Writing is an act of resistance
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A Friability Test
By Kimutai Allan You can try muzzling the press and stifling healthy discourse. They are actions, easy. It’s a different tale down in our hearts. You can’t break us. We aren’t as friable as your petty thoughts deem. Kimutai Allan is an emerging Kenyan writer. His works have been published previously by The Active…
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Reading Aloud in Kidjail
By Jill McDonough The boys in my local juvie want to work one on one, write stories, poems, mark up the stuff I give them. More than one kid at a time’s less fun: more fussing, more holding back to show how tough they are. When one of them writes on the other’s paper…
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The Notorious
By Alex Penland Do you remember Yad Vashem? How the path that leads you through the exhibit is chronological and single lined, each point presented on a hair pin turn of events: here is where a new legislation was passed, here is where some diplomat died, here is where the people thought oh, one…
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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
police shootings, institutionalized racism, Jericho Brown, Black Lives Matter, Poetry, #BLM, Geoffrey PhilpBy 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…