Writing is an act of resistance
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Contingency Plans
post-election chaos, Sara Marchant, racism, Essay, Presidential Election, family separation, concentration camps at the borderBy Sara Marchant My husband recently retired. His anxiety had increased over the last four years (whose hasn’t, right?) and a few months ago he was having a bad day at work, when he abruptly stood up, announced, “I retire,” and walked out the door. It’s been an adjustment. At first, he didn’t know…
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Target Practice
institutionalized racism, Jericho Brown, Black Lives Matter, Poetry, #BLM, Geoffrey Philp, police shootingsBy Geoffrey Philp After Jericho Brown I ride around this city feeling as if I’m always a target, like the one at a gun range where cops used mug shots of African-American men to improve the shots of their snipers—photos of black men who weren’t dead, but whose images would be useful to kill…
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I Manage My Dread of the Election by Reading About the Eradication of Murder Hornets
By Debbie Hall In November we inched closer to the ledge over which one only falls once. —Mary Jo Bang One definition of dread (noun): great fear in view of impending evil. As a verb, it can mean to be in shrinking apprehension of. Derived terms include: dreadable, dreadly, and dreadworthy, as in: the…
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Sing the Songs of Our Youth
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt 24 October 2020 Uncle Jack died this morning. The stroke, the collapse, the surprise mass on his brain? Whichever or all, at least he went faster than Aunt Peggy and Mother. Not as fast as Father—the gift of a heart attack. The comparison? I don’t know, perhaps it’s a futile attempt to…
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These Poems Don’t Come Out Right
By Bunkong Tuon The virus breathes like fire over city streets and farmland, across oceans and mountains, over YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. The president suggests injecting the body with disinfectant to kill it. Maybe he could go first; it’s his idea after all. I’ve become a hack, ranting as if the world will heed…
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Voting in the Time of Climate Change
By Ying Wu The tide swallows most of the beach these days. Sunbathers take refuge in the reeds. And children wade in the new lagoons that stretch across the soft, loose sand. Our poles are melting. The bay spills over the sidewalk sometimes and breaches the steps of private homes. Today, in Texas, voters…
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Closet Rules
By Avra Margariti The first rule of sex doll club is, you get used to getting used. The second rule is, you will be forgotten by your human before your super-realistic, horsehair-eyelash, colored-glass eyes can blink. And blink we did. Here in the storage closet: slumped, folded, no longer expected to perform. The darkness…
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Mother’s Letter to Her Best Friend
By Penny Perry June 5, 1942 Dear Isabel, I drove my sister to the doctor’s in Los Angeles. It all happened so quickly. I promised to bring her a chocolate phosphate when it was over. She joked with the nurses. Told them if she puked from ether she would buy each of them a pair…
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Your vote is your voice. Su voto es su voz.
Be loud—vote! We are often told that our votes don’t matter. But if our votes held no power, no one would try to silence us. That’s why we partnered with artists and MoveOn to create “Your Vote is Power,” an art-centered initiative to inspire young people and people of color to register and vote in November. We…