Writing is an act of resistance
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How to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
By Maggie Downs Gather your ingredients. You’ll need peanut butter, jelly, the bread of your choice, and a clean, sharp knife. Spread peanut butter evenly onto one side of the bread using your knife. Acknowledge the fact that the winner of our constitutionally legitimate but antiquated electoral process is a person who threatens democracy…
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lavender:
By Lily Moody Pink or blue When our daughters are taught to hold their tongues and our sons are taught to hold their tears, when all we want to do is scream and sob. Pink or blue When dolls and toy trucks, bows and baseball gloves are used as barriers to separate us, when femininity…
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Human fatigue
By Eduardo Escalante 1. close into symbols The city looked full artery of Santiago choked with cars a tatted man was standing in front of a tree Affirmed to a symbol in this street there was no crosswalk his body jumped It seemed 3d drawing We can leave we can look the tattoo is the…
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Standing Rock, 2016
By Marydale Stewart I sent my heart, that figurative muscle, that metaphor, that emblem, to go in my stead to Standing Rock where my feet have never known the steady earth, that certain sky, the remembered places the wind has been, where I’ve never known another living being as my own, where the people came…
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Going to Ground
By Sarah Einstein Like a good citizen, I call my senators at least once a week these days, but their aides are brusque. They tell me that Alexander and Corker support the president’s education agenda/healthcare reform/immigration order or whatever I’m outraged about on a given day. In the first few weeks, they’d thank me…
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Clarion Reminder
By Laura Grace Weldon The powerful provoke the powerless to push against one another. Their power grows by keeping us in all kinds of prisons. Yet we are not powerless. Remember the black bear roaming Clarion County, Pennsylvania, its head trapped a month or more in a metal-ringed pail. Remember those who chased it for…
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White Privilege
By Keith Welch the U.S. Caucasian has a marvelous power invisible, noticed only by its absence subtle in action: the lack of a shadow following you through a 7-11 or utterly, terribly clear: the lack of 19 bullet holes piercing your body on the news, you may notice your senior photo instead of a…
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Hail and Farewell to Editors of Poetry
Writers Resist is delighted to welcome our new poetry editor, Ruth Nolan, MFA, University of California Riverside. Already a contributing writer, Ruth brings to the journal a deep understanding of the power of the written word. Ruth said of poetry’s role in the resistance, “Poetry is at heart a political entity, one that is both…
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Oral History of the New Colossus
By Lea Grover I come from a people of wandering, of desert paths swept clean of footprints by thousand year gusts of wind, of vanishing, of villages abandoned as not only my great-grandmothers but I carried what mattered across oceans and borders and the ticking of latitude and longitude beneath tired feet, soles hardened by…