gender roles – Writers Resist

The Mind-Plough

By Christina Hennemann

We rest on this earth where they
once ploughed, the sweat and laughs

formed freckles under the sun
and soil sloppy on shoelaces;

my mother stumbled over a rock,
stitches on cheek, her needle

and thread that sewed my socks,
my curtains, shade from the blazing

truth out there, we’re invading
our ancestors’ graves, more than

we can grasp, and is there life
on Mars or a pink unicorn moon?

Board the spaceship you lot, here’s
nothing left for you, leave us alone;

we cling to our possessions,
the meat and the litter, are you

even qualified, or have you fled
the war, well then I feel for you,

but I’m trying to get a mortgage
and my secret subtenants shower

way too long, the bills, my guilt
and my mother, she needs to heal

from what he did to her and the fall,
did you know that women suffer

three times more than men from
multiple sclerosis? It’s the stress,

the male gaze and female smile,
oh dear, I didn’t mean to, come

back here, my arms are open,
together we’ll handle this—

let’s plant those seeds in the earth.

Christina Hennemann is a poet and prose writer based in Ireland. Her debut poetry pamphlet was published by Sunday Mornings at the River in 2022. She won the Luain Press Poetry Competition and was shortlisted in the Anthology Poetry Award and longlisted in the National Poetry Competition. Her work appears in Skylight 47, fifth wheel, Livina, Ink Sweat & Tears, Moria, National Poetry Month Canada, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a full-length poetry collection. Visit her website at www.christinahennemann.com.

Photo credit: Miika Laaksonen on Unsplash.

A note from Writers Resist

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Vacuum

By Guyon Prince

Artist’s Statement: This collage takes a smiling, vacuuming lady from a 1950s LIFE Magazine advertisement and recontextualizes her. As we know, in the 50s it was largely (and incorrectly) assumed that most women were happy to stay home and tend the house and kids every day, while men went out into the world. But in the new context the lady is now a superhero of sorts, vacuuming up ethical toxicity in the setting of our time—social media. However, I like to believe that her smile in the new context is sincere.

Guyon Prince, raised on the cotton farms of the West Texas Plains with Choctaw blood flowing through his veins, spent his formative years hunting arrowheads and carving makeshift arrows out of roofing shingles with his stilt-walking grandfather, his namesake. Eventually, the Texas winds carried him to the desert storms of Iraq as Sergeant Prince, leading troops in combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom and subsequent campaigns. Upon honorable discharge and restless with patriotism and disillusionment, Guyon enrolled in West Texas A&M University under the G.I. Bill, studying under Dr. Bonney MacDonald and Dr. Monica Hart, scholars of American and British literature, respectively. Renewed by Whitman’s verse and Emerson’s prose, Guyon obtained his teaching certifications in English and Fine Art. He currently commutes 30 miles a day to teach senior English to at-risk students. He lives with his partner, Sarah, their two children, and various domesticated mammals in Canyon, Texas.

Note from Writers Resist: If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Passing On Fire

By Joyce Frohn

My grandmother called herself a “tomboy.”
She bragged that she could chop wood and bale hay as fast
as the men.
And then they sat down and read the paper while she baked
fine biscuits and pie.
She loved hunting, motorcycles and gardening.
She raised four children in a boxcar,
teaching the boys to cook and the girls to love learning.
and that dairy farm sent four children to college.

Her daughters called themselves “new women” and “liberated.”
They marched in protests, fought discrimination on the job and
balanced motherhood and jobs.
They aimed for medical school and seminary.
They fought for their children,
you win some, you lose some.

I call myself a “feminist.”
College was assumed.
I love poetry, slime molds and frog cells.
I signed petitions as soon as I could write.
Some days old battles stay on and
sometimes new problems arise.

We’ve fought for so long.
What will my daughter call herself?
Will she be the one to say “woman”?
What battles will she fight?
Her great grandmother holds her small soft hand
in a stiff callused one and passes on the fire.

Joyce Frohn has been published in Nothing Ever Happens in Fox Hollow, Strange Stories, and Page & Spine, among other places. She is married with a teen-aged daughter. She also shares a house with two cats, a lizard and too many dust bunnies.

Post-Election Meltdown

By Marcella Remund

I am 60 years old. In my lifetime,

my mother’s lifetime, and all the
lifetimes that came before,
no woman has been president.

Don’t tell me to get over it

I have TRAINED blonde footballers
for jobs I couldn’t get without a penis,
jobs that paid ten times my single-mom
salary. After 40 years, I still must work

harder, longer, sweeter to make less.
I have been the “chick in the band.”

I am afraid to go out alone at night.
To walk alone, eat alone, travel alone.
I have been targeted as a child, nine
months’ pregnant, wrinkled and old.
Pedophiles picked me out at 7, at 13.

Don’t tell me to let it go.

I have worked since I was 14.
So has my mother, who worked
two and sometimes three jobs
until she was 70, so had my
grandmother, both of them always,
always, still expected to keep a clean
house, put dinner on the table, pay
bills, keep four kids quiet.

Don’t tell me to move on.

I have daughters, daughters-in-law,
granddaughters, nieces, girl cousins,
sisters-in-law. Their world will go on
just like before, unequal, unsafe, unjust,
until those men are gone—you know
who they are—and worse:

they will inherit a tanking economy
for all but billionaires, greed and profit
our national anthem, international
isolation in our buffoonery, and worse:

open, ignored, sanctioned hatred
and humiliation aimed at my non-male,
non-white, non-Christian, non-straight,
othered friends & family (and yours,
because you have them too).
The list of damages goes on and on.

Don’t tell me we have other work to do.

I have earned this anger.

DO YOU HEAR ME?

Don’t tell me not to feel this grief,
this disbelief, this loss of faith.
I will open my heart and my home
to those who are terrified, paralyzed,
hopeless. And I will move on,
get over it, let it go when I’m
goddam ready. Until that moment,
I will keep screaming

NO.

Marcella Remund is a native of Omaha, Nebraska, and a South Dakota transplant, where she teaches English at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals. Her chapbook, The Sea is My Ugly Twin, was published in 2018 by Finishing Line Press, and her first full-length collection, The Book of Crooked Prayer, is forthcoming from Finishing Line in 2020.

Photo credit: The sculpture, “Innovation,” is by artist Badral Bold, made with horse tail. It is photographed by Frank Lindecke via a Creative Commons license.

I Do Not Wait

By Trish Hopkinson

—for Walt Whitman

nor am I dismissed.
I set myself apart, do not tremble
beneath terms—cold

manly, butch, ball-breaker
bitch—do not determine my worth
by whom I am kept.

I ratchet skyward
take my place at the sun’s table
lifted by turquoise bone & bladed wings.

My scarab shell snubs boot heels
scurries and flutters solo
& yes, I possess myself.

I will not be held in a fist
pinned or stuffed in a case
pierced beneath glass.

I seat you in a room waiting
nude, simple & flaccid, unable
to siphon one more drop of sap.

My body is not yours to be dammed
instead, it releases grace in white waves
& demands nothing of anyone

but myself. I penetrate no one.
I illuminate the paths
of the unwaiting.

Trish Hopkinson is a poet, blogger, and advocate for the literary arts. You can find her online at SelfishPoet.com and provisionally in Utah, where she runs the regional poetry group Rock Canyon Poets and folds poems to fill Poemball machines for Provo Poetry. Her poetry has been published in several lit mags and journals, including Tinderbox, Glass Poetry Press, and The Penn Review; her third chapbook Footnote was published by Lithic Press in 2017, and her most recent e-chapbook Almost Famous was published by Yavanika Press in 2019. Hopkinson will happily answer to labels such as atheist, feminist, and empty nester; and enjoys traveling, live music, and craft beer.

Photo by Ines Álvarez Fdez on Unsplash.