#BlackLivesMatter – Writers Resist

Playing Possum

By Phebe Jewell

Mama won’t let us leave the house, and MJ is furious.

After dinner we form a line at the kitchen sink, Mama on one end, up to her elbows in dishwater, MJ in the middle, rinsing each bowl and plate. I wait at the other end of the line, ready with a towel.

I’ve always been Mama’s favorite. I sit in the middle of the classroom and only speak when I’m called on. During parent-teacher conferences my teachers have nothing to say about me. Mama smiles at my neat homework, tells my teachers “Jackie’s my Mini-Me.”

MJ’s teachers complain about her asking too many questions and arguing with their answers. Whenever Mama and me watch America’s Got Talent we snuggle. “You’re my baby girl,” she says, smoothing loose hair from my forehead. She has no idea what goes on in my head.

MJ turns the faucet off. “Why can’t we go?”

Mama stops scrubbing, lifts her hands out of the water.

“How many times do I have to tell you,” she says in her you’re-on-my-last-nerve voice. “Don’t let anyone know your business. It’s not safe. Don’t let anyone know what you think. Or feel.”

She turns to face MJ, and continues, prodding her chest with one finger. “When you speak out of turn at school, on the bus, wherever, you’re playing with fire.”

MJ steps back, a wet spot dotting her tee shirt where Mama’s sharp nail poked her.

“But people are getting killed,” MJ whispers, like she’s asking a question.

“If nobody knows you’re there, they can’t get you.” Mama turns back to the sink, plunging her arms into the water.

MJ turns the water back on, rinses the silverware. She passes a handful of forks and knives to me, and I pretend to inspect the blade of a butter knife, raising an eyebrow. Our signal.

I dry the last pan and set it on the counter.

Mama presses my hand in hers. “You know what I mean, don’t you, Jackie? This is not the time to make waves.”

I nod because that’s what Mama wants. She’s sure I’ll go upstairs, wash my face and brush my teeth, say my prayers before slipping into bed.

Later, when the house is dark and still, and MJ whispers, “It’s time,” I know Mama won’t be waiting to catch me sneaking out. She’d never dream I’d stand with MJ outside the police station, raising my fist.

Phebe Jewell’s recent flash appears or is forthcoming in XRAY, Literary Heist, Ellipsis Zine, Bad Pony, Crack the Spine, and The Citron Review. A teacher at Seattle Central College, she also volunteers for the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a nonprofit providing college courses for women in prison. Read more of her work at PhebeJewellWrites.com.

Air Floyd: A Ritardando*

(AKA “It’s Gotta Be The Shoes…”)

By Hakim Bellamy

George Floyd.

The latest in a long
noose of names
to die in the street.

At the hands
and feet
of police.

Public asphyxiation
is nothing new,
but it has always drawn a crowd
even on Sundays down South.

However,
he still couldn’t get a witness,
just an autopsy,
“on the house.”

A hundred years later,
same result.

His last meal,
all asphalt
no air.

His last song,
the ritardando of his pulse.

The last thing he ever saw,
a montage of his 46 years on this planet,
feels just like a flash.

Including unequivocal evidence that when it plays,
it never starts at the beginning,
it always starts at the end

and plays backwards.

Why else would he cry for his mama
How else would we find him lifeless,
in a fetal position?

In these Black-ass streets,
wide berths built for a steady stream of hearses,
we have no choice but to keep it real,
because we aren’t afforded the privilege of rehearsals.

The stakes is high,
but for everyone else out here mistakes are fine.
And for the cops
mistakes are …

a fine.

It’s no place to die,
but if you drop to your knees.
Get on the ground.
Get in the ground.

Lay

face down, hands up,
chest to cement
and inhale,

you can still smell the wildest dreams
of little Black boys and their burnt rubber soles
begging Mom and Dad
for sneakers

that could fly.

And if you lie there long enough
you can still hear their laughter

too.

*Ritardando (or rit.) in music, a gradual decrease in tempo.

Before being tapped by Albuquerque Mayor Keller to serve as the Deputy Director of the Cultural Services Department, Hakim Bellamy was the Inaugural Poet Laureate for the City of Albuquerque (2012-2014). Bellamy is a W. K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network Fellow, a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, an Academy for the Love of Learning Leonard Bernstein Fellow, Western States Arts Alliance Launchpad Fellow, Santa Fe Arts Institute Food Justice Fellow, New Mexico Strategic Leadership Institute alum, and a Citizen University Civic Seminary Fellow. In 2012. he published his first collection of poetry, SWEAR (West End Press/University of New Mexico Press), and it landed him the Working Class Studies Tillie Olsen Award for Literature in 2012. With an M.A. in Communications from the University of New Mexico (UNM), Bellamy has held adjunct faculty positions at UNM and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Bellamy has shared his work in at least five countries and continues to use his art to change his communities.

Photo credit: Tiger500 via a Creative Commons license.

Say Their Names

Writers Resist is honored to share some of the many and diverse creative writings recently inspired by Black Lives Matter, systemic racism, police brutality, U.S. protests, and the gorgeous, global chorus demanding equity and equality for all. This issue includes works by Kitty Anarchy, Despy Boutris, Schyler Butler, Marcy Rae Henry, Dana Kinsey, Christa Miller, Aaron Sandberg, Sarah Sheppeck, Jennifer Shneiderman, and Rebecca Tolin.

We’re grateful to be able to illustrate the writings with images of protests, labor that often puts photojournalists and lay photographers in police crosshairs.

Please join us in celebrating all these works by sharing them wherever you feel safe doing so and—more important—when it isn’t comfortable.

Silence is not an option; resistance is transformative.

We’ll be releasing one piece daily on social media for the next ten days. Follow us to share the posts on Facebook @WritersResist, Instagram @WritersResist, and Twitter @WritersResist.

And subscribe at writersresist.com. It’s free, and words do create change.

With love and persistence,
K-B, Debbie, Sara, and Ying
Writers Resist
Publishing the resistance since 2016

Years that ask questions

By Marcy Rae Henry

Black like me said John Howard Griffin and the world listened

(Black like losing electricity)

Black like me said Rachel Dolezal and the world blistered

(Black like the plague)

Black lives matter (now) say my neighbors

(Black like squares on a checkerboard)

Black is beautiful said Bill Allen (maybe) and the world paused

(Black like hair before silver)

Doesn’t matter if you’re black (or white) said Michael

(Black like a birthmark)

And what did I mean by ‘black’? asked Coates

(Black like seeds)

I became black in America said Adichie

(Black like pepper)

Black Power is a cry of pain said MLK

(Black like blindness)

The Black Revolution is controlled only by God said Malcolm

(Black like Goth)

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide
welling and swelling I bear in the tide wrote Maya

(Black like ink)
(Black like mud)

Education is indoctrination if you’re white—subjugation if you’re black argued Baldwin

(Black like leopard spots)
(Black like the unlucky cat)
(Black like guns)

Animals weren’t made for humans any more than black people were made for white
(or women for men) claimed Alice Walker

(Black like pupils)
(Black like funerals)
(Black like devil’s hooves)
(Black like beaches)

Las caras lindas de mi gente negra son un desfile de melaza en flor sang Susana Baca

(Black like asphalt)
(Black like all colors blended together)
(Negro como mina de lápiz)
(Black like the absorption of all colors of the spectrum)
(Black like film noir)

Black, brown, beautiful—viviremos para siempre Afro-Latinos hasta la muerte lyricized Elizabeth Acevedo

(Black like eyeliner)
(Black like beans)
(Black like a cocktail dress)
(Negro como el opuesto de blanco)
(Black like the depths of Langston’s Africa)
(Black like a red-beaked swan)

Who would have thought, when they came to the fight
that they’d witness a launchin’ of a black satellite said Ali

(Black like charcoal)
(Black like black holes)
(Black like coal)
(Black like Christ)
(Black like Olbers’ Paradox)
(Black like the anoxic Euxine Sea)
(Black like the eight ball)

I am black because I come from the earth’s inside answers Lorde to the question she posed

Marcy Rae Henry is a Latina born and raised in Mexican-America/The Borderlands. She is a resister and an interdisciplinary artist with no social media accounts. Her writing and visual art have appeared in national and international publications and the former has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. Ms. M.R. Henry is working on a collection of poems and two novellas. She is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Fine Arts at Harold Washington College Chicago. Visit her website at marcyraehenry.com.

Each Day I Ask Nine Words

By Rebecca Tolin

Less than nine minutes is how long
it took to snuff
the life out of a man
a white officer with his knee
on the neck
of a black man in Minneapolis.
Necks are not meant for kneeling
mister officer.
Necks are meant for breathing
turning
linking head to the heart.
Before his lungs collapsed
like a balloon
deflated
George Floyd once
talked and danced and cooked
with his mother and brothers
washed clothes in the sink
dried them in the stove.
His cousin said when Big George
wrapped his arms around you
your problems vanished
for a while.
Nine days is how long
it took to be charged
with second-degree murder
for holding down
a man
as the last breath
slipped from his lips
as he begged for air
as he called for his mama
as he fell forever out of reach
of his five children
Gianna just six.
Nine words is how many
it takes to ask:
How may I make each day
a living reparation?

Rebecca Tolin is a writer and poet living in San Diego. She enjoys tree gazing, trail blazing, word playing, asking unanswerable questions and drifting into the silence that gives rise to it all. She previously worked as a broadcast journalist covering science and nature. Her essays and articles appear in places like Yoga Journal and Sierra Magazine. Rebecca’s poetry is featured in the anthology Song of Ourself: Voices in Unison and other journals including Perigee. You’ll find her, occasionally, on Facebook.

Yes, All

By Sarah Sheppeck

Car break-ins were frequent in the city. Insurance only covered the damage if I produced a police report, so when I left work to find another window smashed, I simply left for the precinct.

It was already dark. Trying to avoid traffic, I stayed on side roads and in residential neighborhoods. Two miles from the station, whoop. My arm hair straightened, as did my spine.

They never even approached my window.

Exit your vehicle, said the megaphone.

I just got pulled over, I texted my friend.

Are you OK??? she asked. I opened my door, certain she’d never receive an answer.

Stand on the sidewalk, said the megaphone. Place your hands on your head.

I did.

I wept, ugly and loud, and when two large men exited their vehicle to approach me, I prayed that the first bullet would hit my head so that I wouldn’t feel the rest.

Even though I sat in the passenger’s seat the officer looked at me first. Then he noticed my friend’s quivering lip, the smooth expanse of pale freckled skin extending from beneath her romper.

He asked her to approach his cruiser.

In the rearview, I watched him direct her into the passenger seat. She sat, leaving her door ajar. He signaled to her, and her eyes turned forward. I met her gaze in the rearview. She swallowed. She closed the door.

I watched for nearly ten minutes. He advanced as she receded.

She returned to her driver’s seat. He drove away, and she cried.

“The next time that happens, call Mommy. Just leave me on the line, so I can hear if …” My mother choked.

“I will,” I said.

I knew I was going to be pulled over.

I didn’t know there was a cop behind me, but I knew, the way you know that you’re going to be sick, or that the man who just sat next to you at the bar is bad news.

It was two a.m., my partner beside me as I drove. We were out of town, we’d missed turns, I was frustrated. I chose to ignore the NO U-TURN sign on the otherwise empty street, and the red and blue lights blinded me from behind.

My partner, a white man, said something calming.

The cop, a Black woman, knocked on his window.

“Where are you headed? Where are you coming from?” she asked him, while watching me.

Then she saw it, the cardboard carrier containing six empty bottles we’d drained the day prior, stupidly, so stupidly left on the passenger side floor mat. She retreated, returned with her reporting officer, also a white man. This time, they approached my window.

I wasn’t drunk, and neither was my partner, the white officer determined after six sobriety tests.

The bottles were a mistake, my partner explained. We’d meant to recycle them and hadn’t thought to move them to the backseat. The white officer nodded. The black officer fidgeted.

“It’s your call,” he said to her.

She looked at him. Looked at me. Wrote a citation for violating the state’s open carry law. Left.

In the motel, I dreamt of sirens.

Sarah Sheppeck is a graduate of U.C. Riverside’s Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Rochester and her Master’s in Secondary Education and Curriculum from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Born and raised in upstate New York, with stints in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, she now lives in the woods of northern Maine, where she pays the bills by ghostwriting for motivational speakers. Follow her on Twitter @EpicSheppeck.

Photo credit: Raffi Asdourian via a Creative Commons license.

Dear Captain

By Jennifer Shneiderman

after Walt Whitman

O Captain! my Captain!
our fearful trip has just begun.
Exit the door of no return –
grim vessel of horror,
the treasure chest,
black gold, first wealth and power –
America cannot go back.

But O heart! heart! heart!
the bleeding does not stop.
Black men struck down – life seeping,
fallen cold and dead.
How many ways are there
to sink a heart.

O Captain! my Captain!
rise up and see what has become of us.
The bugle is trilling,
soul of the country.
Bouquets, wreaths fly in the wind
ashes and flames
burned out buildings
broken storefronts
looted dreams.

Here father! dear father!
swaying masses call out for relief
from wretched rudderless elect.
Lips of justice pale –
a standstill, a dead fall.
The anchor sinks,
voyage done, heads bowed.
Exult no shores.
The bells are still

You are betrayed, my captain.
We mourn what could have been,
complicit in silence,
eyes averted.
Time to pay for the passage.

Jennifer Shneiderman is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and a writer living in Los Angeles. She writes poetry and short stories about health and mental health. Her work has been published in Indolent Book’s HIV Here and Now and her short story, “Housekeeping in the Time of COVID-19,” was in the most recent issue of The Rubbertop Review. Her poetry will be included in the anthology, Poetry in the Time of COVID-19, Variant Literature, and the Bright Flash Literary Review. She is the recipient of a Wingless Dreamer flash poetry prize. Currently, her teenage son is in quarantine and her emergency room doctor husband is on the front lines of the pandemic.

Photo by munshots on Unsplash.

oppression Olympics

By Kitty Anarchy

you can’t even
say a problem

without someone
having a better
story than yours

suddenly they’re
the ones
telling theirs

yours out
the door

it’s the
oppression
Olympics
out here

but those
doing the
oppressing

aren’t even
playing
with us
down here

they watching
us fight
over crumbs
from up
in the
hills

Kitty Anarchy is an anarchafeminist, chicana womyn poet and short story writer. She has a background in social work, having earned her MSW from California State University, Long Beach, and she listens to KPFK radio. She has 7 cats, her favorite being ChiChi and 2 dogs, named Nibbit and Chato. She is published in Chiron Review, Rabid Oak Journal, Los Angeles Review, and Ghost Town Literary Journal, as well as in anthologies through Arroyo Seco Press and Picture Show Press. Visit Kitty’s website at www.kittyanarchy.com.

Photo by Donovan Valdivia on Unsplash.

The Gospel According to Saint Bryan

By Dana Kinsey

There was in Georgia a humble young man, jovial and curious,
who came upon two others who knew the law and the prophets.
Confined and detained, this man had no recourse but to run.
Hunted, he must have cried out to implore neighbors for help,
and sought shelter from bullets he knew were inscribed for him.

Fortunately, there was a Good Samaritan traveling the same road,
one whose benevolence forced him to stop and end the plight of
the innocent Georgian, offer him the help denied by the other men.
Sunday school lessons flooded back and he knew what he must do.
The victim was not of his race or religion, but he loved this neighbor
as he loved himself, and so reached in his pocket to offer a phone.

Gently, fearlessly, without flinching or uttering even a gasp, he
put the camera in video mode, took care to turn it horizontally
and filmed the man’s unfortunate ordeal, a sign of true mercy.
This Jesus, reincarnate, knew what a selfless gift he provided,
footage for the young man to show his grandchildren someday.

Roddie held steady to get the best quality video, kept his reactions
stifled so as to not mar the 28 seconds with any jolting or shock.
In time, all could see that his footage revealed God’s truth while
the other two men walked away appearing blameless in the town.
He thought of panning the area to show the 11 shotgun pellets
dead on the sidewalk, but he was expected in Samaria by sunset.

Dana Kinsey holds a BA in English and an MA in Theater from Villanova University. She is a poet, actor, freelance writer, and teacher at Lancaster Catholic High School in Pennsylvania. Her poetry has been published online in the Yellow Chair Review, The Broadkill Review, and Spillwords. Her work also appears in Fledgling Rag and Silver Needle Press. Dana’s screenplay, WaterRise, was filmed in Manhattan by Sagesse Productions. Visit Dana’s website at www.wordsbyDK.com.

Photo credit: William “Roddie” Bryan mugshot courtesy of Glynn County Sheriff’s Office.

Response/Ability

By Schyler Butler

Share the photo of Keisha with tire marks cascading her back.
Remember the protest last night, the hungry eyes.
Ask the masses where were you.
Ask them taste blood in exchange for God.
After the ashes settle on the campus rooftops
and the downtown glass is swept,
pay for Speedway Marlboro’s.
Listen to birds chirp and avoid the eyes
of every child still young enough to grow.

Schyler Butler received her BA in English from the University of North Texas. A recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for FY 2020 and a lead poetry editor for Human/Kind Journal, her work appears and is forthcoming in Duende, Superstition Review, Obsidian, Heavy Feather Review’s #NoMorePresidents, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere, sometimes under the pseudonym “Iyana Sky.” She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash.

At Heaven’s Door

By Christa Miller

After ten days of scavenging around the houses in our subdivision, I know it’s unsustainable.

Zoe and I had started with the houses next door, then worked our way down the street, but we were walking farther and farther for less and less.

I decide to head for Myrtle Beach, but Zoe doesn’t want to go. She’s worried about running into more mobs. I tell her, “They’re mobs, not zombies,” but my words fall flat. The memories in her dark eyes reflect in my mind: the way they banged on our door, broke our windows, searched the house.

I haven’t been able to tell her why they came. I’ve never been an open book, and my stepdaughter is as much a stranger to me as I am to her. She was 12 when I met her, 13 when I married her mother. Zoe had been deep in the throes of puberty-driven issues, and I’m sure it doesn’t help that I’m white.

When I finally convinced her it was time to hit the road, I expected it all to start up again: the thrum of National Guard Chinooks, the bizarre scenes of mob violence, the screams and gunshots that made us barricade ourselves in our home, our prepper stash enough to sustain us for six weeks.

But the streets are eerily quiet now. The sounds are long gone, along with the people who made them. Did they all leave? Move with their mobs into other communities like schools of fish, flow into the Lowcountry like floodwater? Or did they all give up once the mob lost its meaning and they came to their senses, go inside their houses to starve themselves or take pills?

I don’t know which thought unsettles me more. But I’m glad I made the decision to go on foot, just a pair of backpackers. I don’t want to draw any more attention to us than we already have.

On the road, my memories are so strong that, as we search stores for food and clothes, I nearly hallucinate perky greeting girls and tired middle-aged clerks, asking if they can help me find something. I catch myself with my eye out for store detectives following Zoe, or well-to-do white women eyeballing her clothing choices at checkout like she doesn’t deserve the moisture-wicking sports gear or new pair of Nikes. That’s why, at a truck stop off the interstate, I don’t even notice the trucker drawing down on me until he screams something about this place being the domain he’s taken for himself. Blinking, my head still full of distracted thinking that the place should have bustled with crying children and cranky clerks and zoned-out drivers, I turn and face the black hole of his muzzle and think, This is why I left my guns behind. I’d almost welcome the bullet.

When the glass display case full of little crystal figurines crashes down on the trucker’s head, I don’t comprehend what’s happening right away. That big old burly white guy lies there screaming, a thousand tiny cuts from pink tinted glass all over his face and neck and eyes. Then there’s movement in my upper peripheral vision, and I turn my attention there.

It’s Zoe, of course. My stepdaughter has gone above and beyond what I deserve.

We grab up as many snacks as we can carry and hustle on our way. Zoe doesn’t exactly walk with me, but she doesn’t disappear either. She has this way of sort of eyeballing the space around her until she sees that I’m in it. Then she keeps going.

After the truck stop, there’s nothing but forest and farmland. By now, despite crazed white truckers, we’ve worked out that most everyone is gone. Disappeared, like the Rapture was a real thing, and we were the only sinners who didn’t get taken up. I don’t really think so, of course. Occasionally, holed up in a garage or shed, we’ve had to endure that sweet smell when it wafted on a breeze. Not often enough for suicide to account for all the disappearances, maybe more people died in the mob riots, but there’s no way to tell.

We manage to steal a truck from a farm and we drive just past Sangaree before it runs out of gas. It’s only been about an hour, and we’re a lot closer now to the coast, but the thought of walking makes my legs throb. Zoe, too. I can see it in her stiff limbs, the way she picks up her feet and puts them back down: gingerly, like she wishes the hard ground weren’t there.

We haven’t spoken since the truck stop. Time to give conversation a try. “We’re so close. All I want right now is to stick my feet in the surf.”

She shrugs, pushes her long box braids back away from her neck. “I’d settle for a place to stay and relax.”

“With a nice sun porch,” I try. “A hammock.” I chance a look at her face and catch the tail end of her eye roll.

We’re in a small community just off the highway. Zoe gestures at a little ranch. “No place matters if we don’t have food and water,” she says.

We have plenty, so much that I’m afraid any more will slow us down, but, whatever her reasons—probably a general disdain for my incompetence—Zoe seems to want the responsibility for scavenging.

The optics of a white cop letting a Black kid break into houses aren’t lost on me. After what happened to her mother, it feels like I’m setting her up for certain death. But arguing with her feels like an assault on her individuality, and so I watch her slip, cat-like, into the dark gap beneath the garage door.

Was Zoe into urban exploration or was it something she’d picked up from her video games? Jaye had never said anything about it. Jaye wasn’t a permissive mother, but she wasn’t strict, either. “Zoe’s like a river with a fast, deep undercurrent,” she told me once. “Damming it is only temporary, and you’d best have a way to relieve the pressure when it rains too hard for too long. Better to direct it. Set its path in the direction you want it to go, and hope it doesn’t overflow its banks.”

I could only wish I’d been raised that way. I might’ve gotten into less trouble. At the time I’d been excited that maybe Zoe and I had more in common than I realized. Now I think spit-and-polish discipline has been a part of my life for too long to be helpful to either one of us. All I know is, these urbex skills of hers, however she came by them, are exactly what she—what we—need to ensure our survival in this new world.

I come to a stop almost in front of the house, where I can see and hear anything that might go down, but I don’t go inside. That would be a good way to get myself hurt or killed if I were to turn a corner and surprise her, or anyone else who’s in there. Instead I wait. I keep my pack on my back and do a slow 360-degree turn, because I haven’t looked behind me in a while and I want to get my bearings.

As always, there’s nothing. A few high cirrus clouds tell me rain might be on its way, but that’s about it. There are no sounds, not the chatter of children playing nor the whir of lawn equipment. No footfalls or the squeak of a bicycle to tell us someone followed us. The air is flat and still, heavy with moisture and heat that won’t rise, and I suddenly have the irrational thought that we should be heading inland, away from the coast, because it’s hurricane season and what if? We’d never know until it hit us.

I shut it down. It would take us days to retrace our steps, and as bad as inland flooding has been in recent storms, we’d still have no guarantee of safety. I’d rather stay, maybe in a house built up on stilts, than risk fleeing.

Another five minutes and Zoe comes back out. She rolls her eyes again. “Why are you waiting for me?” she demands.

“Basic safety. Watching your back. Would you rather I went in there with you?”

She clicks her tongue and suddenly I know: Someday, perhaps sooner than I think, she’ll walk off without me, decide she’d rather just live on her own. I’ll wake up one morning, and she’ll be gone, or she’ll roll right out the back door of one of these houses and keep going, disappear for good.

I force myself to breathe, focus. Her hiking backpack doesn’t look any more stuffed than it did before. I resist the temptation to go in and do my own search, and instead I ask, “What’d you find in there? Anything good?”

She relaxes, just a little bit. “Nah. Those people took everything. Shelves were empty.” She hesitates, then meets my gaze. “Where are our photos?”

It takes me a few seconds to understand what she’s asking. The shame compounds tenfold when I realize I didn’t even think to bring any of the pictures Jaye printed from now-unreachable servers.

We halt in the middle of an intersection. Gas stations at opposite corners, a McDonald’s on one side, a Rite Aid on the other. All of them surrounded by weeds.

“How could you forget?” Zoe’s soft alto turns harsh, guttural. Her brown eyes meet mine, then slide away. Her mouth compresses into a thin line on her delicate face, and she twists a thin braid around her finger. “It’s not like we had no time. We spent weeks at home, waiting for the riots to blow over. Weeks. Plenty of time to go through the photos.”

What she’s saying is that those memories meant more to her than they did to me, and I’d never even stopped to consider that. I realize two things: one, I’d long ago reconciled with the idea that I might lose Jaye—you can’t both be cops and not recognize that—but I’d thought of Zoe as an extension of her. And two, I hadn’t thought—really thought—that we were truly leaving everything behind, but it pissed me off that Zoe blamed me when neither one of us had been able to think straight. I say the only thing I can think of to say: “If they were so important, why didn’t you go through them?”

She rocks back on her heels like I physically hit her. Then she takes off running.

Shit. Shitshitshit. The one thing Jaye would’ve entrusted to me, and I’ve fucked it up.

I stay in the same spot in that intersection for much longer than I tactically should. When Zoe doesn’t come back, I go looking for her.

What will I say when I find her? I don’t know. She probably won’t let me hug her. I’m so pissed off and frightened and ashamed that what I really want is for her to see me and follow me. To prove she didn’t just stick with me because she felt somehow compelled to.

I hear footsteps behind me, and my mind starts to play havoc. What if it isn’t Zoe, but some half-crazed resident, looking to loot me or worse?

The thought of being assaulted and left for dead out here in the street, under the baking Carolina sun, is what makes me finally spin around, hand at my hip where my gun used to be.

Zoe stops dead in her tracks.

She’s tied her braids into a ponytail, so it takes me three beats too long to recognize her. The first thing I notice is her expression: fearful, astonished, and, worst of all, betrayed. She eyeballs my hand until she’s sure I’m not really carrying. Then she seems to melt into the landscape.

I didn’t think the shame could get any worse, but it does. It burns my face along with the sun. I just made the worst possible assumption, not only about the only other living human being I’m aware of, but Jaye’s daughter, for fuck’s sake. And now I’ve chased her away, and the two of us are worse off for it. “I’m sorry,” I call out to the deserted street. My voice thin, weak.

She doesn’t respond.

I could end this all right now, one way or the other, if I could just tell her what happened to her mother.

She deserves that from me. They both do. I should have told her.

I take a deep breath, channel my most authoritative voice. “Zoe,” I call into the silent street. “Remember when we had to hide in the attic last month?”

No answer. But I wasn’t expecting one.

“I never thought I would ever have to do that,” I continue, “hide from people I considered friends, brothers even. But after what they did to your mother. … She tried to make them stop. They’d whipped themselves into a frenzy, thinking a group of unarmed civilians was looting a store, and she got in front of them. I couldn’t get to her in time. I promise you, Zoe, if I’d had any chance— In that moment, you were all I could think of. That moment … I’d been seeing for days, weeks, even months, who those people really were, but I couldn’t accept it until I saw what they did to their sister officer. Until I couldn’t say what they’d do to you. We were our own mob. The damage we did or were complicit in. So I deserted.”

Zoe sidles out from behind a parked car. I don’t give in to the relief. Not just yet.

Then she says dryly, “And you used to worry that video games were desensitizing me to violence.”

I have to let out a bark of laughter, because she’s right.

She doesn’t laugh with me, but her face softens. She hefts her pack on her back and without another word, starts to walk once more. East, of course.

I follow her.

Too goody-two-shoes for the rebels and too rebellious for the good girls and boys, Christa Miller writes fiction which, like herself, doesn’t quite fit in. For nearly 20 years, Christa has written in genres ranging from crime fiction to horror to children’s, but prefers to write—and read—blended-genre stories. Her affinity for the dark, psychological, and somewhat bizarre doesn’t stop her from volunteering at a local wildlife rescue, adventuring with her two sons in rivers, swamps, and marshes, or—when she’s not running her freelance business—relaxing with a book and a beverage in her hammock. Learn more at her website, christammiller.com.

Photo by Donovan Valdivia on Unsplash.

Cicadas in Protest, 2020

By Aaron Sandberg

they emerge—
suddenly and briefly in large numbers—
symbols of immortality—prominent eyes—

active during the day with some calling at dawn or dusk—
modes of locomotion—walking and flight—
take to the wing to travel distances—

the structure is buckled by muscular action—
removing dirt in the process—
sometimes cause damage—
blunt spikes—
drumlike—

yet to be studied carefully—
many await formal description—
common names—red eye—black prince—
trees may be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers—

cicadas are preyed on—
making them drop to the ground—
variety of strategies to evade predators—
long lifecycles may have developed as a response—

the cicada-hunter—
mounts and carries them—
pushing with its hind legs—
sometimes over a distance—
until they can be shoved down—

a loud cicada song—
especially in chorus—
distinct distress call—
asserted to repel predators—
calls to maintain personal space—
emitted when seized or panicked—

resonating chamber—
sing in scattered groups—
an exceptionally loud song—
may use different heights and timing of calling—
loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss—
the pitch is nearly constant—the sound is continuous—
they construct an exit tunnel to the surface and emerge—

they emerge, all at once—

Poet’s Note:

Audre Lorde said, “Revolution is not a one time event.” With the reemergence of the cicadas this season and the uprising protests, I saw a point of positive comparison—gathering in large numbers, being viciously preyed upon, making a unified chorus of sound. This is a found poem—all the phrases here are taken in some form or another from the Cicada Wikipedia entry.

Aaron Sandberg resides in Illinois where he teaches. His recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Asimov’s Science Fiction, English Journal, Yes Poetry, One Sentence Poems, Vita Brevis Press, Literary Yard, and elsewhere. You might find him on Instagram @aarondsandberg.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash.

This Morning, I Mistake the Sound of Thunder for Bombs

By Despy Boutris

for Brittny

which tells you something about the state
of this country. This morning, I open Instagram

and see Céline lying through its teeth.
I’d love to write about planting flowers

on my forearms, or my best friend’s collection
of wool coats, but the police pulled guns

on her husband standing in his own yard.
I want to love my country. I’d love to write

about the scent of honeysuckle,
but this city has gone up in flames. I learned

only yesterday that Charleston was the center
of the slave trade. A few miles from the port,

another white couple exchanges vows
at a plantation. I wish I could love my country.

Right now, I live a mile from where George Floyd
grew up, hear that Cartier and Dior

have boarded up their windows uptown.
That’s more than just a metaphor. I was twelve

when Oscar Grant was killed at the same BART station
where my mother debarks. She has blonde hair,

blue eyes, has never had to fear for her life.
At seventeen, in math class, someone said

I have major jungle fever, and I watched
as my friend stiffened, brown eyes unblinking.

I waited for her to say something
so I wouldn’t have to. I still think about that.

In college, every English professor but one
was white, and I’m from California,

which thinks itself superior. In college, I read
an Audre Lorde poem and my heart beat fast

as rubber bullets leaving the barrel,
which aren’t really rubber at all, I’ve learned,

and these are what the police keep firing
at the people I love. I want so badly to love

my country. Last July, I saw a man I knew
from college on Instagram: shirtless,

in a MAGA hat, the photo captioned, America
is fiyah! If that’s true, then let’s let it burn.

Despy Boutris’s work is published or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, American Literary Review, Southern Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, Palette Poetry, Raleigh Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she teaches at the University of Houston, works as Assistant Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of The West Review.

Photo by Donovan Valdivia on Unsplash.

Tallent Neal’s Hungry Belly

By Ron L. Dowell

You’re on Compton City Hall’s council chambers steps, a fist-sized Black Lives Matter button pinned conspicuously on your t-shirt, your belly distending and nearly blocking out Congresswoman Imelda Herrera and obscenely stretching Elizabeth Eckford’s 1957 photo that’s on your tee. Elizabeth’s lovely brown face is downcast, looking cautiously through dark sunglasses, clutching her books, wearing a white cotton piqué over her petticoat, in stylishly pressed hair curls, keeping ahead of Hazel Bryan and legions of other whites whose mouths seethe and follow her with venomous, nullifying words, their minds filled with imagined superiority on Eckford’s first day at Little Rock’s Central High School.

Your iPhone selfie tells the story.

Far right is Turner, teen mentor, researcher, prison guard. He exhibits a picture of young Emmett Till lying in his casket, body swollen, teeth missing, ear severed. At sixty-three, stomach tumors forced you to retire your dustpan and broom. Your gut burns like a fire whirl. Your abdomen knots and twists into closed fists and forces words up your throat. “Same old shit,” you say to diminutive Congresswoman Herrera’s wide eyes on this early spring evening. She smells of Chanel and, in full 2018 campaign mode, postures between you and Turner.

Years ago, you made yourself a promise to never allow you a belly like your daddy lugged around—one full of hog maws, potatoes, and greasy chicken. At seventy-five, he died from too much blood pressure and sugar, a supersized prostate.

Turner’s gut matches yours but for this shot he sucks it in and angles his Shoot the Police t-shirt toward the camera. You don’t because you can’t. You turn slightly toward Herrera.

“Tallent Neal and I will support you,” Turner says to her.

“Good luck,” you say. She heads inside.

“Man,” you say to Turner. “I never noticed how big my gut’s grown. I look six months pregnant.” You’d assumed based on four to five days a week gym time that you looked pretty svelte for a graybeard. No.

“Damn,” Turner says. “I thought my stomach was fat.”

When did your body change?

“Forget it. We have what we came for,” he says. “Can you upload it to Facebook?”

“I think I’ll up the cardio,” you say.

•

Burdened by protest signs and the heavy Killer Cops banner, you and Turner squeeze through crowds into the council chambers. Four-by-ten feet, the canvas standard is a stark optical showing killer police agencies, names and ages of people murdered in Los Angeles County since 2005. Not long ago, you’d nailed it up at the rear, next to the public entry doors in perfect view of council members from the dais. You considered that an act of free speech. The mayor considered it public property defacement. She called you a vandal, had sheriff deputies snatch down your banner, grip your upper arm, and escort you outside. Deputies said you tripped and fell on damp pavement. You said that you were shoved. They threw the banner your way and said, “Next time we’ll arrest you for trespassing.”

You’re back. Having, at nineteen, acquired a felony conviction from back in the day, you don’t really want to face another judge, but this is a campaign rally, not a council meeting, so officials aren’t present, no deputies visible. Whew! You’re lightheaded with an unexpected release of tension.

You and Turner hang the banner, stand on each end of it with signs. Yours reads, “Black Lives Matter—Stop Killing Us.” Turner’s says, “What if We Shoot Back—with cameras?”

The chamber overflows, eyes focusing on your banner, riveting to your signs. You switch the sign from hand to hand but still your arms tire. You set it down and lean on the stick like it’s a cane. That won’t work so you hoist it up and rest the stick in the folds of your belly, which seems to have grown over the past several minutes. You sigh. Like a tent pole, it fits within pudgy gut creases, holds fast, the fit, perfect. You wave your hands around, move your feet, do old school dances, the Jerk, the Swim, then you Twerk. You enjoy communal energy and shout, “Black Lives Matter.” Turner follows, “Shoot the police.”

In front of the dais, Congresswoman Herrera looks startled by your display. Into the microphone she says, “It’s true that black lives do matter and there are far too many black and brown men killed by police.” Still, she’s a politician and modifies the subject. “That’s why I advocate a ban on assault weapons—I’ll eliminate bump stocks—we’ll put metal detectors in all schools, require lockdown drills.”

The audience is silent until someone shouts. “Hell, yeah!”

A sheriff’s deputy peeks in. Chest tight, you breathe faster. Your belly, acting on its own, bounces the sign up and down, waves it side to side, forcing words from your gut, despite your resistance, up to and through your esophagus, to your mouth, “Off the pigs,” you shout.

•

Two sleepless days later, your belly gurgles and protrudes from underneath your navy blue county jail shirt. Court’s spilling over with defendants at your preliminary hearing. Their supporters and victims clamor for seats. Turner’s waving his ‘Free Tallent Neal’ sign.

Pasty-faced Judge Hardass is on the bench, smiling smugly and broadly like a lion about to pounce on an antelope. His eyeballs linger on your belly, as if he knows something that you don’t, signaling that maybe he’s already decided your fate, finally asking after a long, uncomfortable moment, “How do you plead?”

You turn to your portly public defender who, in bright red bowtie, mouths, guilty. He’d promised the plea deal would get you thirty days jail time plus probation. That’s easy for him say. He doesn’t get strip searched or have to walk with his back to walls to avoid shanks or hard dick attacks. The pit of your ever-expanding gut feels empty. You mumble “Fuck you” to him.

Hardass says, “Speak up, Mr. Neal.”

The DA says to the judge, “He has priors, sir.”

The crowd hushes when the bailiff eases over, clutching the Taser on her equipment belt.

The public defender whispers, “Guilty—say guilty. Unless you raise bail, you’ll stay in jail until trial.”

Mouth dry, you glance at the clock on the wood-paneled wall to the judge’s left. When you turn back, your chest opens. Your lower esophageal sphincter snatches the public defender’s neck and forces him into your stomach, where he’s attacked by enzymes that especially like fatty foods. “Say guilty,” he says again before he dissolves into chyme. The bailiff reaches to pull him out, but is also swallowed by your burgeoning belly. Gut flora breaks them down and digests them both. Your liver and pancreas send juices to help push them into your large intestine as shit.

The DA’s eyes widen, Hardass smashes his gavel, “Order,” he says. “Order!”

Even if you’re in jail, who’s going to mess with someone with a hungry belly?

You say, “Scuse me, your honor—Black Lives Matter—and I. Ain’t. Guilty.”

Ron L. Dowell holds two master’s degrees from California State University Long Beach. In June 2017, he received the UCLA Certificate in Fiction Writing. His short stories have appeared in Oyster Rivers Pages and Stories Through The Ages Baby Boomers Plus 2018. He is a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow.

Photo credit: Jorene Rene via a Creative Commons license.

Black Lives Matter

By Joel Fisher

The black pain explodes
Where he dropped
Disintegrating to flowers

And in that moment
Shot and shot and shown
The heavy-gauged

Is a mourning of
Its blue-grey trigger
The reality that

On this pavement
Stained just as red
We hold, self-evident

Black Lives Matter

Joel Fisher is currently an undergraduate reading Creative Writing at Canterbury Christ Church University.

Photo credit: “Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge” by Jonathan Bachman for Reuters.

America

By Asante Keron Hamid

Picking and choosing what to
keep and what to crop.

Pick of the litter. Pick
of the cotton. No
Afro picks. No
cornrows.

Three-fifths out of the photograph
and one stanza too censored for an
epitaph and one bullet too deceased
for the polygraph to detect our truth.

Blue in black water and white up
brown nostril and white on black
chalkboard and nappy hair knotted
into spiritual song. Strum along:

We will not die, USA.
P.S.A: We can’t die.
Shackles, whips, chains,
tar and feather, names —
We won’t die, USA.

Asante Keron Hamid is a poet / writer born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. His work can be found in The Ibis Head Review, Dissident Voice, and Tuck Magazine among other publications, and he can be found on Instagram @asante.avenida.

Photo credit: USDA NRCS Texas via a Creative Commons license.

Black Lives Matter? Will Our Stories Save Us?

By Amy Abugo Ongiri

Asa Sullivan didn’t want to go back to jail and he shouldn’t have had to. But, on June 6, 2006, neighbors in a rapidly gentrifying area of San Francisco called the police to report what they believed to be suspicious behavior.

Though they did not have a search warrant, police entered an apartment that Sullivan and a friend were cleaning for another friend. Asa Sullivan’s friend quickly surrendered to the police but Sullivan—who had recently been released from jail and was on probation for selling pot—chose to hide rather than risk one more interaction with the San Francisco Police Department.

Unarmed and, by all accounts, terrified, Sullivan became trapped in that attic when police entered through the only exit. Although Sullivan was unarmed, police claim an “exchange” of gunfire caused them to shoot him five times in the face and sixteen times in total, killing him instantly. Police labeled it “a standoff,” but the entire event took less than fifteen minutes to unfold.

Asa Sullivan was a typical son of a San Francisco that was rapidly disappearing. Thanks largely to the technology boom of the 1990s, San Francisco had become the most expensive city in the world in the twenty-five years since Sullivan was born there. Working class and mixed-race, Asa did not fit the profile of what some newly-arrived residents thought their neighbors should look like. Both Asa and his friend had permission to be in the apartment, but, in a rapidly gentrifying San Francisco, who had the right to be where and when often became a police matter.

Asa’s brother, Khalil Sullivan, tells the story in a piece he wrote for the San Francisco Bay View.

I went into that attic myself, just as he had that night, and climbed to the area where he was last alive. I saw my brother’s blood covering the floor and walls. There were holes from bullets everywhere, in the rafters and the walls. … A big hole was in the attic floor over the bedroom, where they must have pulled him down.

I couldn’t help but cry while I was in that place, trying to put myself in his place to find out what happened.

After his murder, Sullivan’s surviving family members began what would turn out to be a protracted and painful attempt to get explanation and retribution for their loss through the court system. The case, which seemed to be a battle of competing narratives, eventually made it so far that an appeal from the city to dismiss the case was turned down by the United States Supreme Court. It raised the question: Can our information really save us? Can we ever tell our story in such a way that someone will hear it differently this time?

Khalil Sullivan’s account of his brother’s murder continues in the tradition of what literary historians call “slave narratives.” Black abolitionists not only organized against slavery, they wrote about it. They took written action to save their lives and the lives of their people. Henry Louis Gates and Charles T. Davis wrote one of the first academic studies of the literature created by African Americans during slavery. The Slave’s Narrative explores the fact that people of African descent in Europe and the Americas created a larger body of written evidence of their enslavement than any other people in human history. Slave narratives existed, according to Davis, “for the slave to write himself into the human community through the action of first-person narration.”

Like African-American abolitionists Frederick Douglas and Harriet Jacobs, and their Afro-British counterparts, Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince, Khalil Sullivan was writing about despair to literally save his life and the lives of those like him who are trapped in a system that otherwise refused to hear their story.

These abolitionists’ slave narratives were so popular in their lifetimes that they helped turn international opinion against slavery. Mary Prince’s autobiography, published in 1831, sold out three complete runs in its first year alone and Equiano’s autobiography, first published in 1789, has never gone out of print. Equiano was a founding member of the Sons of Africa, an influential British abolitionist group made up of the formerly enslaved, whose activism to outlaw slavery in the UK helped to trigger the end of slavery worldwide. A fundamental part of their activism was to write of their experiences as slaves and what that experience had cost them personally. But their larger concern was with the welfare of those who had not managed to make it out of slavery. When Louis Asa-Asa concluded the story of his enslavement in 1831 he wrote: “I have no friend belonging to me, but God, who will take care of me. I am well off myself, for I am well taken care of, and have good bed and good clothes; but I wish my own people to be as comfortable.” Frederick Douglass argued in 1855 that slave narratives were fundamentally necessary because those who were not enslaved “cannot see things in the same light with the slave, because he does not, and cannot, look from the same point from which the slave does.”

This strategy worked for Douglass, but can it work for Khalil Sullivan or his mother Kathleen Espinosa? They have both written persuasively about Asa Sullivan’s death and their family’s ordeal seeking justice through the courts. The family recently engaged in attempts to raise the $10,000 necessary to get transcriptions in order to prepare for an appeal against the last court verdict that ruled Asa Sullivan had “committed suicide by cop,” as the police department alleged. The family claims that inconsistencies found in the transcriptions will prove otherwise. The fundraiser failed to raise the necessary amount of money to appeal the case.

President Obama responded to the crisis in Ferguson, initiated by the police shooting of unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, with calls for national programs to arm more than 50,000 police officers with body cameras that would ostensibly “tell the truth” about policing and thus create accountability. Images of Eric Garner’s killing at the hands of the police, including his poignant pleas to be allowed to breathe created two narratives: one in the court of public opinion that helped give rise to the #Blacklivesmatter campaign and one in the US courts that said he had, in fact, not been murdered. Despite what the courts may tell us, more evidence doesn’t necessarily mean that these narratives will ever come closer together. Nevertheless, the Sullivan family continues to collect evidence and continues to tell their story in the hopes that somewhere someone will listen.

Amy Abugo Ongiri is Associate Professor and the Jill Beck Director of Film Studies at Lawrence University. Her book Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic, explores the cultural politics of the Black Power movement, particularly the Black Arts movement search to define a “Black Aesthetic.” Her work has appeared in Glitterwolf, Black Girl Dangerous, Black Lesbian Love Lab, Mutha Magazine and The Rad Families Anthology.

Photo credit: DFBM via a Creative Commons license.