George Floyd – Writers Resist

The Hold

By Pat Andrus

For Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, George Floyd, seven-year-old Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones, Eric Garner, Dante Parker, Atatiana Jefferson, ninety-two-year-old Kathryn Johnston . . .

A broken baton
a dead rat
5 jailers with guns.
How the life loses its state
of pure being.
How a bone breaks
and one rose falls.

I live in my own isolation
chosen, without blood
smeared on my dreams.
And the color of weak
is a white picket fence,
a story painted with
craven words
and a rule
of division and
unequal equations.
Can the body
find its healing laws?
Can a language
bandage the sores
of a society’s broken moons?

The colors of red
and brown
and yellow
make possible for mended wounds
if the dam finally breaks
and washers clean
the bottoms of
twisted stories and
fallen guns,
of cracked memories
trying to bandage
a lie in
the histories of the burning white suns.

Pat Andrus, having just completed her third work of poetry Fragments of the Universe (but right prior to the pandemic), has fully settled into her new home, San Diego, California. An instructor for several years at Bellevue College outside Seattle, Andrus also served two years as an artist-in-residence for the state of Washington. She also was fortunate to study modern dance with Seattle-based choreographers and with choreographer Debra Hay for a four-month residency. Today you can find Pat co-coordinating two monthly Poetic Legacy Workshops with Christophver R, sharing her works with San Diego State University MFAers at the Wine Lovers monthly, singing with her spiritual center’s choir, and giving support when financially possible to Voices of our City and Border Angels.

Photo by Oscar Helgstrand on Unsplash .

Duende and The Great Matter of Life-and-Death

By Karen Morris

Garcia Lorca called me last night (Before you get in a twist, he called you too.
You didn’t pick up.) He said, “Disappearance and Death are real.” I suggested he text
but, texting’s too flat for the poetics of death. “Sure,” you said to no one
out loud, ridding yourself of the bitter taste on your tongue.

I feel you quicken, slow drifting away. Turning the trail by checking the volume,
counting the likes, followers, following. Disappearance after disappearance. There’s no
way to count the air. You think you know death. The Day of the Dead is just
ink. Garcia Lorca called you last night. Your line was dead.

Playing at death in the House of Numb.
Ay! Valiant cruising Internet!
Ay! Needles nattering!

Garcia Lorca is calling from Portland. Pick up!
Pick up! You’ve disappeared again, strategized
a pretext. Blackout. Death

is instantaneous. Torture, endless. Hunger,
slow. Shit a scandal of humiliation. Torment
deeper than a half-life is long.

The afternoon is ordinary. You are about to take a next breath, to shoot
an email to your publisher that contains your manuscript, Daily Minutia. The server
is hungry for fresh insights. It drags your text into the nearest hog-
shaped cloud. You have no teeth to speak of.

You ponder atomic particle theory. Trying
to manifest reality,
bitch-slap the keyboard.

He called from the marshes of Satilla Shores where there’s no reception at all.

He called from Minneapolis through a busted windpipe to tell you of the mastermind.

He called from Louisville awakened by a battering ram.

He called from Portland choking out the names of vanished people.

He left you a message from Chicago about meeting up in Kansas City,

He said, blossoms fall on the Day of the Dead.
You are a dreaded weed about to be pulled.

Karen Morris received The Gradiva Award for Poetry (2015, NAAP) for her full-length collection CATACLYSM and Other Arrangements (Three Stones Press). Her poems have appeared in Chiron Review, Plainsongs, The Stillwater Review, Paterson Literary Review, SWWIM Everyday, and others. She is a psychoanalyst by profession and an Ambassador of Hope for Shared Hope International in the role of volunteer public educator concerning the impact of the commercial sex industry in the sex trafficking of children around the world. She is a cofounder of Two Rivers Zen Community in Narrowsburg, New York.

Image: David Alfaro Siqueiros Echo of a Scream, 1937, MOMA.

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

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.

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.