Trump Tower
By Lao Rubert She thought life in the castle would be great, high up in the palace where Anne Boleyn had lived, but had forgotten to read her history, was busy with reality TV and those tasks were the business of her personal Cromwell, the minister who neglected to inform her of the bruised…
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An Accounting
By Dianne Wright “What is poetry which does not save nations or people” – Czeslaw Milosz of the knowns: 25 years, the age of Ahmaud Arbery, gunned down by 2 white men. 1 white man filmed the assault. 2 prosecutors recused themselves. 1 recused prosecutor recommended no charges. 0 charges brought against the shooters…